case study in performance analysis

3 Performance Management Case Studies to Inspire HR’s Approach  

Don’t reinvent the wheel – start with the frameworks these successful organizations have built off of!  

Performance Pathways: Finding Your Performance Management Fit

Table of contents.

Performance Management Case Study: How Fossil Group Evolved Its Performance Management Practices

Performance Management Case Study: How Benesch Connected the Dots Between Performance and Engagement

Performance Management Case Study: Scooter’s Coffee Uses Performance Management to Drive Employee Growth and Excellence

How Can You See Success in Changing Your Approach to Performance Management?

Your approach to performance management is key to building high-performing teams. Organizations want to maximize productivity so they can achieve their goals. But even though organizations have made changes to their performance processes, less than half of employees say their current performance management is a good use of time.  

Employees say their organizations can do better. They long for easier, more motivating, more meaningful performance management processes.  

There’s not one perfect approach for your workforce. Building your ideal program requires a little experimentation and constant evolution. But it doesn’t have to be complicated or confusing. Backed by more than 20 years of employee experience research, Quantum Workplace has designed four customizable performance pathways that you can adapt to your organization’s unique needs.  

As you navigate the journey of shaping your performance management philosophy, learn from real organizations and read their performance management case studies about the challenges they faced and the solutions they implemented.  

In this blog, we'll share how Fossil Group, Benesch, and Scooter’s Coffee transformed their approach and dive into their performance management case study to show you how you too can be successful  

Performance Management Case Study: How Fossil Group Evolved Its Performance Management Practices  

At a time when the retail industry was undergoing rapid change and increased competition, Fossil Group knew it needed to find more efficient and effective ways to keep its managers focused on performance management and results.  

Fossil Group used a complex, 100% paper process for performance reviews and check-ins for more than 15,000 global employees. They wanted to move toward a digital performance management strategy, but knew they needed to simplify the process first.    

Fossil Group set up four traditional components that were stretched across three strategic touch points throughout the year. These touch points were supplemented with ongoing performance conversations that could be initiated by any employee, at any time.  

As Fossil Group evolved its company-wide performance approach , they were happy to see immediate progress.  

92% of employees participated in goal-setting reviews, setting an average of six goals per employee.  

However, when they dug into the data, they found that 35% of individual goals created were misaligned or did not have an impact on the organization and its strategic priorities. They knew they needed to get better at goal alignment if they wanted to meet important business objectives.  

Explore the three ways Fossil Group simplified performance management.  

1. They scheduled ongoing performance conversations and continuous feedback.  

Although the three formal performance touch points in place were working, Fossil Group knew teams needed to have goal conversations more frequently. They implemented informal “check-ins” that could be launched by any employee at any time.  

To ensure adequate time was made for important performance conversations and other performance-related activities, Fossil Group implemented "Performance Days" — days strictly dedicated to employee performance. On these days, no task-related meetings are scheduled, and all work is set aside for the day. Conversations between managers, employees, and teams are all centered on performance.  

2. They created intuitive goal conversation templates.

Fossil Group recognized that simply having more performance conversations wasn’t enough — the conversations needed to include healthy dialogue, debate, and collaboration from managers and employees. They created 1-on-1 templates to help guide managers and employees through an effective and productive goal conversation.  

Check-in templates could be customized to the needs and work of individual teams and team members. The templates helped ensure conversations were focused on creating clear, aligned, and motivating goals.   

3. They used recognition to keep performance conversations fresh.  

Fossil Group wanted to bring performance conversations full circle by recognizing employee performance daily. They created recognition toolkits for managers including fun notecards, gift cards, and employee recognition tips. They also launched an online, peer-to-peer recognition program that generated an average of 140 recognition stories each week. 

By taking time to uncover the needs of its employees, and delegating time for managers to focus on performance, Fossil Group was able to listen and act on employee voices and evolve their performance strategy for success. 

