Retrofit offers a combination of a mobile app and personal coaching to help people achieve and maintain a healthy weight. It serves companies looking to improve the health of their workforces and health care organizations seeking to promote healthy lifestyles in their patient popula­tions. Individuals also can sign up for Retrofit’s service. Participants use the mobile app to track their food consumption, physical activity, hours of sleep, and weight. They and their coach monitor their progress on a dash­board, and the coach uses the performance data to provide personalized coaching via online video connections. As an employer of almost 50 people, Chicago-based Retrofit applies similar features—ease of use, mobile tech­nology, and frequent feedback—to its performance man­agement system. Originally, the company started out requiring twice-yearly performance appraisals, but it recently replaced that system by introducing an app called TINYpulse Perform. 

Employees work with their managers to enter goals into Perform. When a manager observes goal-related performance to rate, he or she simply opens the app and swipes right for meeting expectations, up for exceeding expectations, or down for falling short. Employees and managers also can enter comments and post supporting documents such as e-mails in praise of an employee’s work. At the end of the year, the per­formance data are available on the app to represent a year’s worth of efforts and outcomes for each employee. According to Catalina Andrade, director of employee happiness at Retrofit, the app supports the goal of making reviews “instantaneous.” Managers and employees are less likely to forget about achievements or problems they want to discuss because they quickly record Page 376the informa­tion right after these events occur. That efficiency supports Retrofit’s expectation that managers will discuss perfor­mance with their employees at least twice a month. The expectation of frequent feedback, in turn, aims to support employee engagement and what the company’s vice presi­dent of human resources calls Retrofit’s “culture of health and happiness.”

1. What methods for measuring performance would be most suitable for the system Retrofit is using? Why?

2. What advice would you give managers at Retrofit to help them deliver performance feedbaack effectively when they meet their employees.