Building a System that Celebrates Employee Performance with Mahir Iskender

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This is a podcast episode titled, Building a System that Celebrates Employee Performance with Mahir Iskender. The summary for this episode is: <p>In this episode of The Future of Teamwork, host and HUDDL3 CEO Dane Groeneveld speaks with Mahir Iskender, the founder of Digno, a company that aims to bring a human touch to "Employee Scoring." Mahir explains how harnessing digital tools for real-time feedback and evaluation can revolutionize the employee experience and touches on gamification, incentives, and the need for improved performance management tools. During the conversation, Mahir discusses how Digno can help share insights on role clarity, performance metrics, skills training, and&nbsp;tools that celebrate employee performance and drive work behaviors.</p><p><br></p><p>Episode takeaways: </p><ul><li>[00:11&nbsp;-&nbsp;02:56] Meet Mahir and learn how Digno is making "Employee Scoring" more human</li><li>[02:56&nbsp;-&nbsp;04:49] The origin of Digno and helping people perform better</li><li>[04:51&nbsp;-&nbsp;06:29] Gamification, incentives, employee performance, and the need for better performance management tools</li><li>[06:39&nbsp;-&nbsp;09:25] Harnessing digital tools for real-time feedback and evaluation</li><li>[10:13&nbsp;-&nbsp;11:17] Combining knowledge for role clarity</li><li>[11:18&nbsp;-&nbsp;11:55] Performance metrics for 10,000 employees in under a minute</li><li>[11:58&nbsp;-&nbsp;16:06] Five factors that contribute to employee success</li><li>[16:07&nbsp;-&nbsp;17:14] A system to celebrate good work</li><li>[17:16&nbsp;-&nbsp;18:56] Skills training and predictive analytics</li><li>[18:57&nbsp;-&nbsp;20:19] Approximating employee behaviors</li><li>[20:20&nbsp;-&nbsp;22:31] Making employee data more accessible and visual</li><li>[22:31&nbsp;-&nbsp;24:51] Goal management</li><li>[24:51&nbsp;-&nbsp;27:44] Celebrating good work and driving the right behaviors</li><li>[27:46&nbsp;-&nbsp;30:07] When hiring, Mahir thinks about how trainable someone is</li><li>[30:08&nbsp;-&nbsp;33:17] Recognition and reward at work</li><li>[33:17&nbsp;-&nbsp;38:18] Building a better system for incentives, rewards, and employee motivation</li><li>[38:19&nbsp;-&nbsp;41:20] A results-oriented perspective and a more accessible future for finding freelance jobs</li><li>[41:21&nbsp;-&nbsp;42:06] Disaggregating work</li><li>[42:09&nbsp;-&nbsp;43:52] What does it look like to be successful with Digno</li><li>[43:55&nbsp;-&nbsp;45:43] Simplifying performance evaluations</li><li>[45:51&nbsp;-&nbsp;47:15] How to reach Mahir</li><li>[47:17&nbsp;-&nbsp;48:49] Navigating the Big Brother stereotype to deliver employees respect and humanity</li></ul>
Meet Mahir and learn how Digno is making "Employee Scoring" more human
02:45 MIN
The origin of Digno and helping people perform better
01:52 MIN
Gamification, incentives and employee performance, and the need for better performance management tools
01:37 MIN
Harnessing Digital Tools for Real-Time Feedback and Evaluation"
02:46 MIN
Combining knowledge for role clarity
01:04 MIN
Performance metrics for 10,000 employees in under a minute
00:37 MIN
Five factors that contribute to employee success
04:07 MIN
A system to celebrate good work
01:07 MIN
Skills training and predictive analytics
01:39 MIN
Approximating employee behaviors
01:22 MIN
Making employee data more accessible and visual
02:10 MIN
Goal management
02:19 MIN
Celebrating good work and driving the right behaviors
02:52 MIN
When hiring, Mahir thinks about how trainable someone is
02:21 MIN
Recognition and reward at work
03:08 MIN
Building a better system for incentives, rewards, and employee motivation
05:01 MIN
A results-oriented perspective and an easier future for finding freelance jobs
03:01 MIN
Disaggregating work
00:44 MIN
What does it look like to be successful with Digno?
01:42 MIN
Simplifying performance evaluations
01:48 MIN
How to reach Mahir
01:23 MIN
Navigating the Big Brother stereotype to deliver employees respect and humanity
01:32 MIN

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group, and today I'm pleased to welcome Mahir Iskender to our show. Mahir is the CEO of Digno, and with a tagline like" Employee Scoring Made Easy," I think it's going to be a wonderful conversation. Welcome, Mahir.

Mahir Iskender: Excited to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet. So before we get into what employee scoring means to you and the customers of Digno, I'd love to hear about your story. How did you come to be the CEO of this business and what's really attracted your attention and interests into this field?

