How eMAG Transformed and Scaled Performance Management with Mirro

Industry: Retail

Company size: 6,000

People in scope: 4,500

About: eMAG is a leading online platform in Central and Eastern Europe.

Founded in 2001, eMAG is a pioneering e-commerce platform operating in Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Committed to providing exceptional value and convenience to its customers, eMAG offers a vast selection of products, including those from Marketplace partners. Through its user-friendly interface, eMAG enables customers to efficiently search, discover, and purchase items anytime, anywhere.

eMAG and its two platforms, Fashion Days and Freshful, had a classic 360-feedback process managed via a third-party tool. Following the pandemic, people needed faster, more natural, and more meaningful feedback. Moreover, most users weren’t as engaged as once, and the outcome wasn’t relevant anymore. That’s how eMAG decided the process needed a change.

The business challenge

The main business challenge was to provide eMAG employees with clarity, appreciation, feedback, fair performance, and support for development. Thus, upgrading the performance management framework was mandatory to allow the company to continue its rapid growth across the region.

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The solution: a new process

After thoroughly researching various methodologies, case studies, and expert literature on the essential pillars of performance management and the optimal process, eMAG built its own framework — S.T.E.P.S., which stands for “Set Objectives | Track Progress | Evaluate Performance | Provide Feedback | Support Development.”

S.T.E.P.S. is meant to bring clarity by setting objectives, monitoring their progress, and making rapid adjustments through 1-to-1 meetings and continuous feedback. This framework also facilitates alignment on eMAG principles (through specific feedback and appreciation) and transparent performance evaluation every six months.

Strategic partner: Mirro

The next natural step was researching the market for suitable performance management software to integrate eMAG’s needs. With powerful core features, catchy UX, and a helpful and involved team, Mirro won the company’s platform selection process.

noun-quoteThe selection scorecard was tough, but we went for the most interesting platform: Mirro, an unusual provider at that time, offering everything we needed BUT a predefined performance evaluation cycle. The performance in Mirro was only continuous. The feature was appealing, and it took us a bit of a shift in mindset. Mirro won our platform selection process with powerful core features, catchy UX, and a helpful and involved team.noun-quote

Rareș BĂCIOIU

(Senior Manager, People Analytics, Tech & AI)

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Alexandra-Breana-emag

Alexandra BREANA

Quality Advisor

As a regular user, my overall experience with Mirro is that it is intuitive and easy to use, and the impact it has on my daily activities is positive, helping me to centralize the feedback I give to colleagues with whom I work closely and to follow their evolution, it can be seen as an improvement manual depending on the objectives set, the discussions had. The OKRs set in Mirro, being an interactive platform, help me to have very good traceability of the discussions I have had with my colleagues, to receive feedback, and to be able to follow my evolution about the overall objectives of the department and the company, and the general objectives of the company, being noted in Mirro, I can think of strategies in my daily work to contribute to achieving them. Mirro is a great tool for personal, departmental, and company development and is easy to use. My favorite functions are giving feedback on the start-stop-continue structure and requesting and receiving feedback; where it helps a lot that I can set the person I request feedback from, the response time, and the reminders sent by the platform automatically, giving the convenience of having automated follow-up.

After working closely with the Mirro team, eMAG reached the best of both worlds: fixed bi-annual campaigns, keeping the same time slots as the old 360-feedback process, but also flexible performance evaluations that could be concluded after one month, three months, or at any time managers may need it.

noun-quote The initial adoption process was met with some challenges, as it meant sending all our employees to a new platform to manage their objectives, exchange feedback and appreciation, and evaluate performance, while some business units managed both feedback and evaluations locally (using emails, Excel or Word files, or 1:1 meetings). We relied on internal communication and Mirro's user-friendly interface to overcome these challenges. While performance evaluation is working on an open model, Mirro has helped us manage them through campaigns with specific start and end dates, which needed more technical assistance in aligning due dates, but allowing us to have a structured approach to performance management custom to our needs. noun-quote

Daniel DOBRANIȘ

Performance & HR Tech Project Owner

Integrating Mirro with other systems was a concern for eMAG because it's not easy to integrate systems "overnight". However, Mirro proved highly adaptable to eMAG's needs, providing live assistance with various imports and developing database integration and synchronization.

noun-quoteMirro is helpful and adaptable to our needs, open to growing the product around complex processes in companies like eMAG, and guides us on better implementing performance management in the organization. We found the platform very easy to use and has a great UX design. Mirro's customer success and dev teams are flexible and reactive and have helped create a scalable solution for the future inside the whole Group.noun-quote

Rareș BĂCIOIU

Senior Manager, People Analytics, Tech & AI

The business outcome

noun-quote Our company is dedicated to fostering high performance, and with the introduction of the new platform, we enhanced our focus on performance evaluation throughout the employee lifecycle. Although we've only been using the platform for just over a year, we're excited about the opportunities it presents for even greater impact and future growth.noun-quote

Daniel DOBRANIȘ

Performance & HR Tech Project Owner

The company’s latest performance evaluation campaign was run for eMAG, Fashion Days, and Freshful across all three regions. It lasted four weeks and featured more than 4,000 employees (including around 700
people managers).

