Better Work: Responsive Management That Connects People, Strategy, and Results

It’s time to make performance management work.

We’ve moved on from antiquated tools like typewriters or checkbooks, but bosses still rely on the same annual performance review process to manage employees the same way they did 70 years ago. It fails our modern hybrid workplaces and it doesn’t improve performance, especially for today’s millennial and Gen-Z workforce. It succeeds only in lowering employee engagement, undermining trust in management, decreasing transparency, and increasing turnover. There must be a way to make work better for all of us.

There is. Make Work Better shows HR, leaders, and middle managers the modern path to better employee performance, amplified engagement and company culture, and more empowered people. Readers will learn how to:

• Make goals and OKRs more useful, more often for everyone
• Eliminate ratings and implement a promotion process that reflects reality and retains employees
• Make check-ins more productive at better intervals for managers and reports
• Teach everyone to better deliver and receive more effective structured and unstructured feedback
• Make recognition count, and create formal development paths for high performers
• Use data to make the right people decisions and eliminate bias
• Structure your organization to maximize the impact of HR and People Operations

Featuring front line insights from adopters of the process at Google, Intuit, Vertiv, Pepsico, and other leading organizations, Make Work Better gives readers everything they need to improve their organization from wherever they sit.

Doug Dennerline is the CEO of Betterowrks, the leader in strategy execution software for enterprise companies. He has been working in Silicon Valley since 1982 - starting with HP selling the first PC, followed by 12 years at 3Com, and 12 years at Cisco, massively scaling those companies. In his last role at Cisco, he became the CEO of Webex post the acquisition of Webex by Cisco. He has been running SaaS companies ever since. He’s worked for many famous leaders - Marc Benioff, John Chambers, Lars Delgaard - and learned many lessons about what it takes to grow and scale high-performing teams. Hint: it’s not an annual review, followed by a pat on the back and standard raise. Doug was the president of SuccessFactors which was the first company to move the performance management process to the cloud and was ultimately acquired by SAP.