What Employees Want From Performance Management

When you have 11,000 employees, changing your approach to performance management is no small undertaking. This is a story about how one of the largest investor-owned utility companies in the United States did just that.

Recognizing that its annual self-evaluation cycle was not improving performance, the company engaged a leading HR consulting company to develop a new program to support meaningful feedback on a more frequent basis—with the goal of helping employees thrive in the workplace.

The new program was designed to be both transparent and future-focused. Instead of focusing on past performance, it shifted the emphasis on career goals and aspirations. In this way, the company aimed to drive development through more frequent and more broadly focused conversations between employees and managers.

An employee survey revealed that its employees found the existing process to be cumbersome, ineffective, tedious, and difficult. What employees—and HR—wanted was something simple, fair, effective, meaningful, and efficient.

So they turned to PeopleFluent.

Unifying the Performance Management Experience for Managers and Employees

For nearly a decade, the company had used PeopleFluent Performance to manage its traditional review process, and knew it was flexible enough to accommodate the new process.

As part of the transition, the company also took advantage of the Talent Productivity Platform, launching a single, unified workspace for managers and employees alike. This enabled all 11,000 employees to efficiently execute performance management tasks and access how-to videos and other contextual information right in the workflow.

With the Talent Productivity Platform in place, the company is able to

• Clarify the role of performance management in an employee’s career
• Better support manager-employee conversations
• Communicate employee development opportunities
• Ensure people know about key dates and milestones
• Create transparency across the performance management process.

The end-result? A meaningful performance management experience across divisions, locations, and roles.

Increased Company-Wide Communication and Performance Conversations

Using the Talent Productivity Platform as the primary communication tool for its workforce, the company was able to deliver a unified, yet personalized experience for all its performance management needs.

Today, it benefits from a company-wide improvement in communication, including more frequent—and higher quality—performance conversations. In fact, managers and employees are holding four times more performance conversations than before launching the new program.

As their performance process evolves, PeopleFluent will be there to further refine the employee and manager experience—reinforcing and enhancing their culture of future-focused conversations and employee development.