While many vendors have integrated tools, most of them feel like different solutions that are simply banded together. However, this is not the case when it comes to Quantum [Workplace]. If you can use one module, you can use them all. Additional benefits of this integrated approach include faster ramp-up time for employees, less frustration for the end-user, and higher user adoption. By linking these pieces, you set the stage for predictive analytics as it relates to performance and engagement.

James Webb VP of Global People Development & Engagement Fossil Group

Read Fossil Group's performance management case study: Fossil Group, Inc. Makes Time for Performance With a Strategic Platform That Wins

Performance Management Case Study: How Benesch Connected the Dots Between Performance and Engagement  

Benesch, a leading firm in the AEC industry, faced several challenges in the last several years. They needed employees to understand how their performance was being measured, a more effective strategy for hiring and retaining top talent, and enhanced learning and development tied to succession planning .   

To solve these challenges, they needed to analyze their strategies for effective 1-on-1 performance conversations, feedback, and build transparency and trust between employees and managers.  

The solutions Benesch implemented reduced turnover, boosted employee engagement, and increased participation in development programs.  

By doing these three things, Benesch revamped their performance management strategy and processes:  

1. They identified areas of improvement through feedback and metrics.  

It all starts with feedback. Through engagement surveys and employee feedback to managers, they gathered employee perspectives they could use to understand what was working and where they could improve. They listened to employee feedback, analyzed the data, and used that information to inform strategic decision-making and take action.   

2. They trained managers to have meaningful 1-on-1 conversations.  

Benesch held a training course for managers on how to have successful 1-on-1 conversations with their employees. This helped them communicate better, as well as build transparency. By including clear performance measures in those performance conversations, employees could better understand what was expected of them. By doing this, employees communicated in surveys that they understood performance expectations.   

3. HR empowered managers with data and analytics.  

Managers were given access to their team engagement results and analytics so they could use those to have better team discussions. Those discussions led to improved goal-setting.  

By empowering managers and acting on employee feedback, Benesch proactively updated its talent management strategies to bridge the gap between engagement and performance.  

"The ability to use Quantum [Workplace] tools to listen to employees and ask questions is key to our success. The tools provide a way to support our employees as we grow and consistently keep employee engagement at the forefront and show employees this is important to us. The research capability Quantum [Workplace] offers to clients and new products/functionality have really helped us make decisions and move on initiatives."

Julie Melidis Director of Learning & Development | Senior Associate at Benesch

Benesch Improved Employee Engagement and Retention through Enhanced Performance Conversations, Continuous Feedback, and Comprehensive Training Programs

Salute saw reduced turnover and improve employee engagement by improving their performance management processes. Watch the video to learn how they created an environment of employee success. 

Performance Management Case Study: Scooter’s Coffee Uses Performance Management to Drive Employee Growth and Excellence  

Scooter’s Coffee’s annual employee engagement survey revealed they had an opportunity to improve career growth and development. Employees said they didn’t necessarily have the tools, insight, or opportunity to grow within the organization, even though they were looking for advancement.  

They needed to design career pathways for employees’ career aspirations, but also integrate them into employee conversations with their managers so that goal setting, development plans, and future-focused performance discussions were all aligned.  

1. Fostered regular advisory conversations between employees and managers.  

Scooter’s Coffee conducted bi-annual talent reviews and encouraged frequent conversations between employees and managers. Custom templates were created to gear conversations toward growth and development.   

2. Established top-down goal alignment.

Using a goals tool, Scooter’s coffee increased awareness and communicated organizational and team goals across the company. Employees were encouraged to create personal, development goals to help guide growth and development. 81% of employees adopted goals.  

3. Recognized employees through peer feedback and employee milestones.

Scooter’s Coffee enhanced their employee-centric culture with feedback and recognition. Employees were encouraged to recognize others for their great work.  

And Scooter’s Coffee saw tremendous success! Employee turnover decreased by 5% in a year, with corporate store location noting a double-digit decrease. The organization internally promoted 29 individuals in the first five month.   

