“While we’d had a performance review process in place at Fusion5 for ten years, it was admittedly very much an exercise in box-ticking,” says Pine. “As a people-centric organisation we were always looking for ways to improve the employee experience, but we were limited by the old systems we used.
“So, despite our best intentions, some of our people only caught up with their managers once or twice a year, and others, not even that often. Review notes were captured using Word or OneNote documents and saved into our payroll system. The meetings were very much orientated around the old ‘does not meet, meets, and exceeds’ KPI approach. And as our employees had limited visibility of their own KPI performance prior to their meeting, this understandably created anxiety for many.