Mahir Iskender: Thank you. Well, you mentioned about the employee score made easy, right? It's actually a perfect tagline there, but our real tagline is, " Individual performance management for team excellence and rewarding every effort." So that's our tagline, and before I launched this, I had a retail business. We managed multiple locations and employees in different locations. And as entrepreneur who have launched about now more than five companies in my lifetime, what I realized is that no matter how much effort I put into making sure to communicate with my teammates or colleagues, and no matter how much effort I put into rewarding them for the great work, what I realized is that the clarity still was missing. You find there are entrepreneurs or CEOs always complaining about the employee performance and then you talk to employees, they talk and complain about the company performance or the way the company manages them. So what I thought is there was something missing. And what we did, we evaluated that and we used different tactics in my previous companies, mainly the most recent one. And we adopted the pilot program where we announced to employees that we actually started measuring your performance and scoring them. And for each score you would get rewarded for the good job that you do. In our cases, of course, it's the sales increase, the customer retention, or customer loyalty, communication, et cetera. So what we did is we announced that, and the idea came basically when one night at 4: 00 AM I woke up and actually, yes, I'm going to show you something very cool here. This is how everything started with Digno.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh wow, you got busy.

Mahir Iskender: Yes, at 4:00 AM.

Dane Groeneveld: That's when the best thinking happens, when everyone else is quiet.

Mahir Iskender: That was a perfect night for me where the idea was born. And the first thing I wrote on the top, it says, " Okay, we reward the great customers, loyal customers, but we don't reward our employees properly the way we do the customers." Where yes, the customers are most important part of the business, but I do believe that employees are even more important. Who face the customers every day, right? So that's why I thought that what we need to do is first we need to set the rules in advance, rules of the game. Instead of coming to employees back at each year and trying to do performance reviews, we'll say, " Okay, this is the rule, this is the score, and this is the reward." Right? So they know the game real well in advance, and so they can play it properly and they can get rewarded for the good job, right? So we have a lot of behavioral psychology going behind this because the score is the queue, right, and the progress is the action. And then basically the reward is there. So three of them comes as a circle. Right? So every time score changes, that's the queue for employee understanding where they are, where they need to be without the micromanagement, right? So that score basically simplifies the communication, simplifies the feedback from the company to employees, and the same way from employees to company, because then company sees who needs the most help and they can focus in training them, in helping them to grow and reach to the other people who are the performing better. Sorry for expansive answer, but yes, I'm happy to answer further.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, we're going to dig deep on that. You hit some words that I always love to talk about. I love the way you explained that individuals are being pressured for their own performance by the company, and yet they're feeling like the company's not performing. I think that's a really interesting paradigm. And then the way you explained how you've created these queues and the measurement and the rewards in a way that's a game. I mean, we talk a lot about gamification. Computer games themselves are very interesting to humans right now because there's a level of safety and a level of transparency as to what level you're on, what you need to do to beat the next challenge. So it's interesting the way you built that.

Mahir Iskender: Thank you. You look employee performance evaluation systems and management systems are simply broken. They don't work. Talk to every manager in every company and every employee, they simply hate it. They don't want to get evaluated the way they have been in the past. So we're looking for in a time where there's a digital transformation happening, right, in the times of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence. When you look at this, the way companies are still doing this, it's really funny. Why are we still stuck with this and it still doesn't work? Look, according to Deloitte by the way, 95% managers who were interviewed, they said, " They hate current employee performance management tools." And 63% of Gen Z against according to the same report. " They don't like to be evaluated."

Dane Groeneveld: Full stop?

Mahir Iskender: For full stop. Let me clarify that. Rather, 63% of Gen Z, they said, " They don't like to be evaluated." But if you go further, they want to hear timely, constructive performance feedback. So the timely is the key here, right? And the 80% of millennials, they say, " They prefer on the spot recognition." So why don't we listen to this and create the products that actually can change this, right? So that's why I came up with this idea, and I will tell you this, look how the credit agencies are helping us to improve our financial performance, right? So the score changes what we do. We react, " Okay, what happened?" Okay, " I paid late, let me improve it." Or, " I'm using max of my credit card, let me reduce that." So it automatically creates a good behavior in us to properly manage our finances. So when you apply that to the employee performance, look at this. I said we are in a digital transformation period, right? A lot of companies, they're moving to Cloud and all these applications. When you go and talk to employees, they have probably 50 tabs open.

Dane Groeneveld: It's a lot.

Mahir Iskender: It's a lot. And those are the applications companies use. On average approximately 30 applications used by companies at the moment. And how do you expect the employee to stay focused and get the actual job done? And on top of that, companies require everyone to be in the boardroom almost every other day. So that takes a lot of time off the employees again and then nothing left for them to actually go and perform. So my idea behind digital is how we pull the enterprise data into one single dashboard? We evaluate that data, we generate one score, and that's for both management and for the employees to know exactly where the company is in terms of performance health, right, and to react real- time, instead of waiting three months for the OKRs to come in or to follow through. And for employees, you don't need to micromanage them anymore. They get the feedback and they self- improve. They learn what they're doing wrong. The system notifies them. Our system has a nudging module there where it reminds the employees instead of the managers calling them or emailing them, now they're not worried about it. There's no fear. That fear gets out of the way and that helps them to actually self- evaluate and improve whatever they need to improve to get to where they need to be.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat.