“Quantum Workplace has brought teams closer together and aligned groups across common goals and objectives to share partnership and accountability. As a leader of multiple teams, across a broad array of functions, roles and responsibilities, the tool has allowed me to not only be more organized in communicating with and aligning my direct reports, but also to have clear visibility to the communication, development, engagement, and recognition of all levels within my organization.”

Missy McKinley Senior Vice President of Operations Scooter's Coffee

Read the Scooter's Coffee performance management case study: How Scooter’s Coffee Empowered Growth and Success

How Can You See Success in Changing Your Approach to Performance Management?  

When it comes to performance management, each organization’s approach is unique. Crafting your strategy is an evolution. You can’t transform it overnight.    

As you develop your customized process, follow these steps:  

• Read success stories. Find a performance management case study. Take notes about how you can replicate their success.  
• Act on feedback. What are employees telling you in your engagement survey, pulse surveys, and feedback to managers? How can it shape your new process?  
• Make one change. The middle ground between traditional and continuous performance is vast. Find one thing you can do now to move the needle.  
• Train your managers. Make sure your managers understand the change. Coach them in what you expect and how they will operate with the changes.  
• Get employee buy-in. Explain to employees why you’re making the change. After you’ve made the change, ask employees what they think.  
• Repeat the process. Take the feedback you get from employees and make another change for continuous process improvement. Then identify the next action you’re going to take to improve performance management.  

Build your processes and successful habits of performance management. Analyze what other organizations are doing and what works for them. Read their performance management case study. It’ll help you improve your performance management approach every day!  

Ready to find the perfect fit for your performance management needs? Explore our Pathways today.  

Published September 19, 2024 | Written By Jessica McBride

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People Analytics: 5 Real Case Studies

Maaike Ankum

Harness the power of HR analytics to improve business performance by learning from these organizations.

Data is essential to an organization’s growth and profitability. HR analytics turns the focus inwards on one of the biggest determining factors of a company’s success: their employees. Collect and analyze data about the talent within your organization and get the insights you need to increase productivity, reduce waste, and capitalize on unique opportunities. 

As a leading expert in employee feedback solutions, Effectory encourages a data-driven approach to identifying opportunities for improvement within organizations. This includes refining strategies to hire the right talent, designing individual employee development plans, and enhancing employee engagement. We’re always available to talk with you about how we can make people analytics work for your organization.  

This article will, first, outline the steps to implementing an effective people analytics strategy and, second, explore case studies from five prominent organizations that highlight the different ways in which HR analytics can be used to improve your business outcomes. 

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The steps in an HR analytics strategy 

Organizations need to have clearly defined processes to gather data, analyze it, identify patterns, and turn those insights into actionable initiatives. Though the terms are similar, HR reporting and HR analytics are not, in fact, interchangeable. They are actually the first and final steps, respectively, in the three-part process of people analytics. 

1. Reporting  

HR reporting is the foundation of people analytics, bringing together all the data your organization has tracked. 

HR reports are objective and factual. They present data in a digestible way to highlight patterns, but do not derive conclusions. 

2. Analysis  

HR analysis is the investigative phase where your team draws connections among data points and develops hypotheses. 

During analysis, you may need to identify gaps in available data and fill them in using new tools and initiatives like surveys, employee interviews, or game-like personality tests. 

3. Analytics  

This is where the people-data, HR reports, and analysis come together to give you a definitive picture of the problem or opportunity your organization is facing. Data and hypotheses are structured through analytics to provide actionable insights. 

What is predictive people analytics?

Create impact with People Analytics

Link feedback from employees to your organization’s performance

The following step-by-step guide is another way to map out the people analytics process: 

• Identify opportunities or areas for improvement 
• Establish performance metrics 
• Collect data 
• Identify relevant patterns and develop hypotheses 
• Fill the data gaps 
• Analyze the results 
• Implement data-driven strategies 

Here are five real-world case studies that demonstrate different ways in which businesses have used people analytics to improve their bottom line. 

