Ben Ogren

To me good managers are the key to employee happiness and retention. As a manager and leader myself having worked in HR Tech (at Workday), far too often I found myself too short on time, ill-prepared, and lacking the context.

A few years ago, I had a surprising performance review. It was surprising because all of the signals I was receiving made me feel like I was doing an amazing job - plus all of my past reviews placed me in the “high-performer” category. After this review, I took it upon myself to conduct an anonymous 360 survey and found that the results didn’t align with my manager’s review. What was clear was my manager’s point of view had been biased by the feedback of one individual from one single event – he was missing the full context of my work and contributions.

After that experience, I started to run similar surveys on behalf of my employees. The results helped me quickly identify gaps and areas where I should lean in. Overall I felt the most prepared I had ever been in career discussions because I had the full context. I know first-hand how powerful something like this can be but due to the amount of manual effort I rarely did them. I can't help but wonder how powerful this would be if done continuously in the background with no work required from the employee, their manager, or HR leaders. This is why I started Candor.