Our Method

Employee engagement is not an HR problem, it’s a management one.

Organizations have relied on traditional HR tools to help them “manage performance” for far too long. And for the most part? They’re more of a distraction that prevents us from getting work done than anything else.

Yet here we are, filling out pulse surveys and annual reviews so that our HR teams can get the data they need for their reporting. Meanwhile, our team isn’t selling, shipping, or supporting more because of it. It’s just bureaucratic tasks that turn otherwise productive people into data inputters for executive reports which are read, on average, by one person.

Let’s be honest, as much as these things ☝️are correlated with performance, they aren’t the cause of it. They don’t really do anything to engage or improve the performance of your employees they just measure it (ineffectively in our opinion).

What does? You.

The #1 reason an employee shows up and tries? Their direct manager. It’s not the free lunches, ping pong tables, unlimited vacation, or a fancy beer cart. These material things mean nothing when it comes to people trying their best every-single-day. Employee engagement is not an HR problem, it’s a management one, and we think it’s about time someone built software to help managers with these problems, rather than just helping HR with their reports.

“People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers”

Bad bosses lead to poor performance. There’s no amount of surveys you can do to change that. It’s time to start spending our resources on turning good bosses into great ones.

Rarely are managers set up for success in their roles. That needs to change.

Does this sound familiar?

You start off as an individual contributor, a high-performing one. You’re great at your job and you know how to “do” it. One day, you get a promotion, and then another one. All of a sudden poof, someone disguises a career change as a promotion and you don’t “do” anymore. Instead, you now help others “do”.

Your role is now less about “doing” and more about nurturing others to “do” as well as you. You need to figure out how to make more of yourself.

The average manager goes 10 years into people-leadership without any formal training. That’s 10 years of trial and error on people’s lives. Repeating the same mistakes that every previous manager has already made.

Is the solution then more coaching and training sooner? Sure, in a dream world. But we’ve got 90 days to hit our quarterly goals and we’re already behind. So here, read a book and hope it helps get you up to speed quickly — the same thing we’ve been doing for decades.

If you’re anything like the rest of us, your biggest challenge is juggling your team with the rest of your responsibilities.

That’s why we built Spinach AI: A platform to help managers juggle their team activities while coaching good management habits. Turning your “meh” one-on-ones into high leverage opportunities to get the most out of your team. Your weekly meetings into a productive rhythm that builds the team up. Ultimately turning chaos and stress into an organized, calm, incredibly productive week for your whole team.

Spinach AI is the first platform designed to help those with the unique burden of managing people off of those who manage… people, without all that HR junk slowing you down.

Think about it: Marketing, sales, customer success, engineering, design, HR … Every department has software to manage their tasks. Yet, at a certain point, your tasks become people-tasks. And those shouldn’t live in a CRM, an issue tracker, or project management software. And they definitely shouldn’t live in Google docs, Apple notes, or a paper notepad! Shouldn’t you have a tool for the people parts of your job too?

We think it’s time someone stepped up to the plate.