High Performing Cultures Thrive with Bonusly

In October 2021, when Mindbody acquired ClassPass, a new chapter began for thousands of fitness and wellness businesses worldwide. The acquisition united two powerhouse platforms: the leading experience technology platform for the wellness industry and the leading global fitness and wellness membership. Mindbody and ClassPass were united in their goal of maximizing revenue for these businesses, a mission that required seamless integration of company operations and culture.

As Mindbody and ClassPass came together, one critical initiative that needed consolidation was employee recognition software. In order to successfully merge cultures and form new critical organizational connections, getting a solution up and running quickly was essential. Both Mindbody and ClassPass already had recognition and rewards solutions, but they needed to get the whole organization onto one platform. After careful assessment of both solutions, Bonusly was the clear winner for its modern interface, ease of use, and ability to operationalize company values. 

By getting the whole organization connected through Bonusly, the team established a thriving company culture together, one recognition post at a time. Bonusly was an instant hit among employees, managers, and leadership alike. We spoke with Lauren Whitehouse, Mindbody’s Employee Experience Manager, to understand how Mindbody uses Bonusly to empower managers and power performance post-acquisition. 

Consolidating recognition platforms

Immediately following the acquisition, Mindbody and Classpass teams couldn't acknowledge each other's achievements because they were split between different recognition platforms. Employees were craving a way to connect with new teammates and they wanted a solution sooner rather than later. With help from the Bonusly team, Whitehouse was able to get Bonusly up and running quickly so employees could connect with one another in the wake of the acquisition. 

As Whitehouse put it, "Bonusly was one of the best gifts I could have given the team.” 

Empowering managers to cultivate high-performing teams

As the entire team acclimated to Bonusly, Whitehouse began training managers to use the solution to cultivate high-performing teams. When describing the manager training process, Whitehouse said: 

“Bonusly is a tool managers already know and love, so we’re just helping them level up the way they use it so we can help them achieve the goals that are already top of mind for them. We try to show them that Bonusly is a tool that will actually help them save time.” 

 What are some of Mindbody managers’ favorite features? 

• Managers are thrilled with the manager giving tracker, a feature nudging them to recognize team members and foster a culture of appreciation.
• They are also excited by custom feeds, which allows them to filter their recognition feed to show only recognition given to their team. This view provides insights into team dynamics and allows managers to give more personalized recognition. 
• Managers appreciate the ability to recognize their team members year-round instead of in once-per-year performance reviews. Consistent recognition enables higher team performance from direct reports who are more willing to input discretionary effort when they feel appreciated. Plus, looking back at historical recognition of their team members made the performance review process more efficient, evidence-based, and inspiring to employees. 

As the company geared up for its first annual review cycle post-Bonusly launch, the platform proved invaluable. Managers leveraged recognition data to glean insights into their team's contributions and accomplishments. These analytics became especially important in aiding new managers in understanding their team's past achievements. 

Integrating core values

Bonusly became a cornerstone for making Mindbody’s new values sticky. The values introduced after the acquisition were new for the whole organization, so the team needed a way to operationalize the new values. They decided to require core value hashtags in recognition posts, so the entire organization could see their colleagues enacting the core values and start to learn what they looked like in practice. Quarterly core value awards were operationalized and amplified with Bonusly, transforming recognition into a company-wide celebration during all-hands meetings. 

“I can't even describe how much easier the fulfillment is by fulfilling awards on Bonusly. I announce them in the all team meeting, and I give a speech about the individuals and then put the award in Bonusly in real time so everybody can jump into Bonusly after the meeting. I even have the winners put their award emoji as their Slack status, and so people know to jump on Bonusly and see the awards. I also send out the link to the winners’ posts in our Slack channel for further visibility. I am always sure to tag the winners’ manager so that they can congratulate their team members publicly. It makes recognition carry on long after the all hands meeting ends.” 

The takeaway

Bonusly didn't just streamline recognition; it became part of the unified culture emerging from the Mindbody-ClassPass integration. It seamlessly translated organizational values into a tangible company culture, uniting a global workforce in a shared appreciation for each other's efforts and enabling a high-performance culture. 

What comes to mind first when you think of a highly productive workplace? Maybe a room with a row of neat, diligent workers with their heads down, ceaselessly turning out goods or services?

