council. HR also appealed for teams willing
to be early adopters of the new framework.
There were six early adopters, including a
children and family social work practice team,
a care home for older people, a road service
team, and a business support team. Over a
period of around nine to 12 months these
early adopters trialled the approach and fed
back to HR.
It was always about being employee-centric,
with HR there to assist and facilitate. “We led
it but you’re looking at a co-produced
collaborative exercise,” Love says. “We were
getting insight and feedback from them and
tweaking it as we went along. It was iterative.”
The project also extended far beyond
performance management to include
engagement, two-way communication and
wellbeing. “It wasn’t just around goals and
objectives and development plans, it was
around the person as a whole. We really
wanted it to be a holistic framework
rather than just the performance bit,”
explains Miller.
The resulting framework is made up of six
elements: a values map, an annual
conversation (to reflect on the year that’s been
and prepare for the year ahead), one-to-one
check-ins, team check-ins, real-time feedback,
and performance improvement conversations
(to be used as and when necessary).
The values map consists of four areas:
honest and transparent, forward thinking, put
customers first, and work together. In the
performance framework document available
to all employees there are statement examples
of what ‘at my best’ and ‘at my worst’ might
look like for each value. It also contains lists of
helpful questions to kick-start some of the
other elements like real-time feedback or oneto
one conversations. Crucially these all came
from the employees themselves.
“Some colleagues might have felt slightly
uncomfortable opening up
conversations. Whether that’s
about real-time feedback, giving
or receiving feedback, or about
somebody’s wellbeing. So the
question banks are language that
anybody could pick up and use
to have a conversation, and those
were written by the early
adopters and the focus
groups that we used. So it’s
language that colleagues felt they
could use in their jobs,”
Miller says.
Case study Operational efficiency
To ensure leaders were on board and able to
properly implement the new approach, HR set
up two-day experiential workshops, starting
with the top 100 leaders. During these
sessions leaders could practise having
challenging conversations and giving realtime
feedback. At the end of the second day
actors were brought in to really put leaders
through their paces. So far there have been
around 170 workshops reaching 1,300 leaders.
To spread the message on the frontline
there were roadshows, newsletters, video clips,
an interactive how-to guide, bite-size
workshops, and volunteers who continued to
update HR on how everything was going after
the framework’s launch in April 2017.
“They became our eyes and our ears. And
we still engage with them around how things
are going,” says Love.
The result
It’s still reasonably early days; Miller expects it
to take between two and four years to embed
the new framework fully. However, there are
some promising signs so far.
After the first year HR engaged with the
‘eyes and ears’ and 97% of them said that
they felt valued, and that they’d been part of
a two-way conversation. Ninety-two per
cent felt clearer about how they were doing,
and 86% said their conversation helped
them learn and reflect so they could do
even better.
Miller and Love don’t plan on standing still
either. “We’re not complacent, this is a longterm
cultural transformation and so now
we’re reviewing, we’re benchmarking with
other organisations around latest thinking,”
Love explains.
“When we introduced this framework we
took the decision to break the link with pay
to effectively see what difference that would or
wouldn’t make to the honesty of the
conversations. We’ve yet to
make a final decision on that,”
says Miller.
“One of the points of
evaluation we look at at the
moment is: do we even want to
collect data on when
performance conversations
happen? Or are we at a point
whereby we’re trusting in the
system? We might not be
there yet but I think that’s
a question we need to keep
on asking ourselves.” HR
Fact file
Locations
790
Number in HR
120
Number of
employees
18,000
Budget
£1 billion
adopter groups for the new performance framework
of part- and full-time employees doing varied roles
hrmagazine.co.uk June 2019 HR 47
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