Johnson & Johnson: Experience and retention 

Area for improvement: American multinational Johnson & Johnson was looking to improve both employee performance and retention. At the time, their recruiters prioritized candidates with job experience in the industry, assuming they were more likely to stay with the company and would be quicker to make significant contributions. As a result, the company experienced a 10 percent decrease in new hires who had recently graduated from college.

The State of Employee Retention

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Data and analysis: Challenging these assumption, HR and the people analytics team at Johnson & Johnson compiled data on 47,000 employees to test the link between experience and turnover. The data revealed that employees hired right out of college actually remained with the organization “significantly longer” than more experienced candidates. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between the two groups’ contributions to the company. Their new hypothesis is that Johnson & Johnson’s two-year leadership development program may help reduce turnover among recent graduates.    Analytics and outcome: Based on the people analytics, Johnson & Johnson increased hires of new graduates by 20 percent, effectively reducing turnover while maintaining performance. 

Clarks: Employee engagement 

Area for improvement: C. & J. Clark is a British shoe manufacturer and retailer with approximately 1400 locations and over 13,000 employees. According to Chief People Officer, Belinda Deery, Clarks already had high levels of employee engagement relative to their industry but were looking to maximize return on investment, especially at the store level.    Data and analysis: The HR analytics team used 450 data points to get an accurate picture of the relationship between employee engagement and overall business performance. The report and subsequent analysis revealed that for every 1 percent increase in employee engagement, business performance increased by 0.4 percent, confirming the correlation and the value of employee engagement. The analytics team also collected additional data from the company’s 100 best-performing stores. 

Analytics and outcome: The combined findings of this two-step people analytics initiative enabled Clarks to implement multiple effective changes and programs that improved engagement and increased business performance. First, they drafted a replicable schema to create high-performing stores, including the ideal team size for optimum efficiency. The company also designed a store management development program and put together an employee engagement toolkit for managers. The CPO reported positive ongoing results after implementing these initiatives. 

Global Employee Engagement Index™

A comprehensive overview of employee engagement with benchmarks from 57 countries with essential lessons for your HR strategy .

Credit Suisse: Predicting turnover 

Area for improvement:  

Credit Suisse is a financial services company based in Switzerland that employs over 47,000 people. To reduce turnover, they tried to predict which employees were most likely to leave the company and when. It’s been estimated that the cost of replacing an employee can be anywhere between 30 and 400 percent of an employee’s salary, depending on seniority and experience. This is a substantial loss for a company the size of Credit Suisse. 

Data and analysis:   Because the Credit Suisse workforce is so large and since they have strong data tracking practices, the analytics team had substantial information on who left the company, why, and after how long. The team dug deeper to explore “the specific circumstances prior to the points of departure” by tracking over 40 variables, such as performance ratings, the time spent in a given role, and the size of an employee’s team. 

Analytics and outcome:   The resulting predictive people analytics model gave Credit Suisse the ability to accurately predict how likely an employee is to leave the organization in the next year based on as few as ten indicators. With these predictors, Credit Suisse is able to identify risk factors and address these issues with employees before they result in attrition. 

Use the insights of departing employees to uncover hidden truths about your organization and minimize further unnecessary departures.

E.On: Absenteeism 

Based in Essen, Germany, E.On is an electric company that employs approximately 78,000 people. When absenteeism rose above the acceptable benchmark set by their HR department, E.On used people analytics to determine the factors driving increased unscheduled time off. Depending on whether an employee is paid hourly or with an annual salary, absenteeism can cost a business anywhere between $2,660 and $3,600 per employee, annually. For an organization of E.On’s size, that potentially adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Data and analysis:   The people analytics team at E.On put together 55 hypotheses. Based on the available data, the team tested 21 hypotheses and finally validated 11 of them. What they found was that the duration and timing of vacation had the biggest impact on the frequency of unplanned time off for the rest of the year. Contrary to popular belief, employees selling back their vacation time to the company did not appear to have any statistically significant impact on absenteeism. 