Mahir Iskender: Yeah. So we talked about the score, right? But what we did also is we added the goal module there and then we add rewards. So we bring all the three together. So what's beautiful about our system is that, and most systems in the market, they're amazing, but they took the old basical method from the papers and they turned into digital version of them. In our case, we're trying to revolutionize really the employee performance management, and that's our goal and that's the score. Really. It's just simple. I believe this is the future of work where the teams can actually better understand and improve themselves. And also instead of focusing on what's going wrong, they can focus what we can do to go to the next level.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. Focus on building into those strengths. I like that approach. So that takes me back to your correction on the tagline about moving people towards team excellence. So the score is how the team is performing. How does the individual know what their role is in the team? That's often such a big challenge. Are you building queues specific to their role and showing how that all feeds up into the overall score?

Mahir Iskender: Look, our job is not HR job, right? I mean, our job is to take the data from those platforms and just convert them into score to make it easy to understand what's happening. So what we do is when you do your integration with digital, you bring your HRMS. So we pull all the data, already the titles are there, what their responsibilities are and everything's already set up in their system, right? And then we pull the performance data from all enterprise inputs. We combine them, and that's how we bring the data together.

Dane Groeneveld: Okay, great. So if I'm an individual employee, you've already pulled my job description, my duties, my title, and you're looking at which existing data points from our existing system. So I'm not having to go in and manually type anything else in.

Mahir Iskender: Nothing is manual. If you want to, let's say, evaluate 10,000 people, our performance, is it possible right now to do with any other platform? It's not. I guarantee that to you.

Dane Groeneveld: Sure.

Mahir Iskender: But additional what it does in 10, 000 employees, if you want to evaluate and understand where the performance metrics are, it does it within under one minute.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Mahir Iskender: Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: That's bold. And tell me a bit more about that. Let's say I'm selling a tech product, I'm working with the sales and account management team. So you can see through our CRM and through my email how many calls I'm making out, how many notes I'm putting in the system, how many emails I've sent out. You can probably see how many sales contracts I might have had signed in the month. Does that all cascade up to say, " Okay, on Dane's sales team, these guys achieve this against a historical trend." How does the data really play to let me know that I'm doing a good job, or that the contracting department's letting me down? I'd be intrigued as to how that works.

Mahir Iskender: Yeah. So we built a formal for that, and based on the interviewing about 200 companies executives, and the way they actually choose their metrics, KPIs for company success. So what we have done, we came up with the five factors that we believe contribute to the success of individual, which at the end contributes to the overall bottom line of the company. So one is the productivity score. So we have five factors. One is the productivity, whatever comes in and goes out, it measures that. The second is goal success. Goal success measures the results only. It measures how many goals you accomplished and how much percentage not accomplished, that goes in there. The third is we measure app usage and we call it engagement factor. And what the engagement factor does is two things, right? So you provide the employees all the tools you have, which is applications, desk, laptop and everything, right? But do you really measure your return investment on that? I don't think most companies do. So someone may use that laptop to go to Facebook and just spend their day on the Facebook, but it doesn't measure if this laptop actually pays them back. So what we have done is we measure not only engagement with colleagues, each other. Let's say Dane, you wrote me a message in Asana. You said, "Okay, this is your task, this is your due date and this is your task description." But our system measures whether the employee replies to that, engaged with that task or not. And then that comes up with the score. Because unless you are engaged, it means that you are somewhere else. You're acquired to something else. So what we do in app engagement score, it measures not only the communication among the colleagues, but also the app usage engagement score. The fourth one is the tenure. How long have you been with the company? So we don't generate the score, it's individual, right? When we started, we said individual performance. So everyone has their own value, and that's because we don't automatically just create the value based on because someone just joined, it's based on their tenure in the company. So the scoring formula doesn't work for someone who just joined versus someone who has been 10 years. And the fifth factor, I think you're going to like this one because you talk about this in your show all the time, is the consistency. So what that factor does is it measures the consistency across the rest of the factors. This person make five calls a day. And then if our system not says that there's a sudden change. Well, for example, Dane has been making 10 calls average, and then suddenly it went down to one. Then first the employee gets notified, " Is something wrong? Do you need any help?" And then after certain time, we have formula, we have timing there, and our machine learning keeps learning based on the data and then averages out. So right now the manager gets notified, " Look, something is wrong with Dane. Do you want to talk to him?" So instead of your manager going and talking to everyone about their calls, his focus is you because something is happening within company and your consistency went down. So these are the five factors that comes in and we generate the one score based on these five factors.