Since most employees are not making widgets on a production line, defining and measuring productivity is tricky—and improving it can feel impossible. For starters, working your employees as hard as you possibly can, without breaks, meaningful rest, or a connection to a larger goal, is pretty much the antithesis of productivity.

Let’s go back to the basics of productivity in the workplace: what it is, how it benefits your business, how to measure it, and of course, how to improve it. 

What is employee productivity?

The definition of productivity is simple at its core: employees who get a certain number of tasks done in the course of their workday. Those tasks aren’t just busywork, but they’re moving the organization closer to its goals in an efficient way. 

What does a productive employee look like? Are they chugging along every day checking tasks off their to-do lists in the expected amount of time? Or are they going beyond meeting expectations and making effective decisions, innovating, and living out the company culture? 

Most of us would probably agree on the second definition as the ideal state for productive employees. But unfortunately, that state is fairly rare in today’s workplace. More than half of employees report being relatively unproductive at work, according to McKinsey research. And the productivity of U.S. workers is declining at its fastest rate in 75 years. 

It's no wonder businesses are looking at ways to increase worker productivity, especially in a tight and pricey labor market. Lots of companies are turning to stricter controls on employee behavior like forcing a complete return to the office, using tracking software, and micromanaging in an attempt to measure, track, and improve employee productivity. 

The thing is… none of those attempts at control are actually what boost employee productivity. In fact, they often damage it (and make employees even more disengaged and unproductive). 

What boosts productivity, then? Well, first let’s dig into how to measure productivity so you have a baseline. 

How to measure employee productivity

To measure productivity, you must divide output by input. So, to determine productivity costs per hour, if you generated $100,000 worth of goods or services in 2,000 hours, you’d calculate: 

• $100,000/2,000 = $50 per hour of work productivity.

If you measure productivity by employees, the formula looks like this: 

• $100,000 goods/services produced / 50 employees = $2,000 per employee 

Output is not the only measure of productivity, but it's the easiest to measure. Quality and efficiency are also vital parts of productivity; if your company is churning out goods or services super fast but with low quality or a lot of waste, that’s lost productivity as well. 

Of course, when you bring knowledge workers into the mix, it gets more complex. But there are some ways to think about measuring productivity there too—even though their output is more often abstract things like ideas, relationships, strategies, and solutions. Are your employees hitting the goals your organization has set? Are they innovating? And, critically, are most of your employees engaged? 

The connection between employee engagement and productivity 

The most productive employees are also typically the most engaged ones. On the other end of the spectrum, a lack of engagement can spell doom for your company’s productivity levels; disengaged employees cost the global economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity, according to Gallup. 

This link between engagement and productivity becomes clearer when you think about your most productive employees. They’re the ones who love their work, feel energized by their role and connection to the company and their colleagues, tackle their tasks eagerly, and are ready to take on more. They’re also innovative and collaborative, and help others to be productive too. In short—they’re highly engaged.  

Enabling these employees to stay engaged and get their work done as efficiently as possible is critical to keeping their productivity as high as possible. And increasing engagement with the rest of your people also helps boost their productivity. 

Making these productivity gains can even increase engagement and retention further—highly productive and engaged workplaces are exciting and deeply satisfying to work at, while low-productivity ones can be, well, a bit of a drag. 

The overall employee experience matters to productivity levels as well. Employees who work at companies with leading employee experiences have a 40% higher level of discretionary effort (McKinsey’s language for going above and beyond) and so are more likely to surpass expectations for their work.

Creating a workplace where employees are engaged, satisfied, and challenged has benefits beyond just being a great employee experience—it will boost productivity levels as well.  

5 data-backed ways to boost employee productivity 

1. Recognize and reward good work

Gallup has found that recognition boosts not only employee engagement, but also productivity (and retention too!). That’s because recognition is about more than just feeling good—it shows employees that their work is seen, valued, and appreciated. It’s hard to get motivated to go above and beyond when that feeling is missing. 

Also, if you regularly reward your top performers for their hard work by dumping even more work on them, that’s not going to encourage them (or their colleagues) to keep up high levels of productivity. Instead, give them rewards like additional time off, bonuses, or other perks. 

2. Keep a close eye on staffing levels and practices 

Productivity in the workplace is often conflated with “doing more with less,” the battle cry of corporate and startup leadership teams alike lately. But a single employee can only take on so much work before they get burned out and lose all productivity gain. High turnover can cause issues too, as the remaining employees have more and more piled onto their workloads. 

