Rippling sets its sights on performance management with latest product

Amid the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, some employers let performance reviews fall by the wayside—at least temporarily.

But they may be back with a vengeance, thanks to CEOs who became hyper-fixated on metrics like efficiency and productivity when the economy cooled last year.

The workforce platform Rippling set its sights on performance management for its latest product rollout, as well. COO Matt MacInnis said Rippling’s new product, which the company announced on May 8, is intended to help employers monitor performance on a more consistent basis, and free up HR to work on more complex tasks.

Why Rippling is investing in performance. In the current economic environment—one characterized by higher interest rates and elevated layoffs, particularly in Silicon Valley—“company leadership is trying to squeeze more productivity per dollar,” MacInnis said.

“It’s very clear to me that the standards for employee performance are far more stringent today than they were two or three years ago when the going was good,” he said. “There’s a lot of pressure from companies to actually implement proper performance management programs.”

MacInnis acknowledged that it’s hard for managers to carve out time to give employees feedback, and said the product is intended to help them facilitate more continuous reviews. Rippling’s performance management supports “milestone-driven reviews” that employers can set depending on what makes sense for their workforces: Rippling, for example, conducts reviews for new employees during their first 30 and 90 days.

The product is intended to address other common “pain points” in the performance management process, according to a press release for the company. It draws on employee data already in the Rippling system so that leaders can compare goal trends against data on department, level, tenure, or revenue targets, for example. Permissions are handled automatically, so the appropriate managers and HR leaders have access to employee ratings. And the product links to companies’ payroll systems so any changes to an employee’s merit or level are reflected automatically.

Freeing up HR managers. The latest addition to Rippling’s product suite reflects the company’s efforts to go head-to-head with point solution vendors designed to tackle one aspect of HR, such as spend management or payroll, rather than streamlining such administrative tasks all in one place.

Rippling, which closed a $200 million Series F fundraising round in April valuing the startup at $13.5 billion, touted the rates at which some of its recently launched products have been “replacing point solutions from companies that have been in-market for years” in a recent investor memo. MacInnis said Rippling’s software features “common reporting and common workflows,” so that customers can build payroll, expense, and performance management reports, for example, on a common interface, as well as integrate data from different applications. The “homogeneity” of Rippling’s products, he suggested, is “one of the reasons that once customers begin with Rippling, they tend to just migrate all of their business processes into our various applications.”

Rippling’s mission to “free smart people to work on hard problems” might mean their customers are working with leaner departments, as well. In its investor memo, the company said businesses who use Rippling employ “about half the number of people in HR, IT, and finance” as companies using competitor systems.

Ultimately, the hope is that streamlining HR processes in one place will help cut your “HR business partners loose, to do what they want it to do for a living,” i.e., engage with managers, rather than manage spreadsheets, MacInnis said.