about

Axon Enterprise, Inc. is an American Scottsdale, Arizona-based company which develops technology and weapons products for military, law enforcement, and civilians. Its initial product and former namesake is the Taser, a line of electroshock weapons.

problem

After transitioning from TASER International, Axon shifted their focus towards growing a suite of connected devices and apps, including TASER smart weapons, police body cameras, and industry-leading cloud-based evidence management software. This shift led Axon towards becoming the world’s premier public safety company and brought tremendous growth.

Amid all this growth, Axon decided to bring on a VP of People Operations for the first time, and with this new position came a new perspective on performance reviews. With a higher vantage point out of the day-to-day tasks of keeping up with all the growth, a person in this position could see that too much time was spent on administrative tasks like paper performance reviews. Gretchen Mastellon was hired to fill that VP of People Operations position. After coming on board, Gretchen saw the need to take the company off its Excel-based performance review system and go online. Gretchen and her HR team saw several benefits to going online, such as saving time and paperwork and having 24/7 access to employee records in the cloud. Having reviews online meant they could also get their international offices on the same page.

solution

Gretchen started the search for an online performance management system with one main thing in mind: it needed to be easy to use. Marcy Rigoni, Director of Human Resources, noted, “new hires were starting each day, and system administrators wouldn’t have time to individually train each person with another new tool,” so having a system that someone could understand on their own was important. And so began the process of online research and product demonstrations.

Axon also took this opportunity to adopt 360-degree feedback into their performance management process, something Trakstar offers. With growth can come growing pains while direct managers and teams shift. 360-degree feedback is a great way to get more staff involved in providing consistent and multi-faceted feedback.

Trakstar provides complete flexibility when creating performance reviews online, allowing for open-ended questions, scorable competencies, and individual or company goals. In addition, the onboarding team provides a wealth of industry knowledge. Axon came in with a clear plan to ask open-ended questions and request qualitative feedback from employees. Trakstar provided an implementation manager to see their vision come to life. Implementation specialists help with product set-up, administrator training, and employee and manager training.

results

Axon is still growing, and Trakstar is still their tool for performance management. In the near future, Marcy Rigoni is looking forward to an upcoming integration with ADP that will connect all her new hire data regularly and save her even more time.

With Trakstar, Axon has a partner in performance management to help them by providing an easy-to-use solution, unmatched customer support, and ongoing product improvements.