SimScale's Performance Management Practices

With more than 120 team members and multiple sub-teams, SimScale has reached a size where whole teams and managers work with very little overlap alongside each other. With increasing team growth, building and developing a ‘championship team’ requires a more intentional and conscious approach to performance management since otherwise subcultures might emerge with different standards for performance, feedback, coaching, leadership, and more.?

A performance management system monitors employee performance in a consistent and measurable manner. To do this, we use a combination of technologies and methodologies to ensure that employees across the organization are aligned with and contribute to the company's strategic goals. In the past we relied on oral, open-ended agreements among managers about how we manage performance. However, as SimScale grew, we had to become more transparent and conscious about performance management and streamlining it across the organization, with the goal of increasing overall team performance faster. In this article, we will share with you what system SimScale has in place to manage individual and team performance.?

Fostering Clarity and Accountability

We strive to build a culture of trust, in which we can count on everyone to do what they say they’re going to do and how they will do it.?The basis for this is having clarity and a shared understanding about the commitments made and willingness to hold ourselves and others accountable for them. To foster this, we capture and record the most central commitments in our collaboration on both what we will do and how we will do it in writing. We acknowledge that commitments come in such diverse forms, sizes, and time frames that a system of record will always be imperfect yet helpful in fostering trust and accountability.

Working with OKRs

We work with quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results ) to capture commitments on what we’ll do for the upcoming three months. Our values as well as leadership principles help us commit on how we will accomplish these goals. We consider the OKR cadence as a standardized process that repeats every single quarter. Working with OKRs offers a variety of benefits compared to other or non-existing performance management systems.

1. Focus and prioritization: The most important goals are identified and clearly communicated to everyone. Everyone in the team knows the priorities and where the focus lies.
2. Alignment: Alignment of all teams and individuals at the beginning of the quarter ensures that resources are used wisely and increases efficiency.
3. Employee input: Each individual should be involved in the planning process. Their input needs to be considered and implemented. Team members can include their interests, competencies, and strengths to the OKR process. This can also increase their motivation and commitment.
4. Transparency: Everyone in the organization sees and knows who is working on which goals and what the current status is.
5. Clarity: OKRs transparently show which goals the employee has successfully completed. Gradations in percentages can reflect success in actual numbers. Arbitrariness, biases, and selective perception are minimized by OKRs.
6. Goal chunking: OKRs break down large projects into predictable and achievable subgoals. Large projects and organizational goals can be transparently broken down to team and employees individual OKRs.?

To increase the quality and transparency of our performance evaluation of individual employees, managers are challenged to avoid biases and encouraged to use the same standards in terms of performance for all of their team members.

Performance Evaluations

At the end of each quarter, we meet during a 1:1 feedback session, reflect on the past few months, draw learnings from the quarter, and include them in the planning for the next quarter, so that an ongoing process is created. The focus of this meeting should not be any criticism, but rather motivation of team members and the opportunity to have regular discussions about their goals in the company and their career aspirations. Performance levels are a performance metric and should primarily reflect objective and measurable OKR achievement. However, they also include non-OKR related dimensions that we take into consideration. Every employee gets one performance level rating for every quarter. Its primary intended use is to help a manager think about the performance of an employee from different angles. For example, we look at the quantity or amount of work produced personally or from a group or team on assignments, tasks and projects. Are these delivered and produced on time and according to the deadline and target? What is the quality of the work like, the efficiency of use of time, as well as the amount and intensity of supervision and support to perform up to standard, amongst others aspects.?All of these aspects are taken into consideration when measuring performance and success.

Manager Surveys?

Quarterly sent out manager surveys aim to collect feedback from employees on a regular basis. Employees get the chance to give anonymous feedback and rate supervisor-related behavior and practices. The feedback survey covers a number of different dimensions that correspond to our idea of good leadership and are linked to our leadership principles . They are intended to ensure good cooperation between employees and managers. Every team member should receive all fundamental aspects in their daily work to be satisfied, successful, proactive, and autonomous in their position.

Working in a startup like SimScale can be very competitive. Not necessarily within our organization or between colleagues but rather in the industry. We set realistic, yet ambitious and competitive goals — company-wide and for every single individual. It’s an environment where you can accomplish a lot and truly see and feel the impact you made on the company. If you’re someone who struggles with working on several things at the same time, deadlines, goals, and situations where you really go above and beyond to accomplish your goals, the reality can be that this may not be the right environment for you. When we say you need to be a self starter, you really need to be a self starter to succeed. Working with quarterly OKRs means that we get the opportunity to come up with our goals and think about the company as a whole through our individual goals. So, in a way you are your own entrepreneur within an organization. We give and receive regular feedback and are never in the dark when it comes to our goals. Yet, at the end of the day, every single person is expected to work autonomously or not shy away to ask others for help. If you’re someone who thrives in an environment where you are given a lot of freedom, work creatively, and really like to challenge yourself to continuously learn new things and work outside of your comfort zone, then SimScale is the right place. We promise to build upon your strengths and offer you an environment where you can get things moving!?

Stay tuned for more insights into SimScale and see what the team has been up to on our @lifeatsimscale Instagram feed. Want to start your own SimScale story? Make sure to keep an eye on our careers page for possible openings!