NOVEMBER - 2021HR TECH OUTLOOK APAC 19this philosophy that the platform draws inspiration from. Kendo essentially improves the performance of employees and the organizations they work for by addressing two fundamental pillars of HR: performance management and employee experience.The first pillar's focus is on improving the performance of the organization and its people. Kendo starts with the company's strategic framework and documents purpose and the key strategic pillars. Almost all organizations have these, although many do not have them enunciated, documented, or communicated clearly. This makes it difficult for people to develop and execute detailed plans. With this strategic clarity, business plan objectives can be developed and agreed. These top level objectives provide the foundations of accountability and once they are clearly established, Kendo does its trick! "Kendo breaks the big picture business plan objectives into bite-sized pieces and proposes them to people to accept responsibility for delivering them. This way, everyone gets their agreed piece of the big plan," says McKerlie. Then the focus on execution comes into play with each agreed objective detailing what needs to be done for it to be delivered i.e., the activities with milestones, which are measured regularly. Objective setting follows The Kendo Way's interpretation of the SMART methodology which they have made easy to use, intuitive and flexible. But setting objectives is not just a top-down process. Individuals can develop objectives that contribute to other objectives and link these up giving a very democratic bottom-up capability. Objectives need to be agreed between an individual and their manager so that a genuine culture of ownership and accountability is created.Regular pulse checks are done where actuals and the objective health is assessed. Objective owners provide comments on their progress and their manager adds their comments as well. This information is used elsewhere in individual performance reviews. When objectives have been set, every individual, team, and leader gets access to a rich, intuitive, and customized dashboard, allowing constant monitoring of progress, identification of issues, and remedial action when required. A powerful report generator allows a deep dive into the information available and provides transparency across the organization.The second pillar in Kendo provides a personalized employee experience which draws heavily on advanced psychological science and the extensive HR domain knowledge accumulated by its creators. "At the core of Kendo is a combined pool of HR and psychology science, plus extensive executive management experience combined with 20 years software development expertise to build an intelligent people-centric platform" notes McKerlie. Kendo assesses each employee's technical and behavioral skills, plus their strengths and motivators. Kendo captures a whopping 120 metrics about an employee on that front! Taking these metrics into account, Kendo's performance appraisal process (which they call, `retrospectives') looks at the relationship between performance and capability (using regression, inferred causal relationship analysis,
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