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.