(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with theCUBE, we're having a CUBE conversation in the studio, we're just about ready to hit the crazy wave that is the conference season, so it's great to still have some time to do some studio stuff before we hit the road. We're excited to have a new guest who's never been on theCUBE before, he's Danial Hazariki, the CMO of Reflektive. Danial, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you. >> So you guys are working in a cool space, kind of the new age HR management for lack of a better term. We've had Patty Mccord on before, who obviously was seminal in kind of the Netflix culture, which I think was pretty early days in kind of saying throw out traditional annual reviews, kind of throw out regulations around expense reports, throw out a lot of these traditional mechanisms to manage people and really say what are we managing people to? And we should be giving them feedback on a regular basis and we really need to kind of bring this into the modern era. And that's smack in the middle of what you guys do. >> Absolutely yeah, a big part of what we do is managing employees to be high-performing, and that's the big tagline for her, is high-performance culture. I think it's critical to have, as part of that, a more active and ongoing role with your employees. That's why they can do things like remove expense report guidelines, because they know we're on the pulse of whether this person is actually performing or not, and by knowing that, we can have faith that we trust them, that they'll do the right thing when it comes to deciding on what they spend on. So, I think we sit right at the center of this, and we're really excited to be a part of it. >> So let's back up a little bit and just give everyone kind of the 411 on Reflektive. >> Absolutely. >> How many people are you, how long you been around, some of the basics. >> Yeah, so we were founded in late 2014, we have three co-founders, Rajeev Behera, Erick Tai, and Jimmie Tyrell. They more or less were actually people managers themselves, they realized that this was a gap in managing workforces, and, you know, classic model of technical founder, and then more of a product percent, and they got together and built this really cool tool. >> So what was the big hole? 'Cause there's a ton of HR applications out there. There's big ones like WorkDay, you know, who's been very successful on the SAAS model. What did they see that was the big hole, even though there's all these huge traditional HR applications? >> Absolutely, yeah, so what happened was there's a five-ish year old burst into framework, they talk about this. Systems and engagement, and systems of record. And so these tools that you mention, they were great at helping catalog what happens in a business, and do all the compliance processes required. But what happened was the world changed, things in terms of social media, the way people were getting information, the pace of things accelerated quite a bit, and these tools struggled to handle the day to day and didn't live where people worked, and those are big gaps. So they saw this and said okay well, there's something here where we can go and insert ourselves in the flow of people's work and help them actually get the information they need to be high-performing. >> So, was the entry point the annual review? What was kind of the entry point to get people to think about HR in a different way and to adopt the technology? >> Yeah, I think that ultimately, there is some form of review that happens, and they built that functionality. What was really interesting to the market was actually their concept of realtime feedback, and building the mechanisms by which you could actually bring that into that platform, and actually factor that in when you're doing interviews. This eliminates things like recency bias, things that, hey, a review is happening at the end of the year, I'm going to remember what happened the last three months. I'm not going to remember that you killed it in March of that year. So we're helping solve for that, and they saw great results doing that. >> Right, so you've got all types of little apps, is the right word, solutions, or kind of activities that enable people both as the employee as well as the manager as well as the HR people, to have kind of this ongoing back and forth relationship. So I wondered if you could dive into some of those applications and what's working really well that's different than things used to be? >> Yeah, so the modern kind of version of what we do, 'cause things have changed much over the past few years, we have a core kind of performance management offering, we also have an engagement offering, and we also have a people intelligence offering, and these are the three pillars by which we kind of enable all of those people that you just talked about. And so when we go back to the performance piece, there's many different components, but we believe that employees need feedback in the moment, they need a way to also do annual reviews. They need a way to set goals and be clear with their manager in what those are and what progress is. And we also believe that those things have to exist in the flow of day to day work, and that's why we do things like have a Slack integration, integrate with Gmail, Outlook, all these different kind of places where people actually live day to day. Then, you know, the other