Look carefully at your staffing and hiring levels to see if overwork is a drag on employee productivity, and come up with a plan to either take things off employees’ plates or to bring more people onboard. Temporary contractors and freelancers can also free up capacity while you hire and train new people, which can take a while. 

Speaking of new employees, are you getting them onboard and up to speed in their new roles efficiently so they can contribute quickly? Only 12% of US employees say their organization has an effective onboarding process, which leaves plenty of room for improvement at pretty much every company. 

3. Eliminate time wasters ruthlessly 

How can you expect your employees to produce at a high level if their time is taken up with needlessly manual tasks and way too many meetings? The average Microsoft Teams user has seen a stunning 252% increase in their weekly meeting time since 2020, and the number of weekly meetings has also increased by 153%. That’s a whole lot of productive time lost if you consider how productive most meetings are (not very!). 

Getting ruthless about cutting unnecessary and unproductive meetings will give employees time back to get high-impact work done. You should also get ruthless about cutting out manual tasks that can be automated or done with AI—ask employees directly what would help them the most and then implement that. Freeing them up for more strategic tasks will make them more productive. 

4. Prioritize autonomy and accountability 

Micromanaging and tracking employees’ every move is a great way to tank their productivity and motivation in the long term. Instead, consider giving employees as much autonomy as possible, including where and when they work, particularly for your top-performing employees. 

Increasing employee autonomy also increases productivity by more than 5%, which may sound small but multiplied across all your employees can add up to a major improvement. (It’s also a critical part of high-performing cultures, so giving employees more autonomy is a win-win.)

Accountability is the other side of the coin here too. Review goals regularly at the individual, team, and company level and update employees on progress or roadblocks. By balancing autonomy and accountability, you can create a culture where employees are enabled and encouraged to be productive. 

5. Make time for rest and relaxation

Giving employees more time off might seem like the opposite of productivity, but it’s a critical component of it. A study by Ernst & Young found that for every additional ten hours of vacation time an employee took in a year, their performance improved by 8%. You’ve likely experienced it too, after a great vacation or long weekend where you come back into the (remote or in-person) office refreshed and ready to tackle your work again. 

It’s not just about giving employees extra vacation days, though that’s a good start. They also need to be able to truly unplug from work without checking in or checking emails, on long vacations, and over a typical weekend too. That restorative time away resets the brain and is a great burnout preventer to boot. 

Takeaways 

Employee productivity can seem like an amorphous, abstract concept that’s hard to measure and even harder to improve. But there’s plenty that companies can do to boost employee productivity, which also benefits engagement and the entire employee experience. 

Ensuring employees have time to focus on their work, time to step away from work regularly, and are appreciated for their hard work are the most critical components of a productive, thriving workplace. 

Bonusly can help you create this kind of company culture with our employee recognition and feedback platform. See how we can help you build your own high-performance, high-productivity culture. 

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the ways that companies have typically managed employee performance 👏 just 👏 aren’t 👏 working. It’s time to seriously rethink performance management and focus on performance enablement instead. 

But it’s also critical to look at why those outdated performance methods aren’t serving companies or their employees so we understand exactly what’s missing—and what the newer forms of performance enablement can add. Here are the ten most revealing performance management statistics you need to know. 

Performance management by the numbers

1. Fewer than 20% of employees feel inspired by their reviews 

Let’s start with a pretty clear statement about the current state of performance management: less than a fifth of employees find their performance reviews inspiring, according to research from SHRM and Gallup. 

The whole purpose of performance management is right there in the same: managing. But that’s not a very motivating way to look at employee performance, and it’s certainly not inspiring employees to go above and beyond and perform at their best. 

2. 95% of managers are dissatisfied with their company’s performance review system 

It’s not just employees who find performance reviews in a traditional performance management system unhelpful at best (and damaging at worst): this data from a Gallup study finds that nearly all managers agree. And managers aren’t alone: only 1 in 4 companies said their performance management systems are effective. 

3. Women get 22% more personality feedback than men 

One big issue with current performance management is that it’s often not fair, impartial, or even actionable. Research from Textio found that women get 22% more feedback based on their personality than men do, like being called abrasive or opinionated. 

