Why did Ted Baker choose Clear Review, and how is it going so far?

Ted Bak­er is a well-known name to many, the British lux­u­ry cloth­ing com­pa­ny start­ed up in 1988 as a stand­alone store, and has now sky rock­et­ed into pop­u­lar­i­ty, with stores all over the world. We caught up with Gary Beg­gs, who is a Devel­op­ment Part­ner at Ted Bak­er and has worked for the com­pa­ny for 17 years, to find out why they chose to join the Clear Review fam­i­ly in Decem­ber of last year. 

Before Ted Bak­er imple­ment­ed Clear Review they were doing things old school, many of their man­agers were still doing pen and paper appraisals, and the rest were record­ing them on a doc­u­ment on a com­put­er, only to be filed away and poten­tial­ly not looked at for 6 months. 

Ted Bak­er has a strong peo­ple cul­ture, they look to hire from with­in, devel­op their staff, encour­ag­ing tal­ent­ed and expe­ri­enced peo­ple to stay with the com­pa­ny. Which is why they want­ed to improve the way they dealt with per­for­mance man­age­ment, so they could bet­ter mon­i­tor per­for­mance, devel­op­ment, engage­ment and well-being of their employees.

“Whilst I think most of the team at Ted would attest to us hav­ing always had a strong & unique Peo­ple cul­ture, we def­i­nite­ly saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty to take the prin­ci­ples of what we knew we were doing well and bring our process­es more in line with cur­rent think­ing. We want­ed to ensure that the devel­op­ment of our team mem­ber expe­ri­ence going for­ward was based on tan­gi­ble data as opposed to what we ​“felt” was true.” Gary Beg­gs, Devel­op­ment Part­ner, Ted Baker.

Ted Bak­er is a com­pa­ny that has team mem­bers in many dif­fer­ent set­tings, span­ning across many coun­tries, as a result imple­ment­ing a per­for­mance man­age­ment sys­tem that could work for every­one sound­ed like a tricky task. They need­ed some­thing that was sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to allow for peo­ple across the com­pa­ny to arrange check-in ses­sions, set and mon­i­tor goals, give and receive feed­back, and that could be used for man­agers and HR to pull all rel­e­vant ana­lyt­ics, whilst being sim­ple enough for all employ­ees to start using with­out exces­sive train­ing, which was a big pos­i­tive dur­ing lock­down when all train­ing had to be done remotely.

As with many organ­i­sa­tions, when Ted Bak­er first intro­duced a new per­for­mance man­age­ment plat­form there were some scep­tics, those who were very com­fort­able with how they were cur­rent­ly doing things. How­ev­er these con­cerns were over­come quick­ly’ as peo­ple begun to see how sim­ple the sys­tem was to use, Clear Review is such a sim­ple sys­tem that after watch­ing a 2 minute train­ing video, the team were able to get up and run­ning with it straight away. And because they could start using it so quick­ly, it wasn’t long before employ­ees begun to see how the sys­tem could ben­e­fit them. 

Mov­ing for­ward Clear Review will be intro­duced dur­ing the on board­ing process, so that new mem­bers of staff get famil­iar with the sys­tem straight off the bat. This way team mem­bers are like­ly to be even bet­ter at keep­ing up with using the sys­tem on a reg­u­lar basis, as it will become sec­ond nature to them.

One of the main ben­e­fits Ted Bak­er has noticed since they start­ed using Clear Review, is the real time feed­back tool. This tool has been allow­ing staff mem­bers who might feel over­looked (such as shop floor work­ers) to receive feed­back from leaders. 

One exam­ple being when, Senior Retail Team mem­bers vis­it stores, and notice what a great job one of the shop floor assis­tants was doing, on their way back home they can go onto Clear Review and give that employ­ee a good piece of feed­back. By doing this the employ­ee feels seen and appre­ci­at­ed, encour­ag­ing them to con­tin­ue doing a good job, and their man­ag­er gets noti­fied of their job well done and can record that as part of their evaluation. 

They are also using the tool to get feed­back on inter­nal work­shops, so they can find out straight away after if it was use­ful, changes staff would sug­gest etc. This works a lot bet­ter than send­ing round a sur­vey a few days after the fact and hop­ing peo­ple will fill it out and send it back.

“The feed­back func­tion­al­i­ty with­in Clear Review was ini­tial­ly the ele­ment I per­son­al­ly was most excit­ed about, giv­en the poten­tial impact on engage­ment that this kind of recog­ni­tion could bring. To have senior mem­bers of the Ted team be able to direct­ly recog­nise the invalu­able con­tri­bu­tion of our front line Sales team, speaks back to our com­pa­ny val­ues of Authen­tic­i­ty & Kind­ness in the most tan­gi­ble of ways.” Gary Beg­gs, Devel­op­ment Part­ner, Ted Baker.

Ted Bak­er want to use Clear Review to con­tin­ue to improve the employ­ee expe­ri­ence. This will involve encour­ag­ing even more team com­mu­ni­ca­tion so that team mem­bers feel sup­port­ed, and chang­ing the way they set objec­tives by mov­ing from annu­al objec­tives, to set­ting short term agile goals with­in Clear Review. 

As Ted Bak­er try to hire from with­in to fill a lot of their roles, they also plan to use Clear Review more to help with skill devel­op­ment. They can do this with the set­ting of per­son­al devel­op­ment goals, from this peo­ple will be able to decide with the guid­ance of their man­ag­er the best course of action to get where they want to be. This could be train­ing cours­es, more fre­quent one on one time with their man­agers, shad­ow­ing in dif­fer­ent depart­ments and so on. 

There is also a val­ues refresh cur­rent­ly hap­pen­ing with­in Ted Bak­er, which will affect the way feed­back is giv­en, as each piece of feed­back should link back to these val­ues in some way. Clear Review will be catch­ing up with Gary from Ted Bak­er again in a few months to hear about the excit­ing progress they are mak­ing towards these goals.