Analytics and outcome: Based on these insights, E.On implemented policy changes that encouraged managers to be more accommodating with how employees schedule time off. Employees are encouraged to schedule multiple breaks throughout the year with at least one larger vacation—a combination that reduces absenteeism. The findings from this people analytics initiative also provided the HR team with additional insights they can use to test other variables in the future. 

Cisco: Choosing an office location 

Area for improvement: This multinational technology conglomerate based out of San Jose, California employs over 75,000 people. When the time came to open a new regional office, the company used people analytics to determine the best building and location for it. The goal was to avoid wasted space, create a positive work environment for employees, and attract the right talent to the organization.    Data and analysis:   With 266 Cisco offices across 87 countries, their People Planning, Analytics and Tools department were able to source data about office usage rates and average costs within the organization. Senior Director Ian Bailie and his team also looked at the building’s neighborhood and the location’s community to evaluate their respective potential impact on business performance. Most importantly, the analytics team explored the availability of talent, specifically from neighboring universities, relative to the number of competitors in the area. 

Analytics and outcome: Because of Bailie and his team’s findings, the company decided to go with a different location than they first had their eye on. Their research found that the original choice would have left the recruitment team struggling to fill the necessary roles. The findings also changed Cisco’s process for opening new offices by bringing people analytics into the discussion much earlier. Planning, staffing, and operating new offices became much more resource efficient. 

These are just a few real-world examples of how HR analytics can be used to improve business outcomes. People analytics focuses on an organization’s most valuable resource, its employees, and empowers them to do their best work to benefit the company and its larger goals. Prioritize data and regular reporting to gain meaningful insights and actionable takeaways. Talk to Effectory today to make people analytics a key part of your HR strategy . 

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Performance Management Case Study

In collaboration with mckinsey & company.

Redefining Performance Management at DBS Bank

How lofty ambitions and innovative metrics sharpened customer focus, march 26, 2019, by: david kiron and barbara spindel, introduction.

In 2008, the year David Gledhill went to work for DBS Bank, few would have predicted that within a decade the Singapore-based bank would be racking up an impressive slate of honors. Nonetheless, DBS was the first recipient of Euromoney ’s Best Digital Bank Award in 2016; it received that distinction again in 2018 and, that same year, was also named Global Finance ’s Best Bank in the World.

Just a decade ago, however, DBS, beset by long lines at branches and ATMs, high turnover among relationship managers, and a plodding credit card application process, had the worst customer satisfaction scores of all the banks in Singapore. Chief data and transformation officer Paul Cobban, who came aboard in 2009, recalls that “it was almost embarrassing to tell people at dinner parties” that he worked for the bank “because DBS had such a bad reputation.”

Executives did not simply change their performance management systems to achieve these goals. They redefined the meaning and measurement of performance.

Soon after Cobban joined, a newly arranged management team, with the support of tech-savvy CEO Piyush Gupta, turned things around by thinking of DBS as more of a tech startup than a bank. Gledhill, DBS’s CIO, says, “Our future competition wasn’t going to come from just banks, but from a lot of cool technology companies that were going into finance.” DBS, in Gledhill’s words, committed to becoming “digital to the core,” and he and his team initiated a thoroughgoing culture change to support digital innovation.

Company Background

DBS Bank was established by Singapore’s government in 1968 as the Development Bank of Singapore Limited. (It became known as DBS in 2003.) Still headquartered in the island nation, the multinational financial services group, with a workforce of over 26,000, has expanded throughout China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, and currently has 280 branches in 18 markets. With its focus in recent years on reimagining banking as a seamless and streamlined digital experience (it has made banking mobile-only, paperless, and branchless in some of its markets), DBS’s mission is embodied in the slogan “Live more, bank less.”