The same study found further disparities in how people receive feedback in the workplace: Black and Latinx people receive 2.4 times more feedback that is not actionable than white and Asian people do, and people over 40 are three times more likely to be described as unselfish than younger workers. 

This pretty patent lack of fairness and objectivity doesn’t inspire employees to go above and beyond—sometimes it just inspires them to quit. 

4. 3 in 4 Gen Z employees will resign if they don’t get feedback 

And quit they will, if they’re not given any sort of guidance on how they’re performing. Recent research shows that younger workers are so serious about receiving regular feedback that 73% say they’re more likely to quit if they don’t receive frequent feedback and communication from their managers. Older generations aren’t as adamant, but more than half of them agree with Gen Z here. 

And while younger workers are often negatively described as more demanding, you know what? Getting frequent feedback and communication from your manager is a pretty essential element of success for people who are newer to the workforce. Gen Z is in the right here 👏. 

5. Only 21% of employees feel their performance metrics are within their control 

‍Gallup research shows that employees aren’t motivated by their performance reviews often because they simply don’t get evaluated on what they can control. This might include company-wide results at a large organization, the results of a team or department project they weren’t attached to, or some other goal set without their specific role in mind. 

Since the results of those metrics are out of their hands, it’s difficult for employees to feel a genuine sense of accountability or accomplishment, and to feel motivated to improve (improve on what, they might reasonably wonder). 

6. Employees are 3.6 times more motivated when they get daily (instead of annual) feedback 

Feedback must be frequent to be effective: Gallup research shows that daily feedback significantly increases employee motivation. Frequent feedback demonstrates to employees that their managers are paying attention and recognizing what they’re doing every day, and that kind of careful, positive attention is very meaningful. 

It also offers employees a chance to course-correct in real-time if a negative behavior is holding them back, and lets them hone in on their strengths much quicker than if they only hear about them in their annual review.  

7. 47% of employees receive feedback only a few times a year—or less

However, most employees aren’t getting this valuable daily feedback—not even close. 28% of employees only receive feedback from their managers a few times per year, and 19% receive it once a year or less. That’s almost half of the workforce not getting nearly enough feedback to motivate and engage them. 

Can you imagine if you were a professional runner who ran every single weekday, but you never got to look at data on your speed and pacing, or where you stood in relation to other runners? Then once per year you were thrown into a gigantic arena with every other runner in your area, and this single race determined your pay for the upcoming year. Sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? But that’s how many companies and managers are still treating their employees. 

8. Performance reviews actually make performance worse more than one-third of the time

That’s not a typo or a rounding error: it’s accurate, and there are a variety of reasons behind it like poorly trained managers and legal considerations. Gallup research that cites this pretty stunning statistic from the American Psychological Association also notes that these performance reviews are expensive—costing an organization with 10,000 employees anywhere from $2.4 million to $35 million a year in lost working hours. So, many companies are losing productivity on an activity that… also worsens performance. Whew! What a combo. 

9. 60% of companies who say they have an effective performance management system outperform their peers 

Now onto some more positive stats to round out this guide. When done effectively, performance management and enablement give companies a significant competitive advantage (probably because so many companies are doing it poorly). McKinsey research found that companies with strong performance management strategies say they perform at a higher level than others in their industry—almost three times higher than companies who say their performance management is ineffective. 

10. 63% of remote workers who receive feedback a few times a week from their managers are engaged 

This Gallup research compares those engaged remote workers to those who only receive feedback a few times a year: only 31% are engaged (and only 19% of those who receive feedback once a year or less). 

Similar gains apply to hybrid workers as well: 57% of those who receive feedback a few times a week are engaged, vs. just 20% who receive feedback only a few times a year, and 10% who receive it less than once per year. This data illustrates the importance of feedback in engaging employees who aren’t in the office full-time, which these days is potentially quite a lot of your workforce.  

Takeaways 

The current state of performance management isn’t great. With gaps in fairness and equality, a lack of training for many managers in handling these conversations, and infrequent feedback as the norm, we’ve got a long way to go to make these performance conversations more regular and more motivating. 

Fortunately, you can start giving employees more frequent feedback, including positive recognition, today. The answer? Focus on enabling performance, not managing it. Plus, with Bonusly’s employee recognition and feedback platform, your company can create a strong culture of recognition all year round and start reaping the benefits of frequent feedback.