Confirm Recognized as a World Changing Idea by Fast Company

From a pool of more than 2,000 entries, we’re excited to share that Fast Company has recognized Confirm as a 2023 World Changing Idea in its workplace category! This annual award program recognizes the innovative ways businesses and organizations are tackling the biggest challenges of our time. 

From day one, we’ve been on a mission to unleash everyone’s potential by recognizing the true difference they make at work. The countless stories we hear about the terrors of performance reviews - from top performers getting overlooked for promotion to the many biases undermining the process - are what drives our team to create a faster, fairer, and easier system for measuring performance. 

To achieve this, we’re bringing science to the century-old practice of measuring employee performance.

Performance reviews haven’t evolved - and it’s a problem

The world of work has changed. What hasn’t is the 100-year-old, top-down method used to evaluate employees: performance reviews. 

Today, with tools like Zoom and Slack, employees work in networks. They work cross functionally, ideate from the bottom up, and often are remote. In a networked world of work managers don’t have full visibility into their direct reports’ impact, leaving people leaders ill-equipped to accurately judge performance. 

The disconnect, between how work happens and how it's measured, leads to poor talent decisions, and results in frustration, inefficiency, and resignations. Companies, often blindsided, lose high performers jeopardizing their ability to hit business goals.

We believe there’s a better way. One that gives high-performing employees the opportunities they deserve, and helps companies identify and retain mission-critical talent. 

Fairer, faster performance reviews are here

Confirm tackles the challenges leaders face with traditional performance management platforms. 

1. Organization network analysis (ONA): Confirm is the first to inject the science of Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) into performance reviews, ensuring talent decisions are based on data, not office politics. Leaders are able to not only identify their top performers, but also see the true impact of every employee, so they know precisely who to promote, PIP, and retain.

2. AI: GPT-4 is embedded into Confirm, saving HR thousands of hours. For example, Confirm recently launched industry-first ChatGPT engagement surveys, getting leaders to survey insights in minutes versus days (or weeks).

3. Auto-Calibration: Another industry-first, Confirm auto-calibration takes the exhaustion and politics out of calibration, arming teams with data on which employees may be over or under-rated by their manager and where the company should focus its time.

By providing HR leaders with the data and insights to make informed people decisions, we’re seeing the impact this is having on business outcomes. One example is at Thoropass.

As news about mass resignations spread in 2021, Thoropass' executive team grew concerned about losing mission-critical employees. After one performance cycle with Confirm, its VP of People & Operations: 

1. Identified a list of the company’s top performers;

2. Retained 100% of the employees on this list; and

3. Saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential attrition costs.

This is just one example of how HR leaders are using the insights from the Confirm platform to make important decisions that have significant impact.  

Confirm is backed by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)

We’re also proud to be backed by SHRM, who recently invested in Confirm. Our team has worked tirelessly to build a platform that enables fairer performance management, and this recognition from SHRM reinforces the importance of our mission. 

As one of just five companies invested in by SHRM this year, we’re honored to be among the most promising companies elevating HR and solving present-day challenges and gaps in the workplace. 

Our partnership with SHRM reflects our shared commitment to supporting HR leaders in their efforts to make data-driven decisions and drive positive change in the workplace. 

What’s ahead for Confirm 

As we look ahead, we're focused on our mission to unleash everyone’s potential by recognizing the true difference they make at work. We want to see a world where employees are recognized and rewarded for their hard work and positive impact, not their ability to play office politics.

Fixing performance reviews, for good, is the first step toward this mission.