Performance Management in a Remote Environment: How it Impacts our Culture

I never set out to build an agency or business. But as things progressed through the years, I knew that nothing would matter more to me than building a healthy and high-performance culture. 

Several of the companies in which I had worked had poor morale, and I always worked hard to create a positive subculture on my teams to attract and retain the right talent.

As a company founder, I set the tone for our culture and what’s acceptable. We’ve decided that our definition of culture is simple -it’s how we treat each other. At our company, gratitude, humility, and respect are all a big part of that - but so are high expectations for performance. 

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What is Performance Management

Experts define performance management as the recurring discussion process between managers and employees. These interactions happen throughout the year to help achieve goals and objectives for the individual and the company.

Performance management includes one-on-ones, annual reviews, and other discussions that typically involve defining objectives, setting goals, two-way feedback, and ensuring that everything is on track.

Investing in Performance Management

When we started growing from a team of a few people to a more professional organization, we decided to invest in a performance management system. We looked at a few solutions but ultimately chose 15five because it felt the most like “us” in its language. We wanted to add structure without adding a corporate feeling.

One of the most impactful parts of the solution has been the simplest - high fives. These are typically one or two-line kudos, and it’s rare that anything makes me happier than when I see team members expressing their gratitude for each other - day in and day out, over big things and little things. 

We have high-fives integrated with Slack, and when I interview candidates, I show them the channel so that they can see that what we highlight about culture is true.

My perspective has been that I’ll save money in some areas and invest in solutions that might be “big” for our small business if I feel like they will make a sizeable impact.

That’s been the case for our investment with 15five and performance management. 

Managing Performance Discussions Within Our Team

We knew that providing feedback was going to be important at Eyeful, and also knew that many managers and leaders aren’t the best at giving it. Our goal was to find a multi-faceted solution that felt structured yet informal so that people would want to use it.

Here are a few ways that we’ve used a performance management solution to boost performance, productivity, and morale simultaneously:

High-fives

Even if all our performance management system did was allow for kudos, it would be worth it from a morale perspective. Before selecting a platform, it was tough to get accolades from our team to share in our monthly all-hands meetings. Now we see compliments flying daily.  This has reinforced our culture of gratitude and easily allows our team to celebrate each other.

As a leader, it’s also been incredibly helpful in learning who the unsung heroes are on our team and gaining a perspective on how employees collaborate - both within their areas and cross-functionally.

Check-ins and Pulse scores

Our team uses a weekly check-in and provides a score on how they feel (1-5). This is a great vehicle for one-way, asynchronous communication between employees and their managers.

Check-ins have made it easier for employees to share progress and help with performance management by supporting committed action. The basic premise of this form is to confirm that employees are completing the things they said they would do in a given week, and also to set the stage for what they are committing to doing in the upcoming week.

A few team members have requested shifting these to every other week instead of weekly. It’s something we’re considering.

The pulse scores enable our leadership team to keep an eye on morale at three levels - for individual employees, teams, and the company overall. 

My team has a goal of ensuring that our average score every week is above a 4. That doesn’t mean that every employee will have an amazing week - life happens - but it ensures that our team feels good overall about what is happening in their direct experience.

One-on-ones

Our team also uses an employee management solution to administer one-on-ones. This enables us to add questions or discussion points to a central location ahead of time and gives the employee or manager time to think about the question if added sufficiently in advance.

Formalizing our one-on-ones and giving them structure has helped improve the quality of the discussions happening within them. Planning, and making it easy to keep track of topics in a central location, allow the team to focus conversations on more meaningful topics.  

Because we also have the check-ins, we’ve been able to shift one-on-ones to be focused on the things that truly require synchronous dialogue, saving standard progress updates for a written format instead.

Performance reviews

When we started the company, everyone other than me was a contractor, and we weren’t doing formal reviews for anyone.

As we made the first few full-time hires, we realized that these were more about the employees than us - they wanted to know what they needed to develop or improve to grow in their careers.

We started by developing a set of questions on a google doc and used this to manage reviews for the first year or so, but as we switched to using performance management software, we moved reviews into the system.

Eyeful is a high-performance environment, and we believe in giving feedback early and often. 

Rather than just having an annual review in our solution, we added 6-week, three-month and six-month reviews. These are much more streamlined than the annual review process (which includes feedback from various peers), but still allow us to have some structure around these important progress checks.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Early in 2022, our senior leadership team (SLT) defined top-level objectives for the organization. Some of those were related to morale (like an average Pulse score over 4), some were financial, and others were related to giving back to our community.

We entered these objectives into our performance management system and trickled them down to the rest of the team. They then built objectives based on what we had defined for the organization, ensuring we were all aligned.

Several groups also set their individual or departmental goals apart from what we had set for the organization. We embraced this initiative since we always want to encourage personal and professional development among our team.

What’s next: Competency modeling

As we emerge from Adolescence in Adizes corporate lifecycle model, we know we must implement more structure for our team. High performers want to know what it takes to get to the next level, so our group directors and VP have been partnering to define specifics around a set of technical, managerial, and leadership traits for each level in the organization.

Now that we’ve solidified those items, we have started to load them into 15five. This will ensure everyone has visibility and is on the same page.

Overall, performance management has been fantastic for our company, and I’m grateful we chose to invest in this solution. 

Since we have always been 100% remote, adding structure to the process and function has made it easier to facilitate discussions and understand how the team is feeling.  There’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction, but for the times in between, adding performance management has helped improve our culture and communication.