A business focuses on goals and objectives through performance management

Save Mon­ey Cut Car­bon is a sev­en-year-old scale-up busi­ness. Jen­nifer Bak­er, now Chief of Staff, and lead­ing the Peo­ple and Engage­ment Process, came into the organ­i­sa­tion in a coach­ing role. She soon realised that, with the organ­i­sa­tion matur­ing and the head count grow­ing, they were ready to replace their lega­cy HR pro­ce­dures with some more struc­tured poli­cies. Per­for­mance man­age­ment was a key area. 

“This is a fast-mov­ing busi­ness. As we grew, job roles were chang­ing. Peo­ple had to adapt and devel­op their respon­si­bil­i­ties in a chang­ing envi­ron­ment. What I found was that peo­ple were start­ing to lose clar­i­ty on what their objec­tives were. They weren’t sure where best to spend their effort. And this con­cern came from both the team mem­bers and the man­age­ment team.”

SMCC had no for­mal per­for­mance man­age­ment process in place. Jen­nifer began to look for a sys­tem to help the busi­ness put some struc­ture around PM. From the out­set, she was focused on improv­ing per­for­mance. Her research led her to Clear Review.

“We knew we want­ed this to be about per­for­mance. And I had a strong idea of how we should do that, but I didn’t want it to be ground­ed in paper work. I didn’t want us to be wrestling with ver­sion con­trol across doc­u­ments and get­ting bogged down with admin. We’re not a huge com­pa­ny, our resources are lim­it­ed and I didn’t want this to make tons more work for everyone.” 

“As soon as I saw Clear Review, I knew this was going to be sim­ple for people.”

Jen­nifer com­pared Clear Review with oth­er ven­dors, but kept com­ing back to one point: the Clear Review offer­ing was sim­pler and more intu­itive. She con­duct­ed train­ing for each lev­el of the busi­ness — lead­er­ship team, man­ag­er lay­er and employ­ees — over the course of sev­er­al days. The train­ing was, first and fore­most, aimed at help­ing the busi­ness to under­stand the pur­pose of good per­for­mance management. 

“Clear Review pro­vid­ed a lot of mate­ri­als that I used in the train­ing process. That was real­ly help­ful. It allowed me to focus on the mes­sag­ing: that this is about get­ting every­one aligned, about under­stand­ing what our goals are and what we all need to do to get there.” 

Jen­nifer had real con­fi­dence in the sim­plic­i­ty of the sys­tem. She con­duct­ed some short ses­sions on nav­i­gat­ing the sys­tem, but her main advice was ​“Just click, you won’t break it.” She was reas­sured to see how quick­ly the busi­ness took to Clear Review: it let her spend her time set­ting up half-day ses­sions with each user group to talk about how to pro­vide qual­i­ty feed­back and explore the sort of cul­ture that they wanted. 

Although the team has embraced Clear Review and is devel­op­ing a more con­sis­tent and pro­duc­tive feed­back cul­ture, it’s the clar­i­ty of goal-set­ting that the organ­i­sa­tion is find­ing most valu­able. The senior lead­er­ship has been encour­aged to be far clear­er with their objectives. 

“Clear Review is a fan­tas­tic way of help­ing us focus on the right things. We’re very dri­ven by ideas, we often have great con­ver­sa­tions about how we could shake things up or move the busi­ness on, but those objec­tives are a vital anchor to bring it back to real­i­ty. Lan­guage is very impor­tant: when we set goals for indi­vid­u­als, we try to use lan­guage that reflects the impor­tance of bring­ing things back to the objective.”

SMCC advis­es that employ­ees set their own check-in meet­ings, and Jen­nifer is delight­ed with the way that the CEO has set the exam­ple for the rest of the organisation. 

“He loves the tool and gives feed­back reg­u­lar­ly. It shows the man­agers and teams that this is the way we want to do things. We’re com­mit­ted to improv­ing per­for­mance through those clear objec­tives and feed­back, and he shows every­one how it’s done. 

SMC­C’s Jen­nifer Bak­er — What we in HR can learn

“You will need more of a behav­iour­al change with some peo­ple than oth­ers. Be patient. Some peo­ple will need you to take the time, sit down with them and show them the ben­e­fit. You need to help them under­stand how it will make things eas­i­er and more effec­tive for them.”