The bank wanted to enable its leaders to manage performance and create capability.
Any project partnering with the Standard Bank Group is never going to be short on inspiration and ambition. The bank’s team had a clear understanding that performance is key to how their people will grow, engage, and deliver – enabling that wider business vision to drive Africa's growth.
After a year-long search of many vendors in the space, they found their partner in Our Tandem, who shared their vision to reimagine performance for the world we live in today.
The challenge
Standard Bank’s challenge was to bring its vision for performance to reality in eight short weeks and roll out to its global population of 44,500.
With the backdrop of a global pandemic to add to the complexities, decision-making needed to be quick, but consider the local entity requirements and context.
With a broad range of employee profiles across the organisation, many different needs were evident, and it would take not just a technology change but a concerted change plan and mindset shift to change the ways of working.
The ambition
Standard Bank had design principles from the outset that were clear and well communicated, giving it a well-defined north star to navigate its direction at every point.
Believing in the power of meaningful conversations to unlock growth, the continuous nature of feedback to empower team members, and the agile nature of goals, their performance management strategy has the ambition to transform the way performance is understood and managed.
Interestingly, their ambition was not just to introduce new performance management concepts but to transform performance management into an everyday, line leader-led business process, one so embedded that it felt like a natural part of the way they work.
Navigating the journey
A clear structure and internal governance steered the programme of work with agility and effectiveness. The stakeholders involved had clear direction from an expert project team who understood the current gaps and the ambitions for the programme of work.
The head of performance management for the group, Carol Koffman, said, “We wanted a platform to enable our leaders to effectively manage performance, create capability in their people and grow within the organisation, enabling us to take long strides towards delivering on our people promise.”
Working with Our Tandem, together they navigated a SaaS design-led process to ensure an on-time go-live and strong user engagement throughout.
Despite all the challenges of any project, i.e., new technology, integration, data, and process design, the team delivered a seamless go-live to 44,500 people, on time, within eight weeks from kick-off.
Never forgetting that transformation is, at heart, about the people, the project put people at the heart of the journey, bringing along more 200 people, including line leaders and employees, to test the new technology and process and who, unanimously, agreed it was the solution to meet their ambitions.
Launching Our Tandem was a step-change in bringing performance and feedback into the flow of work. As part of bringing performance to be a line leader-led business process, we deployed Office 365 integration so that employees and leaders never need to leave their emails to carry out all the key processes of this new performance engagement experience.
Within one week, 100,000 goals were created on Our Tandem’s platform, a truly intuitive experience for all.
What seemed initially an impossible ask: the complexities of a global group roll-out, the backdrop of a pandemic, the challenge of inconsistent Wi-Fi, virtual process design and a timeline that most didn't think was realistic, the team together delivered a new experience in performance management.
They transformed a traditional performance model into an agile, engaging, and intuitive experience that is embedded into everyday business. Making performance simple, timely, and relevant, the programme has been true high performance in action!
Ingredients of success
So, what made this programme of work successful, despite all the challenges and the odds being against it?
- A committed and experienced team underpinned by clear ambition and a mandate
- A user-led approach that involved key stakeholders at the right times
- A partnership approach between Our Tandem and Standard Bank, innovating and finding solutions together, overcoming all obstacles to achieve their goal
- Clear project principles that steered the direction at every point
- Strong internal governance that laid out clear accountabilities for decision-making
- And ultimately, a vision that inspired a dedicated group of people to work relentlessly to achieve great things
In reflecting on their programme of work, Carol commented, “This was an ambitious project, but through a partnership with all stakeholders and a clear, compelling vision, we have built an incredible platform to start using data and insights in truly tracking performance in real-time and connected to our business priorities.”
Perform to Grow is a vision that is becoming the reality embedded into people’s day-to-day work.
Managing performance with crowdsourced feedback, regular performance conversations, and agile goals all featuring as hallmarks to their new approach, the business has moved the dial on not only their performance process but their wider employee experience.
Through the partnership with Our Tandem, Standard Bank has found the perfect combination of continuous performance within an inspiring employee experience.
