Keeping employees engaged and motivated was something that fascinated us. It is clear that so many companies today fail to tap into the true potential of their workforce. Talent lays untapped, people feel under-appreciated and under-utilized and great ideas lay undiscovered.

The Corporate Leadership Council, a renowned research consultancy from Washington, conducted a ground breaking study to determine what are the factors that motivate and drive team performance in the workplace. They conducted in-depth interviews with 19,000 employees of many of the world's top companies, focusing on the question ‘What matters most to performance?’. The results were enlightening.

Informal Feedback was top of the list. In fact 8 of the 10 top factors related specifically to feedback, encouragement and interaction with leaders. A recent McKinsey survey also found that the key motivators for people are praise from immediate managers and one-on-one conversations with leaders. But the question remained, what kind of tools or systems could help companies bridge the performance gap, when the motivators were often soft and intangible?

In the last few years we have seen how the social web has transformed how we communicate. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are fast replacing email as the preferred method for interacting and engaging with your friends and wider social network. We were amazed at how these social networks fostered spontaneous discussions, allowed for discovery of content on the web and allowed you to learn things about people you previously had no idea about. Imagine if we could harness all the positive elements of a social network for business purposes - without all the time-wasting distractions?

For the founders of Yackstar, it was clear that the way to allow companies to bridge the performance gap was to create a more fluid environment for employees (and managers) to interact, share, give recognition and provide informal feedback - and the new paradigm of 'the social network' presented an unprecedented opportunity for companies.

With this in mind, we designed Yackstar - the social network for your business.