Improved Performance Reviews and Consolidated People Data: Q&A with Kevin Brock, Associate Director of People Operations at Movable Ink

If it feels like you’re drowning in a sea of HR systems and spreadsheets, you’re not alone. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Movable Ink is the prime example of that. Kevin Brock, Associate Director of People Operations at Movable Ink, is responsible for the company’s reporting, data maintenance, and people process improvements. Now, instead of finding information in disparate systems or pointing employees to multiple tools for different purposes, he has one place to do it all – ChartHop.

We recently sat down with Kevin to learn more about Movable Ink’s journey with ChartHop and how their relationship has grown steadily over time. Here’s what we learned.

When you first started looking for a people operations platform, what problem were you trying to solve?

Like a lot of companies, we became a much more geographically dispersed workforce at the outset of the pandemic. We went from being in person in our regional offices to having people spread across the country. We wanted to give everybody a place where they could see everyone who works here and easily find certain people and learn basic information about them. We also wanted managers to have visibility into their org structure in one neat and tidy place – removing the manual task of building org charts.

What are the primary org wide use cases for ChartHop?

We found the ability to take information from different systems and put it all together in one place so useful that now we’re using ChartHop for more things than we thought we would in the first place.

For example, we now use ChartHop for performance management. We run three discrete events throughout the year. First, we set goals, then we evaluate them at the midpoint in the year, and finally, we review them at the end of the year as well. All of that has been migrated into ChartHop, from other places.

Our FP&A team also uses ChartHop for reporting, which tracks distinct micro teams we have set up. We have information feeding in from ADP, and then they use ChartHop to add more detail and break that down even further.

Why did you decide to move performance reviews and goal setting into ChartHop?

It was a combination of not being thrilled with our old tool and immediately seeing how ChartHop could work for us once we saw a demo of the Performance Reviews module. I immediately knew ChartHop would be a highly customizable solution for us, which is what we were after. We wanted something that would enable us to do exactly what we wanted to do, display information exactly how we wanted to see it, and show that information to whom we wanted to see it, and between the forms within ChartHop and the permissions that you can assign to different things, it met all of our needs there.

What’s the biggest benefit of doing performance reviews in ChartHop compared to your previous system?

One big enhancement is the ability to see everything within one system. In my experience (and I think this resonates with a lot of people), we had all this stuff that goes into a system and then I had to put it all in Excel, but with ChartHop you don't need to do that.

Now, a manager can just click a link and see their entire team, whether that’s three or 50 people, all in one place – who they are, their ratings, comments on their performance from their managers. And you don't have to export it. You don't have to worry about where you save it and who can see it. There's none of that concern. It's all just one screen that's super easy to use.

How has ChartHop changed how you collaborate with colleagues across the company?

Our Finance team has been really happy. ChartHop offers a great way for them to get exactly what they want in the format they want for their various models, so they're very pleased with it. Our CFO is a super adopter and loves that he can find anything about anyone in ChartHop rather than having to go into other systems.

And that's another place where I think we can continue to grow in our use of ChartHop. We have an annual budgeting cycle where we look at headcount into the future, and we have pockets of leaders that will use the Scenarios function to build out what they want that to look like. That's our next big goal: Let's see if we can get all that living in ChartHop as well. There's that ability to combine scenarios and lay scenarios over each other, which is a great way to get everybody on the same page and to give our top leaders the information they need to make a decision going into the future of what the shape of the organization will be.

How would you say ChartHop saves your team time each week?

ChartHop makes things easier because everything is in there. We've actually used ChartHop for a couple of quick surveys in the past couple of months as well. We do a compliance test that our Legal team runs, and they were previously running that through our learning software, but it was a mess. You had to take the survey over here and then mark off that you did it somewhere else, and it just created a mess of people forgetting to do that. Now we have all that sitting in ChartHop, and it's all in one place, so we know exactly who has taken it. We know who we must follow up on to take it and who gave answers that would raise a flag.

What's your favorite ChartHop feature?

My favorite feature is probably the forms. I like that you can configure a form to do anything you want it to and the ability for one form to inform another form. You can have information flow between things that you're asking employees to do, which is really, really helpful.

My other favorite thing is ChartHop’s documentation. It’s super helpful and super detailed, which is not something I've seen from other platforms before. I don't know that I've ever gone there to search for something and not found what I was looking for.

What would you say has been the most surprising thing about working with ChartHop?

The biggest surprise has been everything that we can do with ChartHop. I joined Movable Ink maybe a month after we had signed a contract with ChartHop. I kind of just got dumped into the fire of joining a new company and trying to navigate how we onboard a new solution that’s going to be connected to a bunch of our systems. But the ability for us to run performance management through ChartHop or run surveys through ChartHop or anything like that was not something that even crossed my mind to consider when we were first onboarding ChartHop.

Just the breadth of things that we've been able to run through ChartHop has been a huge surprise to me, and the fact that we can do all those things and have it be as seamless as it is has been wonderful.

What would you tell other People leaders who are considering ChartHop?

It's a really powerful tool. And it's easy to use too. I think those two things in combination are the biggest selling points that you could have.

We just had a new SVP of HR start on my team two weeks ago, and I sent her the link to ChartHop and said we can cover this at any point; I didn’t want to overwhelm her on day three. But she said “no, I think I got it, this is really, really intuitive.” And she hasn't asked me any questions, but I know she's in it. I think the combination of ChartHop bringing everything together in one place and being easy to understand how to use from day one is a really, really incredible thing.

Inside Movable Ink’s Performance Review Upgrade

Want to take a deeper look into how Movable Ink raised the bar on their performance review process with ChartHop? Get the full story here.

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