layers that I spoke about are engagement. We like to be able to do broad surveys to companies and get a pulse on high level, what is the emotion out there, how are people feeling about management? How are people feeling about even the snacks in the kitchen? Simple stuff like that. >> Right. >> And then, last but not least, all of that information has to feed into somewhere so that the management of an organization can get the insights they need to make decisions, and that's where the people intelligence comes in. >> Okay, so there's a lot of different layers to the story. But the one when I was first preparing for this interview, I'm like, oh my goodness, you were right, another tool, another desktop app, I forget what the statistics are of all the tabs that we have open with our sales force and Outlook and all these things are open. But you guys took an interesting approach, 'cause you actually integrated with some of the apps that you presume I have open like Slack, as opposed to kind of forcing me to have that one more tab. How does that work, and how has that kind of impacted adoption? >> Totally, yeah, I mean this is where the foundations of our company kind of come into play. So, our founders came from mobile applications, and games specifically. So they know how to optimize for things like active users daily, monthly, all that, right? And taking that lends to what they said. Okay, we really do need to encourage adoption, how do we make that happen? To your point, too many tools are open. Some are required to do your job, like email. Others are kind of optional. We're honest with ourselves, we say, hey, we're in the optional category, how do we solve for that? How do we still get people to use this? So we said okay, we're going to plug ourselves into Slack, where people actually communicate day to day. We're going to show up in Gmail, we're going to show up in Outlook, we're going to go to all these different places where people are already working. We actually even integrate with Jira, the engineering tool. And we said that's the way we'll actually get the information into our system that we need, and then we can service all those insights I talked about. >> Is it a popup, is it some encouragement when I do some activity, say, with you on a project? Oh Jeff, by the way, do you have any feedback for Danial? Oh Jeff, by the way, somebody's looking for feedback on Danial, how does the mechanics work, and then what have you seen in terms of adoption? What works and what doesn't work? >> Yeah, I mean it definitely gets traction, because I think specifically Slack, we're a Silicon Valley company, a lot of our earlier customers were Silicon Valley companies, and they all use Slack. >> It's as the way you said, very familiar. >> There you go right, so I think from that perspective, it's really easy to use. You can see all the active recognition, for example, happening in your company and in channel, you can also go and input recognition for other people, write there at mention, and just kind of invoke that. >> So are they kind of channels then within Slack around- >> Recognition can be a channel, but the actual input of feedback, it can do that right from the beginning of our, yeah. >> So interesting to talk about feedback versus recognition. How does that play out in the real world? 'Cause those are two very different words and two very different motivations. >> You bring up a great, great point, and it's an ongoing debate, how do you name these two different things? Frankly, recognition to the broader market ends up being, more or less, positive feedback that you feel like you want to put a public stamp on. But there's an important distinction here, because there's also negative feedback, and there's also just feedback that people want to give that's positive, but they don't necessarily want to share that with the entire world, or with a broader organization. So we wanted to create a safe space for them to be able to do that in every single use case, and so that's where the delineation between recognition and feedback comes in, is that you can go public, private, public and also broadcast to the whole company, and we wanted to give people the avenue to do all those things. >> Right, so I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about goals and goal management, and how does that kind of module work and or how does that tie back to some of the corporate goals and corporate initiatives? Can you tie it back to your Jira project and are these things integrated, or is it kind of a stand alone, and does it operate like an annual goal or a quarterly goal? How does that piece of it work? >> So the way we find the highest performance cultures doing this is they do kind of adjust goals on an ongoing basis. Ideally quarterly, I think that's kind of the favored happy medium right now. And that does start with company level goals. Then it goes to departmental, then it goes to individual, or sub team goals. And all of these people have, you can do smart goals, you can do objectives and key results, you can do whatever format you want, and it's pretty flexible as a platform. But all of that cascades down, and you can coordinate between people, and get visibility of public goals, private goals, and that's part of our whole commitment to transparency on the platform. >> And in terms of your customers and their adoption at a corporate level, not necessarily