As an HR professional, balancing the needs of the business with the needs of the people who fuel it is a key challenge. To successfully find a solution, you need to figure out where the priorities of your organization lie. These priorities can be unlocked with the valuable insights Pando provides. Pando is essential to measuring the ongoing performance of your people and also allows for transparency regarding alignment around performance goals.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Kelly O’Brien, the head of people ops at Scoir, to discuss how critical using Pando’s career frameworks has been to drive performance and performance alignment, as well as discuss the key factors that underscore the importance of performance tracking.
Kelly and Scoir are in a position that many organizations can relate to: force reduction. Balancing the expectations of the business with actual needs, as well as market forces, the force reduction changed the way Scoir operated, but a reduction in the team didn’t mean Pando’s people development software wasn’t useful. The landscape changed, but the needs of their people didn’t.
Even with a reduced team, Scoir suffered from two pain points. The first was that before Pando, performance discussions had been focused on having very technical-based conversations with team members, and while they gave valuable insights, they were very much focused on “where we currently stand”. There was no critical bulk to this communication, particularly concerning how to improve performance. The other pain point experienced at Scoir was employee-assigned levels. Depending on how an employee was performing, they were assigned a level to reflect that, but this system lacked valuable transparency to communicate what these levels truly meant. Resolving these pain points for Scoir is exactly why Pando is working so well for them.
Six months after Pando implementation, it has become a focused and valuable performance management tool at Scoir, even taking into consideration the force reduction that occurred. Kelly noted through her role in people management that they have shifted the way feedback is given because of Pando, with it firstly being more casual and focused on furthering performance development, as well as focusing on the importance of documenting every piece of feedback, which would be utilized in any further terminations.
Scoir is a remote organization, meaning that remote communication is more than critical to streamlining operations, as well as monitoring performance. Any kind of feedback, as such, can be easily lost, and Pando is crucial to keeping track of all feedback in one centralized location.
We’ve all heard, “I was never told any of this feedback”, but with Pando, the documentation is transparent, offering open conversations and holding managers accountable concerning development plans. It’s important to note that feedback within these development plans doesn’t have to be negative. Crucially, it must be continuous and constructive, and within Scoir, they’ve seen that the more feedback employees were given, the more they progressed in their performance, and saw success in their career progression. As a career framework tool, Pando achieves tangible results at Scoir.
In her role in HR, Kelly has touchpoints with all roles at Scoir. Initially, there was strong enthusiasm for Pando, as it centralized performance documentation and was competency and skills-based.
The adoption of Pando at Scoir has been a success despite its implementation taking place right before their December review. As head of people ops, Kelly dedicated a week to training each team on how to use Pando which has been crucial to seeing success with Pando’s performance management tools. From a functional presentation to introduce each team to the new competencies to a live chat about team expectations around utilizing Pando, this interactive session allowed all teams at Scoir to address any concerns about documentation concerning their performance.
These sessions were also crucial to Kelly’s own personal development and performance monitoring in her role in people ops. After the training was completed, she sent out surveys to gather feedback on her training, and she checked Pando’s usage trackers to see how many people were regularly utilizing the performance management tool, which would reflect how successful her training had been.
It’s important to acknowledge that any adoption of brand new software can take time for everyone to adopt, no matter how useful it may be to streamline the development process of performance within an organization, particularly if the company already utilizes dozens of different types of software. However, Pando is more than just a performance management tool. It’s also an HR support tool, and given how vital it can be for team members to achieve success while using it, refresher training may be required at Scoir.
As members of a team, we all have a perception of how we’re performing within our roles, but often, this perception is not accurate to how we’re actually performing, so how do we support that? In particular, how do we support a misalignment between how managers perceive the performance of their employees?
Kelly noted that more often than not, employees have a greater perception of their performance, but managers tend to be more accurate in assessing the performance of their team members, and reducing this misalignment with Pando is a crucial part of the performance management software. Not only does it show which competencies managers and team members are misaligned on, but it also shows the magnitude of the perception of misalignment. These tools can help employees see how they’re truly performing and Pando can help to close this misalignment gap.
As valuable as Pando is to managing employee performance when onboarding new hires, Kelly holds off for a week before the Pando induction. This first week allows them to settle into the company, their roles, their systems, and the larger culture. Including Pando within that is often too much to digest, but allowing these new hires grace can allow them to truly immerse themselves within Pando’s performance monitoring functionalities the second week in.
Another way Kelly uses Pando with new hires is that she asks them to rate their performance immediately. While to many organizations that may seem like it’s far too soon, for Kelly, it allows her to take inventory of their personality and see their self-perceived level through using Pando’s evaluation tools.
There was no hesitation from Kelly in responding to this question: new hires are far easier to introduce to Pando. They’re much more moldable, so it’s easier for them to adopt Pando’s performance management tools.
For long-term employees, some of them still aren’t using Pando’s solutions to the fullest to achieve better performance results, and often this stems from team managers. If they don’t use Pando, then neither will their team.
To Kelly, even though her role is firmly within human resources, when implementing Pando, she took on the role of project manager so it could be successfully adopted at Scoir. She recognized how vital Pando’s tools were as a framework for driving performance and improving performance alignment, and the way it stores performance documentation is essential to making processes more straightforward and clear.
Pando offers a plethora of tools that drive performance clarity and improvement, and makes performance reviews a lot less cumbersome. At Scoir, these essential reviews have gone from something everyone dreaded to becoming a streamlined process with Pando.
To watch the webinar in full, visit the Pando website, as well as explore more of our resources, including our latest e-book, Building Manager Buy-In for Competency-Based Performance. With Pando, we connect your growth and impact to drive performance in your organization.
