Rajeev Behera, founder and CEO of Reflektive speaking at Inspirefest 2018
Rajeev Behera, founder and CEO of Reflektive. Image: Conor McCabe Photography

How to get companies to treat their employees better

19 Jul 2018

Rajeev Behera is the founder of Reflektive, a start-up that focuses on helping employees thrive.

The world of work as we know it is changing irrevocably. It’s no longer about employees pledging unyielding loyalty to long-established companies.

It’s a war for talent out there and employees are in control of their own destiny. What does that mean? It means companies need to think about employee wellbeing.

Rajeev Behera is extremely aware of this. He is the founder and CEO of Reflektive, a start-up that focuses on employees. “Our goal is to help employees thrive and our products are around evolving performance management,” he said at Inspirefest 2018.

Reflektive is a real-time performance management cloud company. Last month, it acquired Shape Analytics, a real-time intelligence and predictive analytics solution for workforce data.

The new capability will be embedded into its platform as Reflektive Analytics, bringing simple, customisable people analytics to every employee.

Behera moved towards HR tech when he worked at Disney building mobile games and wanted to solve problems that came from managing people.

But, when he went to HR, the suggestion given to him was: why don’t you run a performance review? This made him look at HR and its processes as a whole. “They’re built for compliance, they’re built to extract data from employees.”

He added that even the term ‘human resources’ implied that employees are considered as resources to be extracted from. “Instead of calling it HR, we should call it RH – resources for humans.”

Times are changing

While this might feel like a tall order, it’s not as far-fetched as it once was. OK, maybe the term HR will never truly disappear, but what it means is certainly changing with the future of work.

Behera noted that 20 years ago, companies had all the power but now employees have all the power.

“It’s a pretty monumental shift,” he said. “It’s a big influence on the future of work.” He said employees have become the centre of the universe for companies, which will change how employers have to treat their employees.

“It’s actually become an economic imperative for companies to now focus on employee engagement,” he said. This is because if companies want to retain top talent, they have to make sure they give them the things that they want, which will include wellbeing, flexibility and career progression.

With this in mind, Behera spoke about how he built Reflektive and the importance of building the old process on your platform as well as the new process so that you can ease companies into the transition.

Inspirefest is Silicon Republic’s international event celebrating the point where science, technology and the arts collide. Ultra Early Bird tickets for Inspirefest 2019 are available now.

Jenny Darmody
By Jenny Darmody

Jenny Darmody became the editor of Silicon Republic in 2023, having worked as the deputy editor since February 2020. When she’s not writing about the science and tech industry, she’s writing short stories and attempting novels. She continuously buys more books than she can read in a lifetime and pretty stationery is her kryptonite. She also believes seagulls to be the root of all evil and her baking is the stuff of legends.

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