How Taktile Strategically Develops Their People - While Saving Hours Every Week

"Feedback, for us, is a key value. And it's what makes us able to grow as a company in such a critical stage." Valeria Rosati, HR Operations Lead

The challenge: Starting HR processes from scratch while growing fast

Berlin & New York-based Taktile is a fast-growing B2B SaaS startup on a mission to empower decision-makers worldwide to make smarter and safer decisions at scale. 

The company was founded in 2020 and has been growing rapidly ever since.

Up to a certain point, managing HR processes on the spot worked just fine.

But as Taktile grew, so did their need for more structure.

"Now that we are a series A company, now that we are growing, it's more important to structure our HR processes," Valeria Rosati, HR Operations Lead, stresses.

Most pressing: Onboarding and feedback

1. Getting new hires up to speed

Growing by 145% in a year does bring some natural challenges:

• Getting freshly hired colleagues up to speed meant having to repeat the same things, sending out the same docs over and over.
• Tracking progress without a single source of truth was hard; especially in bigger teams like engineering.

2. Celebrating and structuring feedback

As a company highly valuing a growth mindset, regular feedback check-ins had been essential to the onboarding puzzle early on.

New hires were already getting feedback from their managers: 

Managers would go to Notion, copy the feedback guide, and ask the right questions. 

While this worked for a while, it was not the most scalable solution:

• HR still had to manually remind managers.
• Feedback sheets and answers were scattered all over the place.
• Implementing peer feedback would have created a giant overhead. Since it's a delicate topic, anonymity should be handled right.
• There was no way to track if discussions had actually taken place.

Plus, company-wide feedback was still happening informally. Not ideal if you want to use it as a base for people development. 

The solution: Structured feedback along the employee lifecycle

Structured preboarding and onboarding? Check.

Valeria reflects on the journey to achieving this result:

“Diving into a new topic often means you have no idea where to even start. The templates were a great help there. This way, we already had a good first version to launch.

“We later refined the journeys more and more, based on what new Taktilians really needed to know and Zavvy's engagement analytics.

The result is way more structured than what we had back when I joined the company.”

Concretely, this means:

Preboarding - 1 week before start

• 💌 A welcoming journey: New hires automatically get assigned their preboarding journey, building some hype in advance and answering all burning questions.
• ☑️ Tasks: Did you ever join a company and nothing was ready? Not at Taktile. Colleagues get automatic reminders to take care of equipment, contracts, and meetings.
• 👥 Onboarding buddies get notified, so they know what's coming and how to be great peers.

Onboarding - Days 1-30

The onboarding journey goes deeper. It takes new hires, buddies, and managers by the hand over the course of weeks. 

Next to giving new hires all relevant info and concrete tasks they need to be successful, it introduces them to the “mutual development agreement”:

The manager and the new joiner set up actionable goals – goals that then form the basis for…

New hire feedback during 3 set milestones

Feedback is vital to steer new hires in the right direction. But how do you make sure that it's done properly?

Here's how Taktile does it:

⚙️ Frequency

• 6 weeks after start
• 12 weeks after start
• 18 weeks after start

👥 Feedback sources

• Downward (from manager to new hire)
• Peer (from colleagues to new hire)

To keep things simple, managers directly appoint the peers. And peer ratings are optional, so nobody feels pressured to answer.

❓ Questions

Based on the development agreement, managers, and peers share actionable pointers following the start/stop/continue format.

Bi-yearly performance reviews triggered in relation to individual starting dates

Growing as a company did not only raise the need for proper onboarding, but also a more structured company-wide feedback process as a baseline for development and progression. 

⚙️ Frequency

Performance reviews at Taktile are not occurring on the same date throughout the company – but they run based on each person’s starting date.

•  New hires are enrolled into their first performance review 6 months after start…
• …and every 6 months after that.

“Without automations, you’d need an Excel sheet to track starting dates and always make sure you’re appointing all cohorts in time. The smart assignments are taking away a lot of the manual work.”

👥 Types

• Downward (from manager to new hire)
• Peer (from colleagues to new hire)
• Self-review

“Doing this via Zavvy makes people feel more comfortable. Knowing that their input is being shared anonymously and in a firm process, answers are more open and honest."

❓Questions

‍Performance review questions are more diverse. They include areas like:

• Major achievements
• Personal growth goals
• Values

“Overall, our performance reviews are quite detailed, because feedback is a key value for us”.

Additional learning journeys teach both people managers and employees how the tool works and how to properly give feedback.

A clear path forward

Feedback is most meaningful when it's closely aligned with individual roles and competencies.

A clear career framework is the basis for role clarity, and understanding what it takes to reach the next step.

We wanted to provide a clear answer to: “What do I need to get to my next career level?”.

"The career ladder had to be progressive, transparent, predictable and strongly align incentives with our growth strategy, our company values and the culture we are building."

The result: More structure, more time, and a solution that grows with them

“We've grown a lot. Our processes are now already way more structured than in other small companies.”

Overall, Zavvy helps Taktile make everybody's work more efficient:

• 👏…by showing people that their contributions are seen and appreciated.
• 📈…by letting people know when they're not doing the things they're supposed to.
• ⏱…by saving time: 8 hours every week for HR alone.
• 💌 ... and by creating an onboarding experience people won't forget.

“Especially automations have saved a lot of time on my end. No more checking Excel sheets to see who starts when, what to send them, and preparing managers to do feedback sessions.”

“It's great to see so many features added. We don't need all of them yet – but it's good to know they are there once we grow further and the topics come up.”

What Valeria likes most…

…the ability to flexibly structure the processes.

“I am a very organized person. I like that I can set up everything in the way I want. Nothing is set in stone. And it's really easy to improve processes based on feedback from new hires or managers.”

…working with the team.

“We have weekly meetings, which help me a lot and which are a great chance to share any new ideas with the team.”