Dane Groeneveld: That's really neat. And I love the way that you've looked at the tenure because then you can look at people in cohorts. If we brought in a bunch of trainees, they're not going to be expected to perform at the director level for that same role.

Mahir Iskender: Look, we didn't create this to actually punish people. We created this to celebrate the good work. So we want them to actually improve and do better. And also, here's the thing, the leverage between the company and employee changes significantly, because now employee knows that they're actually doing great job. So if they get fired, they have the data behind them, right? They have the score. Look, I have been doing great, so something else is happening, right? So subjectivity is out of the way. And the second most important thing, the discrimination gets out of the way. Now no one can come, " Okay, this is woman or man or subjective opinion from the managers on the performance review." Now we're actually looking at the data of performance, right? And generate the score, you cannot discriminate. It's period. It's out. In the times where we live now, forget about it. No discrimination should be allowed in any company.

Dane Groeneveld: That's really cool. That's powerful. And I think another thing that I'm seeing there, Mahir, from your explanation, is on the productivity and the app usage, you can start to identify forward- leaning trends, I would imagine. And what I mean by that is, if my top three salespeople are doing lots of LinkedIn messaging and everyone else is still dialing and leaving lots of messages because no one's picking up their phone, and then my next group of people are texting to phone numbers, I can start to see which apps, which productivity metrics are helping those team members and start to more organically share best practices, I would imagine?

Mahir Iskender: Absolutely. We are working on the two actually very amazing features that come up is the training. So based on actual the data of the performance, our system actually notifies or suggests automatically to your salespeople, " Okay, you need to listen to this or you need to watch this." So they can improve their skills. It could be, for example, if they see the conversion is not happening, right? So our system will automatically suggest the training materials based on how to convert better, for example.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool. Cool.

Mahir Iskender: And the second important feature we're coming is the predictive analytics. So you will easily go to analytics section of the dashboard and actually see how many people are most likely to quit in the next certain time, for example, or how much sales you are most likely to make in the next year or so. And that's really cool. I'm very excited about that feature.

Dane Groeneveld: That's very cool. And does it also allow you to see not only what behaviors, but which apps? You talked about ROI earlier, so which apps the team like, which apps the team don't like? If there is a need to change out a tool that you may have in the business, is that something that you are seeing customers are starting to gravitate towards?

Mahir Iskender: They actually love that. We just launched back in September, right, and now we have 250 companies using us. So that's very super exciting for us.

Dane Groeneveld: Congrats.

Mahir Iskender: Thank you. Thank you so much. And we get a lot of really good feedback. So our product is a new product, right? Even my developers, when we start first time, they're like, " Where do we look to get some ideas in the coding and the stuff?" There's nothing. We really worked hard to come up with this. And so my point is we are still getting feedback and we're improving our system. And the feedback has been amazing so far. In terms of the app usage, going back right now, by looking at the data, you can guess approximately which app they're engaged the most. But if you want to generate that report, we're still on the works. So we will add that report where you will actually be able to see the most engaged in terms of percentage the apps in the platform.

Dane Groeneveld: That's great. And I would imagine another thing, I'm just thinking about this as an operator of a business. Whenever we roll out new apps, you can give the basic training and onboarding, but invariably you want to find that super user who people can go to to learn. " Hey Bobby, Hey Jenny, you guys seem to really be cranking out results from this new app. Can you show me how you use it?" So I would imagine that you can see pretty quickly in a team too.

Mahir Iskender: Yes, you can do it now because you can see that the tasks completed or phone calls made, et cetera. So what's beautiful is that those data actually is visualized as well. So you don't have to open those tabs, you can just go to the productivity link, and in the productivity you can select, let's say Asana or I don't know, the Shopify, it'll load everything happening at this moment. You don't have to go to different applications to check. So it really brings amazing clarity to the work processes within the company and simplifies the management, which at the end of the day, look, we all want to get rewarded for our hard work, recognized for the job we do, right? That's the key. So that reward is there, they can see it, right? They don't have to wait one year performance review or six months. But the manager's job now, instead of focusing on the micromanagement or having multiple meetings a day, now their job is to go and create amazing goals that actual companies can achieve and attach the reward to it. This is as simple as that. We don't need to complicate it. Recently I had a meeting with a SVP of a large, large company with 5, 000 employees, and I asked them, " What's your processes like?" This is what digital is. And he came back to me, said, " Look, our system, our goal setting and the way we do it is very complicated. You really don't want to do it." I say, " Well, that's exactly why we exist." Why is it so complicated, right? It's simple, right? You don't have to make it complicated. If every individual knows what the goal is, they'll go and achieve it. If you make the levels different or making very complicated, it's most likely they will not achieve it. That's the chance. And here's beautiful thing I want to share with you.

Dane Groeneveld: Please.