High-Impact
Performance Evaluation

4,000+

Employees Engaged

63%

Response Rate

700

People managers

2,570

Evaluations Completed

The campaign was successful, with an overall answer rate of 63%, meaning 2,570 people went through the new performance evaluation process.

So far, the results are as follows:

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Valuable insights on satisfaction and performance

Performance evaluations revealed valuable and actionable insights into employees job satisfaction, individual and team performance, team collaboration, and potential for
future growth.

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Measurement of company values and principles

Living and understanding organizational values and principles are at the core of a healthy company culture. eMAG found that 82% of people rated the “We support each other” principle as shown by their colleagues in their daily activities. Moreover, the appreciation provided within Mirro has shown specific behaviors linked to company values such as Team Engagement, Collaboration, Quality, and Efficiency.

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Increased clarity and alignment

Another essential business outcome emerged after the latest employee engagement survey was run. The results have shown increased scores for understanding company strategy (+8 NPS points vs. last) and transparency to team goals (+2 NPS points vs. last).

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Increased feeling of appreciation and feedback

The eNPS survey also provided insights into employees' increased appreciation within the company (+3 NPS points vs. last) and increased feedback received by employees from direct managers (+3 NPS points vs. last).

These results may not be directly related to the new process. Still, they are more visible after implementing the new performance management process, which is much more structured and offers a more holistic view of the employee lifecycle. By switching from the old 360-degree feedback process to a more continuous performance approach, eMAG can now provide its people with more clarity and support for development. Moreover, people can easily express appreciation and feedback and have fair and transparent performance evaluations on the same platform.

Rares

For me, it's natural to keep 1o1s with my direct reports, giving feedback, actualizing expectations, and appreciating progress on objectives or behavior. Even so, performance check-in in Mirro was a good experience as a manager, helping me keep more focused discussions about performance and better understand what drives it from the colleague evaluated. Continuous performance? Yes. On the platform: 2/year, but in collaboration with my direct reports, all the time. It's easier now to think about how this and that influences someone's performance, and we prefer to address them when they appear, allowing the performance check-in to be a check-in, not a wave of surprises and unsaid things. This way, the process and the platform help us to be focused throughout the year, not only on performance check-ins.

Rareș BĂCIOIU

Senior Manager, People Analytics, Tech & AI

Daniel

eMAG is very dynamic, and we are happy to have found a supportive team at Mirro. The platform proved to be easy to use and intuitive at times. I like that objectives are set and tracked with ease in Mirro. Feedback is continuous; the templates are a nice touch and can be obtained from external sources, which helps gather relevant data in a single place. Kudos were a great bonus; they are fun, easy to use, and practical since it is tied to company principles. Flexibility is key for us, as it all flows into the performance evaluation, which we run on a campaign-based model, even if managers can complete evaluations throughout the year (for various business reasons). Mirro allows data-driven decision-making, and the data collected helps us better understand what is important and how we can grow. We feel that this is just a starting point, and there are plenty of opportunities to improve as we scale up and level up our performance management process.

Daniel DOBRANIȘ

Performance & HR Tech Project Owner

What’s next for eMAG

For eMAG, the next step is to scale the performance management framework until it becomes a cornerstone of the business that will help the company grow. Mirro is committed to being a trusting partner supporting eMAG in achieving the desired outcomes.

About Mirro

Mirro.io enables high-growth SMEs to build transparent and thriving workplace cultures that foster employee well-being and improve talent retention. Our performance management platform helps organizations overcome hybrid workplace disengagement by encouraging a sense of purpose and stimulating social sharing and community belonging around the globe. Teams and individuals that use Mirro are happier, highly engaged, and more productive.

As a user-friendly and highly social platform, Mirro drives more than 5k monthly interactions between team members through recognition, OKRs, continuous feedback, and meaningful performance conversations.

Innovative companies like eMAG, Tazz, Hochland, E Co., and noissue. use Mirro to empower their teams and nurture healthy, solid work relationships.

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