Acto is a platform for pharmaceutical and life-sciences companies to communicate with sales reps, health care providers and patients, and its business has exploded with the health-tech boom. The company’s revenue swelled by 158 percent in 2019, and the following year it secured $11.5 million in Series A funding. At the same time, CEO Parth Khanna was looking for a way to create company goals and transparency around productivity.

As part of the company’s approach to performance management, Khanna created a scorecard system, which measures company-wide goals—like revenue targets or customer satisfaction—on both the departmental level and the employee level. Each manager creates goals for their team, weighting them so staff understands how best to spend their time. There’s a scoring scheme—a heat map—that shows an employee’s specific skills, duties and roles. For example, a marketing manager’s scorecard might dictate that she spend 50 percent of her time managing the team, 25 percent dealing with the budget and 25 percent developing new processes and systems. When employees satisfy their goals, they’re rewarded with bonuses.

The scorecards also help separate productivity from busy work. For example, being on Zoom calls all day might not necessarily translate to the progress and achievements of the company. “If I’m just going from meeting to meeting, we’re not moving as a team,” Khanna explains. “I can be busy, but the organization is not productive.”

“The scorecard system is to help remind everyone of the company’s why, the department’s why and the person’s why”

According to Wafa Sayeed-Irtiza, Acto’s VP of marketing, while employees work from home during the pandemic, the scorecards keep people from working in silos. By looking at their scorecards, team members can see how their tasks contribute to their manager’s and director’s goals, which then contribute to company-wide goals. “The scorecard system is to help remind everyone of the company’s why, the department’s why and the person’s why and to reinforce those values and objectives,” she says.