Mahir Iskender: Goal management. In our case, every single goal is tied to real- time data. No, more OKR and manual updates those OKRs. It's a real- time measurement. And here's amazing thing. I don't know if you probably heard about the inaudible module, where there's a multiplying effect of the simple steps. I'm sorry, I cannot find the word. You probably need to cut this out.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's all good.

Mahir Iskender: But the way we built this is the focus is the progress. Any progress. Not how much you can make or you should make, but how much progress can you make? So what our system does, which again, no other system do, and I can claim that, is that when your manager sets up the goals, what our system does, it goes back as much as history of the employee possible and suggests the new goal.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, wow. So you are actually caddying, coaching managers to set the goals based on what data already tells us?

Mahir Iskender: Yeah. I think that our biggest problem in the performance management is that we apply same rules to everybody, but we are all individuals. We all have our capacities, the skills, our knowledge are different, right? Our experiences are different because our backgrounds are different. So what our system does, we want to study you and we want you to be better and better every day. So we help the manager to identify that, to understand that by increasing the goal by 100% or 50%, which that's what most many managers do, you are actually hurting your bottom line than helping your bottom line.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, that's interesting.

Mahir Iskender: Yes. If you have 100 salespeople, I don't know, let's say 20 salespeople, and if you want to make a big progress in sales, what you should focus is on how much 10% of progress each individual can make versus loading someone who is a good salesperson and doubling their goals, where most likely they will not achieve. And morally it's actually very bad. It's inaudible.

Dane Groeneveld: I think you're absolutely right. I think you've just hit on a couple of very interesting points from an org design standpoint, from a culture standpoint. If you set a high sales target for everyone and only 10% or 20% of your team get there, I've often seen in sales team, that creates two big problems. The first problem is the really good sales people often do it at a cost. Who are they burning along the way? Are they selling to customers who shouldn't be buying the product? Are they discounting on price to hit quotas? Going back to some of my earlier days, are they sharking customers out of territories of some of their colleagues? I mean that incentivization, if it's too far out, it can drive a lot of the wrong behaviors.

Mahir Iskender: Absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: And then the second thing is that there's no shared learning and shared reward. Everyone now starts looking at that superstar and they kind of feel like my 10% next month or in the next quarter doesn't matter because I'm never going to be as good as Bobby or Jenny or whoever that might be.

Mahir Iskender: Absolutely right.

Dane Groeneveld: So I love that you're pulling whole teams up together.

Mahir Iskender: Absolutely. This is about celebrating the good work. And celebrating good work, it's not about the perks. We did have that time, the WeWork kind of trend where companies started introducing free coffees and games and all that. But what we realized is that this actually does not help with performance. It actually ruins the performance most of the time. So people want to just celebrate for their good work. They want to be recognized for their individual good work, right? And that's the goal with digital. I believe that that's the trend, and I hope that we can get this applied globally and grow like that. Because really it all comes to two things, recognizing the good employee and the results oriented of the management, right? So that's the key. And company cares about their bottom line. Employee cares about what their reward is at that company. So in times when we hear a lot of quitting happening, and right now, look at this Facebook or big organizations, they're firing 10,000 people. What's going to happen with them, right? No one probably thinks about this, right? All they think about is how I can cut the expenses. But here's the thing, are you firing the right people is the big question? So 10,000 is a big number. How do you know you are firing the right people?

Dane Groeneveld: That's really difficult to get right. And you're probably looking at the wrong data sets, the influence and qualitative approaches of people who may just be really good politicians and aren't necessarily good teammates. There's a lot, particularly in those big organizations that makes it tricky. Yeah, that is fascinating. And I would imagine from an org design standpoint, now that you are helping to drive growth and awareness and clarity around what the team needs to do, it probably starts to shape how many more salespeople do I hire versus developers? How many people do I hire in this geography versus this geography? I would imagine it starts to give you a lot of insight into how you can design your team for growth, and that must be a fascinating tool resource for leaders to have at their fingertips.

Mahir Iskender: Absolutely. Being myself a small business owner, what I look at is not really the experience. What I look at as the people first for me, right? How trainable this person is. How ambitious they are, et cetera. So what I have realized is that sometimes the people who I hired as a salesperson has became my best creative person in the company, best social media manager, for example. And you cannot just apply that label of the title to someone and just expect them to perform. And what's beautiful about this is that we have the data. All you have to do, just see where they are and direct them and help them in their career path as well. For newbies, you can help them and say, "Hey, how about this? I see that you're making more calls than the salespeople. Are you more interested in that? Is that what you like doing?" I love these new conversations coming up, right? So now you're not really going and kind of micromanaging or punishing them. You have now positive conversations. Where you actually indeed help them to grow, right? And what's funny is that my partner always said in the past, companies that she worked, " What they discussed at the performance reviews were totally different than what they were actually doing in the daily job." Isn't that funny?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Mahir Iskender: And people are still obsessed with this, and I hope that they realize that the future of work is here now. They need to apply new techniques, new methods, and try new things and see if it works or not.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I love that. So let's switch into the celebration and the reward. So that's a big part of the way you've explained Digno, Mahir. You said earlier here that the millennials want on the spot recognition and reward. How do you build that into your platform and your approach?

