Utilizing Feedback for Feedback: The Iteration of the Performance Cycle
From the keyboard of The AIQ People & Employee Success Team
Contributors: Shauna Anderson and Kristy Chan
Tell us a little about your roles at ActionIQ.
As People Business Partners we work closely with leaders, managers and employees in our respective teams on all of ActionIQ’s People programs and processes. This spans the full employee life-cycle from strategizing during the hiring process to employee engagement, performance management, organizational design, compensation planning, and more.
What is the importance/significance of a People Business Partner?
We strive to be true partners to the teams that we support, and we are here to collaborate with them in the ways that will best serve them in pushing the organization closer to our goals. We provide coaching and guidance for making decisions that are aligned with our policies and People-first culture, act as a sounding board for new ideas, and help to ensure that we are operating with consistency and equity across the company. We are in the unique position of having visibility into many different parts of the business, which allows us to provide guidance and support from a strategic perspective.
What prompted the redesign/re-thinking of the performance review process and how did you go about defining, strategizing and executing the updates?
Performance reviews can be complicated, tedious and stressful if done incorrectly, so we really wanted to make sure that we focused on the areas that would bring true value and create the most impact. We wanted to ensure that our leaders were aligned on the goals and objectives of the performance review process and that our execution of the process actually supported those goals. We began by reviewing and rephrasing the questions that we use for employee self reviews and manager reviews to hone in on the skills and impact employees have in their team and in the organization. We reframed the idea of “constructive feedback” to focus on the specific skills and competencies that an employee could develop to have even more impact in their role.
We also examined the role that peer feedback plays in the 360 process. Last year we piloted a performance cycle where we omitted peer feedback for the first time in several years. We had received feedback from the organization that the performance review process could feel heavy and time consuming, so we wanted to trial a shorter, lighter process with self and manager feedback only. Ultimately, the majority of managers and individual contributors agreed that peer feedback was valuable in creating a well rounded view of employee’s performance and contributions, and we made the decision to reinstate it for future cycles.
Another new addition to our performance review cycle was an upward executive leadership feedback survey. One of our goals for this fiscal year was to find ways to enable our leadership team to bridge gaps between them and the rest of the company. In order to do this, we created a separate, optional feedback survey for employees to provide thoughtful and valuable feedback about their department leader. The intention here was to equip our senior leaders with useful information about what is working well in their teams and where there are areas of opportunity.
To ensure that all promotion and raise decisions are made consistently and fairly across the organization, we also conduct calibration meetings every cycle. Calibration meetings allow us, the People Partners, as well as the other leaders within the department to align on how we are evaluating performance at the different levels. These meetings are also a way for us to reduce bias in our performance-based compensation decisions.
How did you uphold our mission and utilize data to inform this project and create authentic human connections within the employee population and engagement?
Data is at the core of our performance review cycle, as with many of our internal processes. Feedback that we gather from employees, managers and our leadership team is used to inform our performance strategy and determine the components of our process. For example, our trial and error approach to the peer feedback component allowed us to collect that data to decide what is right for us as an organization. We also collect feedback on other factors related to the performance cycle including how long employees and managers spend writing reviews, to what extent they found the feedback they received valuable, and whether they feel appropriately recognized for their contributions. All of this data enables us to make decisions that will improve our processes and improve employee’s experience.
Our holistic approach to performance reviews also provides an important data set — by measuring performance feedback from a true 360 perspective — self, peer, upward, manager, and leadership — we are able to identify trends within departments and across the organization. This data can help to shape our current and future People Team priorities and initiatives.
The impact for our managers:
“Expanding beyond just the output of the team’s work, we took time in the review cycle to reflect on their strengths as individuals. It gave me an opportunity to acknowledge how those skills and behaviors make them successful in their role, while also providing a framework for how to apply those strengths to areas for growth.” -Rob Harrelson, Senior Associate Director, Engagement
“Streamlining a process is always at the forefront when it comes to anything related to IT. The new performance review process was much better and questions more relevant to the end user and how they interpret them. I felt like it garnered a better response from both a manager and employee perspective which opens up for a more honest conversation and better communication.” -Cardell Graham, IT Support Manager
Kristy Chan is a People Business Partner at ActionIQ working with our technical Engineering & Product teams. She is passionate about enabling the most important part of any company — the people. In her free time, she enjoys watching reality tv, long scenic walks outdoors, and trying out the new restaurants in town.
Shauna Anderson is a Sr. People Business Partner at ActionIQ working with the go-to-market teams. She enjoys helping her teams navigate the complex challenges of a growing startup and building an organizational climate where employees can thrive. In her free time, she enjoys yoga, traveling, and adventures with her dog.
ActionIQ is a leader in the massive and fast growing category of Customer Data Platforms (CDP). Our product brings order to customer experience (CX) chaos. ActionIQ’s CX Hub empowers everyone to be a CX champion by giving business teams the freedom to explore and take action on customer data, while helping technical teams regain control of where data lives and how it is used. We are backed by top-tier VCs Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and March Capital. Enterprise brands such as Autodesk, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Hertz, Atlassian and many more use our CX Hub to achieve growth through extraordinary customer experiences.
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