an individual, is it more of a stick or is it more of a carrot? Are people figuring out that they need to change, and yours is a tool to give them an avenue to the new way, or is it kind of new and provocative, and we've been doing annual reviews since my dad's dad's dad, I'm not quite sure about this ongoing thing. What's kind of the reception, and how is the market changing? >> Totally, like with anything, either tech adoption life cycle, a lot of our early adopters have just picked up on the fact that the market for talent is extremely competitive now, and some have gotten to different maturity levels in understanding what they need to do to deal with that. Our earliest adopters, they just got it right away. They said our workforce is asking for more in the moment feedback, they want to know what their goals are clearly, and be able to measure against them and be able to go and point back, hey, I actually achieved that, or I did not. And so that has helped us a lot with the earlier adopters, just saying we built something that's ideally suited to the way you need to evolve. Part of the task of any innovative technology is we have to go educate the market, too. We know that universally, people are struggling to attain talent, what we do to educate them is inform them of here's actually what the workforce is looking for. We've done a ton of research, HBR articles, we've seen gallop research, we've signed all sorts of stuff that tells you the world has changed, the workforce is expecting certain things, and we've built something around those needs. And so the more we do our job as marketing to make sure the market understands that, I think the more reflective we'll see success. >> That's funny, in one of Patty's recent medium posts, she talks about foosball tables, and billiard tables, it's like that's not what drives employee happiness and satisfaction. They look good, I guess, on the tour before you take the job, but a lot of other things, that drive, happiness and retention in the super competitive market that's not the ping pong table. >> Absolutely, especially in the case of Patty Mccord, I mean, she's indexing everything, again, around, you want to have the highest-performing people stay, and you don't necessarily care to actively manage the ones who are not. And what she has espoused many times is that the highest performing people actually love this. They love that there's transparency around the business value they're driving. They love to know exactly where they stand, they love to have feedback so they can improve and be better, and so you can see how there's a lot of parallels here about what she's talking about that high performing cultures do, and what the platform that we've built enables. >> Right, what about the pesky lawyers that are always saying there's always compliance issues, and we're still operating off of laws that were established before, and this is a little bit funky and we're not really sure how to deal with it. >> Yeah, what I've actually found is, there are specific customers, even of a size of Air BnB who will highlight that we helped them combat bias, and the way we do this, and evidence that they are not biased in the way they do reviews. And the way we do this, is I think ultimately, the concept of real time feedback. Because this stuff is being logged as it's happening, no one can say it's the end of the year now, and you just remember what happened in the past few months. You're ignoring all my great work that happened before that. This is not fair, that recency bias they call is eliminated. And that actually, in the end, helps with the lawyers, because we can say this was all cataloged in the moment as opposed to way later. >> Right, we have to train among contract year concept, you're supposed to turn it up the last month so they forget about the crappy stuff you did earlier in the year and do well. So Dan, before I let you go, you've been around a little while, you've been in the valley, you've been at a number of startups, you've been here for about a year, I'm just curious kind of as you've come to Reflektive and been there now. What was the biggest surprise entering this company that you didn't necessarily expect now that you've been there for a little bit? >> Yeah, I think what was most interesting and actually kind of exciting was to observe how similar the transformation that HR is going through right now is to the transformation that marketing went through 10 years ago. I'm seeing the movement to being more data driven to getting active information on how campaigns are running, all this stuff. That evolution is happening in HR right now, I'm seeing more and more people scientists, I'm seeing more and more people who are turning people management into a science, and I think a lot of it has to do with record low unemployment. The market for labor got so competitive that people have really started paying attention to this as a problem and trying to understand better outside of just simple compliance things. How can we actually actively manage our workforce into being high performing and happier? And that's really interesting for me. >> Awesome, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sharing the story. >> Absolutely. >> All right. He's Danial, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation in our Palo Alto studios, we'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (funky music)