Director of Performance Management & Employee Listening

Job Description

Freshworks is rethinking how we develop, evaluate, and listen to our people — and this role is at the center of that transformation. As Director of Performance Management & Employee Listening, you will lead two of our most strategically important people practices: a comprehensive redesign of how we approach performance management, and a shift to a modern, continuous approach to employee listening. 

This is a role for someone who thinks systemically, designs with the business in mind, and cares about execution as much as strategy. Ultimately, you are helping us build something lasting: a sustainable culture of high performance and an employee experience that is genuinely differentiated. You will work as part of a small, senior Workforce Strategy & Org Development team — owning your domain with a high degree of autonomy and leading through influence across a matrixed organization. You will not manage a large team, but you will need to move a lot of work through people who don't report to you.

Based at our San Mateo headquarters, you will work alongside senior leaders and represent the People team in high-visibility conversations at the VP and executive level. We need someone who commands a room, earns trust quickly, and brings both creative thinking and rigorous follow-through to everything they own. Critically, you know that even the best-designed programs fail without deliberate change management — and you build enablement, communication, and adoption into your work from the start.

What You’ll Do

Performance Management Transformation

• Lead a meaningful transformation of how Freshworks approaches performance management — moving from a process-heavy, subjective model to a streamlined, AI-assisted approach that is easier for managers, more consistent in its outputs, and more tightly connected to business outcomes.
• Design and own the end-to-end performance system: the methodology, the tools, the calibration approach, and the employee and manager experience. 
• Coordinate across HR, Total Rewards, HR Technology, and business partners to deliver an integrated solution that actually works in practice. 
• Build and maintain executive alignment. This work is visible to senior leadership, and you will present, defend, and iterate on it in real time. 
• Lead the change management and enablement strategy for the performance transformation — developing communications, training, and leader readiness plans that drive understanding and adoption across the organization.
• Hold the bar on quality and detail at every stage. 

Employee Listening

• Own our employee listening strategy and programs, including our continuous listening platform, pulse approach, and how we translate signals into leadership action.
• Drive the shift from periodic survey cycles to an always-on listening culture — designing and executing the change management strategy that moves leaders from passive recipients of survey results to active owners of the employee feedback loop.
• Build leader-facing tools, frameworks, and communications that make listening data accessible and useful, not just reportable. 
• Track program health, participation trends, and sentiment over time; surface risks and opportunities and bring forward clear recommendations. 
• Stand up and lead a cross-functional employee experience working group — bringing together leaders from People Analytics, Employee Experience, and the HRBP community to build a cohesive, multi-lens view of the state of the employee experience. This group will be responsible for maturing how we aggregate and interpret employee signals, and for delivering a regular, centralized view of organizational health to senior leadership. 
• Continuously improve our approach as AI capabilities and listening methodologies evolve

Change Management & Enablement

• Own the change management and enablement strategy across both performance and listening — from how we communicate program shifts to how we build leader capability and drive adoption at scale. The goal is not compliance with new programs; it is durable behavior change that builds a culture of high performance and an employee experience people can feel.
• Apply behavioral science principles to the design of change interventions — using what we know about habit formation, social norms, loss aversion, and motivation to design programs that shift behavior, not just awareness.
• Design and deliver leader enablement programs that translate program changes into concrete behaviors: what leaders need to know, do, and model differently as a result of each transformation.
• Build a communication and engagement framework that keeps employees, managers, and senior leaders informed, aligned, and bought in throughout multi-year transformation cycles.
• Serve as the connective tissue between program design and organizational readiness — ensuring that what we build in the design room actually lands in the field.
• Measure adoption and enablement effectiveness; use data to identify where uptake is lagging and adjust approach accordingly.

Qualifications

• 8–12 years of progressive experience in HR, people strategy, organizational effectiveness, or a related field. 
• Proven experience leading complex, cross-functional transformation initiatives from design through execution in a fast-paced environment. • Deep expertise in performance management design — you’ve built or significantly redesigned performance systems before and understand how to make them fair, scalable, and defensible. 
• Meaningful experience in organizational design and development — you can help leaders think through structure and effectiveness, and you know how to turn those conversations into action. 
• Strong change management and enablement skills — you know how to bring people along through transformation, build leader capability, and design adoption strategies that actually stick. • Familiarity with continuous listening platforms and methodology; experience driving leader adoption of listening tools is a strong plus. 
• An AI-first mindset — you’re curious about what AI makes possible in people practices and you bring that perspective to how you design programs and solve problems. 
• Exceptional executive presence — you’re comfortable presenting to C-suite leaders, you communicate with clarity and confidence, and you can hold your own in high-stakes rooms. 
• High attention to detail — you care deeply about getting things right and you’ll get into the weeds to make sure they are. • Strong cross-functional instincts — you build trust with Finance, Strategy, and Operations partners and you design solutions that work for the business, not just for HR. • Excellent written and verbal communication skills; you can translate complexity into clarity for any audience.

Additional Information

Please note this is a hybrid role with onsite expectations of 3x/week (Tues - Thurs) from our San Mateo, CA headquarters. 

The annual base salary range for this position is $199,750 - $246,750. This role is also eligible for a target bonus. 

Compensation is based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to location, experience, job-related skills, and level. 

Freshworks offers multiple options for dental, medical, vision, disability, and life insurance. Equity + ESPP, flexible PTO, flexible spending, commuter benefits, and wellness benefits are also offered. Freshworks also offers adoption and parental leave benefits. 

At Freshworks, we have fostered an environment that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion, welcoming colleagues of all backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and ethnicities. We are committed to providing equal opportunity and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer environment that boosts the goals of our employees, communities, and business. Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.