Mahir Iskender: So we have three levels of rewarding in the system at the moment. And by the way, we got some amazing ideas from one of our biggest clients, which we put on our roadmap. But right now it's just three. One is the score based reward. When you reach certain score, this is the reward. The second is goal- based, and third is the team based rewards. So what we have done is we individually set the goals and the rewards attached to those goals to actual real metrics. And the score is the real metric. And the second one is the goal- based, which basically once the goal is reached, you don't need to go and talk to your HR people or your people manager. It's already automatical there. When I told you that you know the rules of the game in advance, that's what I meant. So you set the goal and you set the reward. Every single day when an employee comes to work, when they open digital dashboard, they see on top of the screen what the reward is pending there.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool.

Mahir Iskender: So that motivates them. They know what's coming. So that encourages them to actually go and pay attention to performance. And most of the time they want to reach that faster than the end of the due date. In my company, what I can tell you is I'm really honored that my team actually started using it when the system was not there. I just came in and one day I said, " There's such a system." But there was no system there. So I wanted to have that kind of to test it. See, it works. What's amazing is that the people who hated, we have different age groups, some age groups, they didn't like to use Asana. Now they were engaged every single day. They were going and completing the task. Now because they know that there's a score change happening in the background, and if they don't do, they don't get the reward. So it was really interesting. We increased ourselves by 30%.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Mahir Iskender: That's no joke. 30%. The productivity level went up about 42%. So now I know that the subscription that I paid to Asana and all the effort my managers spend are not gone in vain. Now they're engaged with the tasks. More engaged. There's no, " Oh, I didn't hear about this kind of replies anymore." It's there, right? So it was really amazing to see that result, and that's what drive me. And I'm very passionate about helping others really to achieve these results. It's growing real fast. We have about six to 10 signups each day, which is really amazing.

Dane Groeneveld: That's huge.

Mahir Iskender: So our team is also growing, and I want digital score to become the industry standard for measuring the employee performance.

Dane Groeneveld: That's fantastic. When you think about that reward, when they come in, does the company set the reward? Is it dollars? Is it an event? Is it PTO hours? Is it an Avatar jumping up on a screen? How do you set the rewards with your customers?

Mahir Iskender: So every company has different needs, right? Some companies they do based on the performance commissions and bonuses. Some of them they do gift cards, right? And some of them, they simply say, " Okay, we're going to have a dinner together," kind of reward.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Mahir Iskender: So it's actually very customizable.

Dane Groeneveld: So you can just drag and drop whatever you think the reward is?

Mahir Iskender: Exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Mahir Iskender: Yes. What's beautiful is most of the rewarding platforms or loyalty platforms it's based on the points. So after you get certain point, then you see colleagues coming and liking and celebrating the points or giving points to each other. I thought that that was not fair, to be honest with you because-

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, interesting.

Mahir Iskender: Why? Because in my stores, let's say based on New York, the people, because they knew each other, they were actually giving points each other for no reason, and that was not fair toward the company. I believe that the fairness goes two ways. You cannot waste the resources of the company and company has to reward for the good people. So I felt that that was very unfair. I was using one of those platforms where I saw that they were actually rewarding for each. " Oh, you throw the trash away, here your reward points." And then they go and they claim it for gift cards, right? They convert it to gift cards.

Dane Groeneveld: That's how our platform works. That way you're using.

Mahir Iskender: Okay. But it's disconnected from actual work, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yes, it is.

Mahir Iskender: Yes, it's motivational, it's amazing. But really, I feel like this creates a fake celebration, I believe. I will truly believe that. I believe that not every team utilize the way that it's supposed to be, but also it's more like a gamification than serious game. Serious work. So that's why what I thought is that it's very important to add the productivity goal and rewards into one platform and they read each other. It's not separated. That's so critical.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I think that's really critical. And when you think about it here, just going back to your five on the productivity and the consistency and the app usage actually across a lot of your factors, if someone's being a great teammate and if they're responding in a timely manner to tasks in Asana, or whether they're jumping in and delivering more trainings or whatever it might be that they're setting up more leads for the sales team, then they're going to get that recognition anyway through the work. So it's not that you are going away from showing appreciation between colleagues functions, it's just that you're doing it in a very structured data- oriented way.