Gledhill finds that operating in Singapore has distinct advantages. He cites the country’s “advanced IT infrastructure and strong intellectual property regulatory frameworks,” which encourage and protect technological innovation, and he points out that 80 of the world’s top 100 tech companies have a presence on the island. He also mentions Singapore’s highly skilled and highly educated pool of talent. “Together with supportive government initiatives to further Singapore’s digital agenda,” Gledhill says, “we believe we are definitely in the right place to fulfill our digital ambitions.”

The Foundational Years: 2009 to 2014

When Gledhill, Cobban, and the rest of their team joined DBS, they immediately set about changing the culture of the company. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, DBS was determined to differentiate itself from Western banks by emphasizing that it provided, in Cobban’s words, “a special brand of Asian service.” The qualities of this service were embodied in the acronym RED: respectful, easy to deal with, and dependable. The hope was that living up to these qualities would improve the company’s customer satisfaction scores, which Cobban recalls were “rock-bottom.”

Under the umbrella of RED, they created cross-functional teams called PIEs (process improvement events). The goal was to come up with processes that could be implemented within one week and that would address the bank’s biggest service problems — say, the time it took to replace a lost credit card — often by improving speed and eliminating waste. Cobban recalls, “I said, ‘What can you actually change within a short time frame?’ And that was it from an incentive point of view. It made people realize if they put some effort in now, they can see major results. Even to this day, I’m not quite sure how this happened, but we unlocked the enthusiasm, the energy, of the bottom of the company.”

Removing operational barriers lifted the ambition of employees across the organization without the use of incentives.

Notably, the PIEs helped effect a culture shift in the organization by enabling rapid, visible improvements to a wide range of operational processes. Removing operational barriers lifted the ambition of employees across the organization without the use of incentives. “We create a mechanism that anybody can participate in,” Cobban says. “We make it a very low bar to participate, and we did not expect everyone to be successful.”

In addition to improving organizational processes, the new team ensured that the company’s focus was squarely on the customer. In 2009, in what Cobban calls “in hindsight a moment of genius,” the management team invented the measure of the customer hour, a unit of wait time for a customer (a customer waiting for a credit card for an hour equals one customer hour), and used the PIE concept to eliminate as many customer hours as possible. Cobban hoped to be able to take 10 million customer hours out of the bank and ended up taking out 250 million. The process, Cobban says, “was really focused on making the customer’s life better,” a goal that unlike, say, increasing the bank’s profits, gave DBS employees a shared sense of purpose. (Google, Cobban notes, has since adapted DBS’s customer hours concept.) The shift in focus entailed an accompanying shift in the meaning of performance, as the previous measures of success were no longer relevant.

The final innovation was to upgrade DBS’s technological capabilities. “We had to build resilience into our platforms and data centers,” Gledhill says. “Our securities and monitoring operations needed revamping. But more important was the need around insourcing. We built our own technology DNA around the company so that we could really start to look and act more like a technology company. We fixed our application stack and got rid of our legacy systems to build an environment on which we would really start to scale.” The company, which was 85% outsourced in 2009, was 90% self-managed by 2018.

Looking back on the new management team’s early successes, Cobban jokes that “we were so bad, it was easy to improve within that first year.” The team wasn’t yet aspiring to compete with tech companies, but it was laying the groundwork for doing so. Gledhill was still, at that point, “thinking about ‘world class’ as being world-class among banks.” He sees the team’s initial actions, which included experimenting with agile practices, as integral to DBS’s later successes, noting that “our foundational years from 2009 to 2014 were critical building blocks where we fixed the basics to be able to move fast.” The changes to DBS’s approach to performance during this period both responded to and helped drive the company’s digital transformation. Soon, however, the company articulated a new and ambitious goal that led to a major shift in its performance management.

Project GANDALF: 2014 to the Present

Around 2014, Gupta and Gledhill began to see DBS’s competition as tech companies — like Google, Amazon, Netflix, Alibaba, LinkedIn, and Facebook — rather than other banks. They set their sights on joining that pantheon as a world-class tech company. The initials of the tech giants together spell GANALF. The company goal was to add a D to the acronym, for DBS, to spell GANDALF, the wizard of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings novels. “That aspiration, more than any single piece of technology or anything else,” Gledhill declares, “really galvanized people to a completely new level of performance and thinking.” The CIO adds that the company “made it fun as well.”

