How to Build a Performance Management Process?

What a wonderful yet intimidating subject. I am speaking to those of you who found themselves set on a journey of implementing a new Performance Management process in your company by either revamping your old one or creating it from scratch.

This is another one of those articles, which will give you something you can take away and work on: helpful tips and my own learnings. By any means please do not feel like what I am describing here is the final process - everything I build for the company is designed in a way that it can be iterated with feedback and suggestions from my team. What I am sharing with you now is not set in stone, it will grow and evolve as we do.

Think about what you need to achieve vs the strengths and weaknesses of people who will be running this process. Are they good at admin? Do they hate too much paperwork? The thing that helped me most was the survey that collected feedback from people regarding their existing performance process. This way it was clear to me how the process had to evolve in order to align with their expectations.

Based on that feedback, these were some things I planned to achieve with the new process: less admin, more automation, less intrusive questioning, more personal development, more two-way feedback and less school/student scoring methods.

As with any changes, you need buy-in from your team and the best way to get that buy-in was to collaborate with as many key stakeholders as possible. I wrote a draft of the framework and presented it to all managers, asking for feedback. Then met up with multiple team members and presented the iterated version. Then finally sat down with the CEO and got his thoughts and feedback. By the time the whole process was written, I could confidently say that it was ALL of US who wrote this and not just me.

So what was implemented? There are now two parts to our new performance management system: Quarterly 1:1s & an Annual Performance Review.

Let's start with the former. As I wanted the process to be as automated as possible and as uniform as possible, I set up a quarterly review cycle through our HR platform - #charliehr.

This was an easy and straightforward way to get our team to prep for their quarterly 1:1s. The way it works is something like this:

• Both team member and their manager receive a digital form with a few questions & two-way feedback.
• Once the form is filled, its completed version gets shared with both in advance of their scheduled meeting.
• Once the meeting has taken place, both forms remain saved in history and can be accessed at any time via CharlieHR.

Really cool little process. Highly recommend to give it a go. Multiple people in my team have gone through this and found it pretty useful!

CharlieHR offers a few different templates, but I set up my own. I wanted to ensure that the team members get some key things out of this process: talk about what they really enjoy doing, talk about what they wish to change, share their personal development goals, share feedback about their manager and team.

IMO, best 1:1s are those that focus on the team member, where they share/discuss/articulate whatever is on their mind and their manager is there as a facilitator, who provides a safe space for all that to come out. Therefore, the manager's digital form contains a lot fewer questions and the goal for them is to really understand how their team member is doing and what their development areas are. These few questions focus on team member's strengths, taking those strengths to the next level and areas to develop in.

So what is in the annual performance review then? Our annual performance review process is fun - it is designed in the form of a yearly brag document (google "Positive Psychology" and tricks to building your self-confidence and self-belief, yes, I know, its mad cool!).

We have identified some key attributes that define a high performer at Switchee and we created a scorecard for each of those attributes, where each scorecard is divided into 5 levels. The attributes are - technical knowledge, impact, collaboration and culture & values. The idea is that everyone is able to visit the scorecards, identify their own level within each key attribute and write up some examples of their previous projects/work that backs up their score.

This way each of us at Switchee has one "brag" document to work with for the entire year, where we fill in all of our accomplishments. The document is smart - it helps us calculate the bonus we will get at the end of that year based on our self-assessed levels.

The entire process was released all at once - I know this is a bit scary, but if you manage to key people involved throughout, then this will not be a shock it could be. Personally, I ensured that the team knew I was working on this and that I expected to present it by the end of the quarter. This way it was not a surprise and instead an anticipated piece of information.

I coupled the release of this with the results of our Quarterly Engagement Survey feedback. For me this worked really well as a lot of things raised through this survey would be significantly impacted by the new performance process. All in all, I would say there is the right place and the right time for something like this to "hit the screens" (remote-work pun intended).

I hope that this was useful to you. I have run a Roundtable with some fellow HRs last week on this topic and one of them summarised all my ramblings into concise bullet points. I will share:

• Get key stakeholders to collaborate with you on building the process.
• Build your scorecards around known, relatable behaviours that represent what "good looks like".
• Ensure the process provides clarity around performance expectations and personal development.
• Walkthroughs are not just for gamers: guiding managers through the first few rounds of the new process is just as important as a solid process on paper.
• If you name it, you bring it to existence: When you introduce a rating system, perhaps 1 can be "bare minimum/disengaged" and 5 "champion across everything who give back a positive impact on the community" (vs 1 being "absolutely horrible performance" and 5 "unachievably great").
• It's intimidating to place yourself as "excellent" in a performance framework, so it can be helpful to frame assessment Qs against how a project was received vs how they have conducted it.

There is not enough paper to describe all that went into making this performance system work well. You and me both know that a long Linkedin article is boring to read so I hope that these few tips will be enough to ignite your enthusiasm and help you on your journey of building your own performance management system.

Good luck!