Duuoo is an innovative, continuous performance development platform, providing forward-thinking teams around the world a solution that supports their managers. The tool also helps them to be more effective coaching leaders, drives higher-performing teams and gives them a powerful way to put their strategies into action.

Duuoo was created to aid organizations in becoming people-first workplaces. Focusing on the relationship between an employee and their manager, they have tapped into the demand for recognition, ongoing feedback and value in the workplace. One thing that has remained fundamentally unchanged for decades is the performance review and the team behind Duuoo is on a mission to change that.

Duuoo’s software supports 1:1s, development reviews, 360° feedback and OKRs or goal tracking. It’s an all in one, intuitive tool that’s easy-to-use and simple to implement.

Duuoo believes the annual review should be a thing of the past. The practice of setting aside time for only one serious talk about performance and development over the course of the year is often inadequate, and a sure way to create disengaged, unmotivated and unhappy employees. The pace of business today is such that, if you set goals at the beginning of the year, they’re very likely to be outdated or no longer relevant at the end of the year. The annual review can also create a great deal of anxiety and the pressure placed upon it is often a quite negative experience for all involved. That’s where Duuoo comes in.

Their team wants to empower organizations to move away from outdated performance management practices and embrace a pattern of ongoing conversations, goal setting and feedback moments throughout the year.

The relationship between a manager and their employees is central to the workplace experience and directly linked to employee engagement and productivity as well as happiness. Duuoo have found that often managers might be technically skilled but lack formal training in skills like coaching and development or have no formal leadership training. This means they can lack confidence having formal conversations or giving feedback.

Duuoo was designed to get managers and their team members having great conversations. They also wanted their software to encourage and upskill managers whilst creating a tool that doesn’t add to their workload. Even the most experienced of managers have a lot on their plate – the added admin and time pressure of multiple additional 1:1 meetings could be daunting. This is why Duuoo’s tool supports its main functionality with a suite of content aimed at helping and supporting managers in their roles.

The challenge

Duuoo found that often performance reviews or even 1:1 touch points, between a manager and employee are as little as once annually and this simply isn’t regular enough to be of any value to either employee or employer. With increasingly larger teams, pushing the best practice of meeting more often (ideally once every two weeks as a minimum) could seem daunting to many managers who already have many stresses and demands filling their time. There could be buy-in at a company level or by HR teams, but no real thought being given to putting increased meeting frequency into practice – and what this means on an administrative and practical level for managers. Duuoo wanted to ensure that their software promoted the importance of internal meetings whilst also delivering a tool that fitted seamlessly into a manager’s workload and didn’t add unnecessary stress or too much admin.

It was very early on in Duuoo’s product design process that they wanted to find a scheduling solution. Their team explored the idea of building the calendar and scheduling functionality that was needed in-house. A huge consideration was the allocation of time and resources – as a company with a big idea just starting out they wanted to make sure that they were using what they had wisely. They quickly realised that the scheduling project was going to be much bigger and more complicated than initially thought and that they would rather concentrate on the core product goals – reimagining the performance review and improving internal work relationships and engagement. The logical decision was to find a partner and outsource the work and help them to implement scheduling as fast as possible – crucial to the successful adoption of the product.

Choosing Cronofy was a natural extension of the need to solve all of these pain points with powerful real-time, two-way, scheduling technology.

The solution

One of the main bottlenecks in the workplace is scheduling; with a busy schedule, liable to change on short notice, it can be a real challenge for a manager and team member to connect. That’s where Cronofy comes in. It allowed Duuoo to quickly and efficiently build a feature that automates much of the scheduling process and sends out the calendar invites, removing as much friction as possible from the process.

Currently Duuoo has a 79% adoption rate of the Cronofy features amongst their customers. Which means that 8 out of 10 Duuoo users choose to sync their calendar to Duuoo using Cronofy.

With Cronofy, Duuoo have been able to build an easy and intuitive scheduling feature into the process of having 1:1s and meetings, all within their software. This means the admin load is taken off the shoulders of managers and their team members, while urging them to keep having regular meetings. For them, it’s all about making the scheduling process as seamless as possible. The logistics side of it necessitated a scheduling flow that made it as easy as possible for managers and their team members.

These snapshots show Duuoo’s software, with and without Cronofy.

Duuoo use Cronofy’s calendar sync and Availability API. As the screenshots show, it is much simpler to schedule something when the tool is synced to the calendar. The tool does include a simple calendar, but by using Cronofy to display the actual availability of the two team members involved, the whole process of booking the meetings is transformed. It all happens right there, in one place and pushes the invites out from Duuoo to the external calendar for both parties.
Because it’s fairly common for internal meetings to get shifted around (due to the perception that they are less important than a meeting with external attendees – something Duuoo are on a mission to change!) it makes rescheduling a 1:1 much simpler too!

As Duuoo, with the help of Cronofy, handles all the scheduling and admin of their 1:1 meetings, users can focus on what’s really important: having good conversations, and having them more often.

The future of the partnership between Duuoo and Cronofy looks exciting with many more collaborative and content sharing projects on the horizon.

No matter what calendar service provider you need to integrate your software with, Cronofy can help.

You can offer your users streamlined scheduling solutions that work with every major calendar provider in a fraction of the time.

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