Nog maar kort geleden introduceerde ik hier al het nieuwste IiP-rapport The Impact of Investors in People on People Management Practices and Firm Performance & beloofde ik er enkele van de leerzame business cases uit te halen.

Hier is de 1e: resultaten uit de succesvolle SHRM van een grote Britse financiële dienstverlener. Het Model dat zij toepassen: Investors in People (natuurlijk)

“Company LC

Company LC is a major financial services provider employing several thousand people and with a large high street branch network. The company is well managed, develops its people, trains its managers and communicates the goals and objectives of the organisation widely. It also exposes a set of values for dealing with its people and their behaviour in the organisation based on the beliefs of the senior management and the company’s business model.
As one manager put it “It is hard to be a bad manager in this organisation” referring to all the training, development and support mechanisms available, but the company didn’t rely solely on line management to deliver performance.

Here we will focus on three key aspects for delivering business performance that were identified in this case study; the performance management system, the communication system and the company’s business model.

Performance management system

One of the key drivers of performance for this organisation is the performance management system. The goals of the organisation are broken down into 10 key
perspectives and these are cascaded to the functions in the business together with the appropriate KPIs.
Performance management of the individual is tightly managed. Besides the annual appraisals, line managers are expected to conduct monthly “one-to-one” meetings
and the Standard is that there should be at least ten such meetings a year. The focus is both on the achievement of specific business objectives cascaded from the
business plan as well as the employee’s embodiment of the organisation’s values.

These values are widely displayed round the organisation and naturally for part of the conversation, but the individual performance and values are reinforced
through the recognition system.
The company has a formal recognition system and departments have days each month when they recognise members of staff for displaying the company values,
giving exceptional customer service and delivering exceptional results. Senior management are involved in these days promoting the recognition and reward of
the employees.

Being a financial services company, there is stringent compliance regulation and basic training has to be completed and documented with performance being
regularly scrutinised. But in addition to this process and the line management appraisals and one-to-ones there are two other mechanisms for managing
performance. The first is the voluntary quarterly career review meeting, which all employees are entitled to have with their managers. The second is the “skip-level
meetings” where once a year each person gets the chance to have an individual meeting with their boss of the boss.

The performance management system is therefore designed to direct individuals towards the organisational goals and recognise and reward them when they do
this. The company believes that harnessing discretionary effort is one of the keys to delivering good business performance and the performance measurement
system with its formal recognition and reward elements is designed to do just that.

Regular one-to-one meetings support this and the career meetings and skip-level meetings ensure that other aspirations or block to progress are not over looked.

Communication

Everybody recognises the importance of communication to employee engagement and motivation. What is not widely understood is the length and degree some organisations go to make this communication happen.
In this company, we have already seen that they have annual appraisals, monthly one-to-ones, career and skip-level meetings. But these are additional to the
monthly team meetings that occur, the recognition days and the roadshows given by senior management.

Communication is important for telling people the direction the company is taking and the setting of the KPIs do just this, but it is important that the message is
reinforced through the monthly KPI review process. Making the corporate plan simple and rolling it out through roadshows makes senior management visible,
and you know that this is all being taken seriously, when re-organisations are planned if individual line managers start to get more direct reports than they can
effectively support.

Business Model

One of the key elements of IIP is that organisations seek verification that their people processes and practices are delivering value for the business. Most organisation struggle with this assessment, but this company has built and statistically tested their employee model using survey and performance data.
From this business model and statistical analysis, the company knew that employee commitment increased the longer employees remained with the
organisation. They also identified the drivers of commitment and assessed the impact of these drivers on business performance.
Having such a model allows the organisation to focus its efforts on the human aspect of performance that will make a difference. It also allows the company to
understand the return on some of its people investments, making them easier to justify.”

“Realiseer je dit nu ‘zo maar ff’?”  Nee, helaas niet. Nou ja ‘helaas’….. Het kan wél!!!