Mahir Iskender: It's all psychology. I'm enforcing this and it's there. It's the right side of your screen. Oh, you have to just go get the job done. And here's the thing. I think that what we need to also pay attention is that 9: 00 to 6:00 or 9:00 to 5: 00 hour work is gone. What we should focus is that two, three hours of productivity. And I believe that that's the future. I don't think that any healthy company will survive if they go 9: 00 to 5:00. I mean, it depends in the industry, of course. But my preference right now, we just hired someone, right? Enterprise salesperson. And she asked me, " Oh, okay, so what time do I need to come to work and what do I need?" I said, " If you don't want to come to work, you don't have to. But these are the goals. This is what I'm expecting from you. If you want to work one hour each day, that's fine. If you want to work five hours, that's fine." But my achievement is everyone's achievement. If my company can achieve those goals, I don't care if that person worked eight hours or two hours. Actually I do care that they spend three hours and go spend the rest of the time with their families or go do some sports, right, as I do as an entrepreneur. That's the privilege that I have right now. I want employees to feel the same way, right? If I'm achieving the results and I can go and spend more time, that's actually additional reward when you think about this. And what happens here, the psychological factor is very critical. They feel better, they feel empowered. They can actually decide whether they want to finish the goal or not, right? The rewards still there waiting for you. And so that's the approach I have. And I think that that's very interesting because in a time when people are actually working hybrid, how do you measure their success? Only by seeing the results, the achievements that they have.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that. I've always been a big fan of the concept of a results- only work environment. And what you've described there is a results- only work environment. So that's cool because it's not easy to achieve, but if you've got a mechanism, a structure for it, then that's huge. The second thing that jumps to mind beyond results- only work environment is this whole concept of lifestyle that you're talking about, but also even perhaps time zones. Because I think you're right. I think in teams, depending on what function you're in, engineering, sales, customer service, it doesn't really matter. Accounting, marketing, there are always going to be sweet spots where the team's really working together. And then there's going to be periods where there's a critical path, and this work needs to be done here so that this work can be done. I would imagine if I played forward with the data that you are looking at, that companies would soon be able to see, " Well, actually the best time for our marketing people to be working is on Mondays and Tuesdays at this time, because that generates leads to come through on Wednesdays and Thursdays at that time." And now you can determine, " Well, if you want to work in our marketing department, you do need to be in the office on these days to work together, but on these days, you're going to have time to go coach soccer, go for a swim, or maybe a different way." It's okay for us to have our marketing people or our dev teams in the Philippines or in Costa Rica or wherever it might be. Or we can hire this weird guy down in Australia because at the end of the day when they're going to be working fits in with the process flow of the business. So that fascinates me.

Mahir Iskender: Yeah, I really believe that's my vision for the future. I believe that this is going to happen, especially when people are more empowered and it's not hard to find freelance jobs. They can easily quit and go and find it. So instead of losing them, I would rather have them actually work on their preferred hours and give them results. That's my approach. And also the system allows the companies to also optimize their burn rate, right, for the performance. So that's very critical in these days. You don't want-

Dane Groeneveld: It is right now.

Mahir Iskender: Yes, yes.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Mahir Iskender: Yeah. So I mean, there's a lot of distractions and all that, but I believe that by actually bringing clarity to their job, they're more focused. They know what they need to get done and what the reward will be at the end of the day. And the future, I believe that is also actually picking the job they want to pick up. Let's say I believe that our system can actually automatically optimize the task creation, where actually it can suggest if they complete certain job and adjust the goal in time, our system can actually suggesting, " Hey, would you like to pick up more?" If he wants, then there's additional income for him, he can do. So that's my vision for the future. I do believe that this is coming very soon.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's huge. Actually, we've got a guest coming up on the show soon to talk about the disaggregation of work, but you're absolutely right. There is freelancing, there's the gig economy, but even within a business, people often get stuck in a 40 hour a week job description, which was created really to justify hiring someone with these skills and they're not always doing the best work. So as you disaggregate work, I could turn up and it could be obvious that the system's telling me, " Hey, we need more people to do this type of training. Could you go down that way?" And it starts to craft your job, even craft your career, which is a cool concept. So that brings me to my final question, Mahir. This has been a really enlightening conversation. I'm excited to get in and start playing with your platform.

Mahir Iskender: That sounds great.

Dane Groeneveld: But my final question is, if this data is so powerful for the individual, the team, and the corporation, what does it look like if I want to be successful and grow within this group that uses Digno? And then take some kind of signature infographic or other tell that says, " Hey, when I was at this company, I was great at using these tools, completing these tasks. I grew, I was a good team member." Does this begin to give some portability to individuals as they go forward in their careers?

Mahir Iskender: Great question, actually. I love that. So at the end of the job, our system has their history. So this is like a resume building, right? So it's your data. And by the way, if the employee doesn't want her or his score to be visible, he can do that. He can hide.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, right. Yeah.

Mahir Iskender: So again, the employee's king here, in this case, it's their data. But what's beautiful about here is this, after they complete the job with certain company, they can generate the certificate with their digital ID on it.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool.

