Influitive is a community platform that helps companies acquire, grow, and retain customers and partners at scale.

This focus on advocacy also plays directly into how the organization approaches culture internally. A quick scroll through Influitive’s Glassdoor reviews and you’ll find recurring praise about the company’s commitment to their employees’ career development. Influitive invests heavily in its people, and their reputation for doing so has translated into an easier time attracting and retaining talent.

We chatted with Danny An, head of People & Culture, to learn how Influitive helps employees grow and develop.

On the People & Culture level, Influitive’s mission is to maximize their employees’ learning, growth, and value. To achieve this, Danny says it all starts with establishing a clear learning and development path.

“Every employee at Influitive has a learning and development plan and a career plan. One is more long-term and one is more short term,” Danny explained. “It’s all about employees knowing where they are today, reflecting on where they want to be, and putting the right plans in place to get them to the next level.”

Employees create their learning and development plans together with their manager. And the People & Culture team facilitates this process by using a 1:1 meeting template to give managers more direction on what to discuss. Then employees input their development plans into Small Improvements as objectives, which allows them to refer back to their goals at a later date and take ownership of their growth.

Once a learning and development plan is in place, Influitive uses Small improvements to give employees structured, ongoing feedback to help them achieve their goals.

Managers have weekly 1:1s with their reports, where they can discuss issues, brainstorm solutions, and remove roadblocks. “Effective 1:1s need an agenda to follow, so we encourage employees to create an agenda in Small Improvements. This allows both employees and managers to better prepare for the 1:1,” Danny said. “We also provide guidance by suggesting topics to cover within each meeting’s calendar invite, and employees can fill in talking points based on these topics.”

Even though Influitive is big on feedback, it’s still the case that some teams do it well and others don’t. “Small Improvements gives us insight into different teams. We’re able to see who’s having 1:1s and who’s not, and we can easily nudge people within the tool instead of hounding them to have more 1:1 meetings,” Danny said.

Influitive conducts performance reviews twice a year, and peer recognition, 1:1 meeting notes, and 360 degree feedback are all tied into reviews.

When it comes to review season, Danny shares that often the most difficult part is thinking back and reflecting on who said what, and making sure to incorporate all feedback to give the most accurate and helpful assessment.

“With Small Improvements, everything is captured in one place and you can easily refer to it,” Danny said. “Whether it’s adding an attachment, writing a meeting note or jotting down private notes in Slack when something comes up, I can easily find and review it. So when it comes to doing reviews or giving feedback, we have visibility into everything.”

At the end of each review cycle, employees and managers get together to align on the review, identify how to get to the next level, and create a new development plan – kickstarting everything all over again.

“Small Improvements enables us to run holistic cycles to track progress, identify gaps, and make employee development a continuous process,” Danny said. “Regular feedback gives everyone clarity on how they’re impacting the workplace, which allows people to adjust, improve, and achieve real career acceleration.”