Southwest Autism scraps annual performance appraisals to engage their people, promote its core values, and reduce administrative burdens

When the lead­er­ship team at South­west Autism Research & Resource Cen­ter (SAR­RC) announced they were scrap­ping their annu­al appraisal mod­el dur­ing a com­pa­ny all-staff meet­ing, it was met with a spon­ta­neous round of applause! Despite hav­ing an estab­lished core-val­ue focussed cul­ture, the year­ly approach inhib­it­ed rather than sup­port­ed per­for­mance and per­son­al devel­op­ment. It was clear that the nature of the pri­ma­ry job roles at SAR­RC required a reg­u­lar and agile approach to tru­ly engage tal­ent and improve performance. 

Anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge was SAR­RC employ­ees need­ing to pull togeth­er sev­er­al frag­ment­ed spread­sheet-based sys­tems. With objec­tives and per­son­al devel­op­ment con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing annu­al­ly, tasked based check-ins hap­pen­ing week­ly or month­ly, and feed­back hap­pen­ing in an ad-hoc and spo­radic way, there was des­per­ate need to clar­i­fy what kind of con­ver­sa­tions should be hap­pen­ing when and to imple­ment a cohe­sive plat­form to bring it all together.

The cur­rent process­es also yield­ed a vast amount of unnec­es­sary HR admin­is­tra­tion and there was no way to pro­vide vis­i­bil­i­ty of per­for­mance man­age­ment and core val­ue met­rics to the lead­er­ship team. 

Ini­tial­ly, Lar­ry and the SAR­RC lead­er­ship team were sim­ply look­ing to auto­mate their exist­ing appraisal process. After explor­ing the mar­ket, it became clear that real­ly it was a shift to a con­tin­u­ous per­for­mance man­age­ment approach that was need­ed. Lar­ry explains: 

“As we con­tem­plat­ed cloud-based solu­tions for per­for­mance man­age­ment, it became appar­ent that a con­tin­u­ous approach would be invalu­able. As we reviewed sev­er­al ven­dors, Clear Review quick­ly rose as the best solu­tion – fit­ting well with our cul­ture of check-ins, an empha­sis on core-val­ues and the need for vary­ing objec­tive cri­te­ria. It was eas­i­ly imple­ment­ed and has been a huge suc­cess for our organization!” 

The chal­lenge of bring­ing mul­ti­ple require­ments togeth­er while main­tain­ing a sim­ple user expe­ri­ence was crit­i­cal. Clear Review’s abil­i­ty to com­bine per­for­mance objec­tives, check-ins, feed­back, organ­i­sa­tion­al goals and val­ues made the choice easy. This cohe­sion also meant the rel­e­vant reports and insights could be drawn out to help under­stand and improve these var­i­ous aspects. 

Being a not-for-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion, pric­ing was always going to be impor­tant to SAR­RC. Clear Review’s sim­ple and high­ly com­pet­i­tive com­mer­cial mod­el meant that not only did Lar­ry and the team feel it was the right solu­tion, but it was also at a price that worked for the allo­cat­ed budget. 

Although in its ear­ly stages, the sup­port and adop­tion for the change project has been huge­ly pos­i­tive and SAR­RC is now under­way with a true con­tin­u­ous per­for­mance man­age­ment cul­ture. 82% of the employ­ee base have received feed­back in the last month with an aston­ish­ing 98% engage­ment in quar­ter­ly check-in con­ver­sa­tions. The lead­er­ship team have been involved all the way through the launch which has been invalu­able and Clear Review’s imple­men­ta­tion resources helped with the roll out by pro­vid­ing clar­i­ty around what the ben­e­fits and expec­ta­tions were for both man­agers and employees. 

The response to the sim­plic­i­ty and intu­itive nature of Clear Review has been over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive and the nature of the sys­tem has helped sup­port the vision of the ini­tia­tive which is that reg­u­lar per­for­mance con­ver­sa­tions are para­mount to employ­ee engagement.

And final­ly, for the HR team, gone are the days of dis­con­nect­ed sys­tems and man­u­al process­es. All the rel­e­vant data being up to date and eas­i­ly acces­si­ble has helped the HR team obtain vis­i­bil­i­ty of where per­for­mance and devel­op­ment con­ver­sa­tions are, and aren’t, hap­pen­ing. This, in turn, has freed them to get out from behind the spread­sheets and engag­ing more mean­ing­ful­ly in devel­op­ing their talent.