Mahir Iskender: And so they take it with them and basically one number is their ID, is there rather resume or LinkedIn profile. No more fake profiles. No more fake resumes. If you're a good, powerful, skillful employee, then what you do is digital ID. And what allows the companies to do is the hiring person. So right now that interface is not public, but companies can actually go and search the ID and generate the past performance report from there. If employee allows, of course.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. That's powerful. I'm a huge believer in that, because I think right now the resume is not a good reflection of how someone shows up at work as a team member, what they grew, what systems they used. It just doesn't tell you much. And we all know interviewing is an imperfect process. So it's not to say this is nirvana, but actually having some kind of signature digital record of what they've done in the past is informative both to the employee as they shape their career as much as it is to the future employer.

Mahir Iskender: Yes. The times of manipulation is gone, whether by employee or by the company. It's the truth, it's the clarity, it's the honesty that will win. And that's what we are trying to create. We don't want to punish the bad performance. We actually want to help them. So what's interesting is that always the good performers are the ones who come and want to show off their score, right, or performance. The other employees who are less productive, they want to hide. So in this case, they will still hide. And that's totally okay. That's totally okay. We want to help them, right? I mean of course it depends on the company, but in my case, when I see the score going down, I don't punish my employees rather I go and say, " How can I help you? I'm here for you. How can I help you?" But I don't bother my top performance. I let them do that good job they do. I focus on the people who need my help. And I think that the future that I see here is that the same way we go and pull the credit history of the person about financials, you can go and pull their score performance. Of course, that's something that we need to work on and make sure that it's strong and powerful before we release that kind of the platform. But for me right now, the focus is how I can bring the employee data, simplify the performance evaluation and reward for the good job they do?

Dane Groeneveld: That's wonderful. Well, it's been a lightning 45 minutes. It's gone really quickly, and I've really enjoyed the conversation. Congrats on your success building the Digno platform and bringing these customers on. And thank you for doing the work that you're doing. I think it is really interesting to bring this new framework for individuals driving that team excellence, as you said. How do we listeners best find you and your business?

Mahir Iskender: So our website, it's at Digno.io. It's D- I- G- N- O. io.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Mahir Iskender: My email address is Mahir, M- A- H- I- R @ Digno. io.

Dane Groeneveld: Great.

Mahir Iskender: Everyone can reach me over there. I'm happy to help anyone I can.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool. That's great. And as a fun fact, my son's nickname is Dingo, which is actually a rearrangement of the letters of Digno.

Mahir Iskender: By the way, the digital meaning, I want to explain that to you.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Mahir Iskender: It's going to be interesting for you. It has two meanings. One is the digital number from the Latin word, but the second most important one, it means honor in Spanish.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, wow.

Mahir Iskender: So I want to give the honor back to people.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, I love that.

Mahir Iskender: Yes. That's the idea. So that's why we called it Digno.

Dane Groeneveld: Great.

Mahir Iskender: Initially it was just the Score 360, but I thought that's not as powerful. And then we did a little bit of research, we came up with Digno, and so far people like it.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that. I think that's a great story, Mahir, because so many people are worried about the technologies being used in a big brother sense to monitor them. But like you said at the beginning, this is honoring the individual and the team. It's allowing them to see how they can improve at their performance incrementally and grow and be recognized by teammates. So I think that's really fitting.

Mahir Iskender: I think that it's ridiculous when there are systems where they can actually record your screen and all of that.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, it's terrible.

Mahir Iskender: I think that's terrible and I want to eliminate that. Because for me, you already have that data in different applications. Oh, it's already there, right?

Dane Groeneveld: I've got friends that work in those businesses and they lean their phone on the key when they go out for a dog walk so that the keys still press down an email. I mean, people hack those things and they feel pretty terrible for having to hack those things. So I agree with you entirely.

Mahir Iskender: With my engineering team, we are working on that, how we can prevent the fraud also-

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.

Mahir Iskender: ...within the system, because someone can go and complete the tasks without actually completing them and score could go up. But we do have already the prevention methods there. Our system notifies immediately if something wrong, something extraordinary happens, which is why you remember the consistency? That does a good job there and sees that jump or going down. So it notifies the manager and notifies the employee as well. But I think that those technologies where they have to record the screens of engineers and all that, I think those are unacceptable. That's not the future. That's actually going back.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I agree. I agree. No, this has been really fun, Mahir. Well, thank you for joining me today, and I'm sure a few people will be reaching out. Sounds like you're already pretty busy, but lots of good work to be done.

Mahir Iskender: Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it. Was honored to be here.

DESCRIPTION

In this episode of The Future of Teamwork, host and HUDDL3 CEO Dane Groeneveld speaks with Mahir Iskender the founder of Digno, a company that aims to bring a human touch to "Employee Scoring." Mahir explains how harnessing digital tools for real-time feedback and evaluation can revolutionize the employee experience, and touches on gamification, incentives, and the need for improved performance management tools. During the conversation, Mahir speaks to how Digno can help share insights on role clarity, performance metrics, skills training, and more tools that celebrate employee performance and drive work behaviors.

Today's Host

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Dane Groeneveld

|HUDDL3 Group CEO

Today's Guests

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Mahir Iskender

|CEO and Founder of Digno