5 Focus Areas for DBS Bank’s Digital Transformation

The GANDALF goal led to a shift in the company’s approach to performance management, which DBS explicitly used to drive its transformation toward becoming a digital leader. The company quantified what it wanted to achieve and measured itself continually against its goals through its management scorecard and key performance indicators. The effort was enterprise-wide and aligned the business and technology sides. “It’s a partnership with HR in terms of reimagining the training and tools and the programs that we want to run,” Gledhill says. “It’s working with our marketing folks to figure out how we shape and sell our message. It’s working with the other business leaders to get them on board. So, it becomes a culture shift more than anything else, which has to affect all parts of the organization. Everybody has to shift the way they operate.”

To disrupt itself and join the digital elite, DBS took the following steps:

1. Gave new meaning to “performance.” Once the PIEs had resolved the customer satisfaction problems related to basic issues like length of wait time for customer center calls, they evolved into a set of programs focused more holistically on the customer. Cobban recalls, “We realized we now need to take friction out of the customer journey — it’s a lot faster than it used to be, but still there’s quite a lot of friction. This deep understanding of what customers really need is pivotal to what we built in.” DBS turned to human-centered design thinking to solve customer problems, running more than 500 “customer journey projects.” Employees are invited to create solutions and pitch them to senior staff. That might mean designing apps that don’t consume too much battery power because in a digital age, being “respectful,” part of the RED mandate, means being conscious of the importance of a customer’s battery life.

In 2017, in another move that greatly altered the company’s conception of performance, DBS developed a method for measuring the financial impact of digitization. Called the digital value capture (DVC), the data quickly and quantitatively demonstrated the importance of migrating customers to digital banking. “Through DVC, we noted that, compared to a traditional customer, a digital customer brings in twice the income, with 1.5, 2, and 3.6 times higher deposit, loan, and investment balances, respectively. A digital customer, on average, also costs 57% less to acquire and is more engaged, with 16 times more self-initiated transactions,” Gledhill notes. DVC data served multiple purposes: It created a new mandate for DBS employees, it was shared with investors, and it helped develop the enterprise’s business plan.

2. Used performance management to drive digital transformation. The company uses a balanced scorecard approach to measure performance, and digital transformation now comprises a significant part of the scorecard. As Gledhill explains, “Because we are really pushing this digital agenda, our scorecard has changed. We want to drive people to push digital adoption of the customers. And so 20% of our scorecard — so 20% of the bank’s performance, which ultimately defines how much we get paid — is focused on digital transformation.” The scorecard’s metrics are very precise. Gledhill continues, “We have very specific measures in there about the percent of customers we acquired digitally, about the shift from manual channel to electronic channel, execution for transactions, and how much we engage. So, acquire, transact, engage. Every business and every product within every business has targets about how it has to shift its customer base to those electronic channels. So, the scorecard is very tightly aligned to digital.”

“With most people, it was very liberating because it set an aspiration of something they’d completely, to that point, failed to imagine, and it was fun.” — David Gledhill

3. Changed the culture that supports performance management. In addition to providing a unifying sense of purpose to the organization, the GANDALF goal has focused DBS on its company culture. Through a process called Culture by Design, DBS has been extremely precise about codifying the culture it wants to establish: one that gives its 26,000-person workforce the feel of a startup. The acronym ABCDE details the characteristics of the culture: Agile (adapting more quickly), Be a learning organization (adopt new ways of approaching the business), Customer-obsessed (understanding customers’ pain points), Data-driven (using data holistically to transform internal processes), and Experiment and take risks (encouraging the 4D process: discover, define, develop, and deliver).

“Once we defined these key characteristics, we started reinforcing them by making aspects of these traits and behaviors a requirement for everyone,” Cobban explains. “We continue to reinforce these characteristics throughout the bank through multiple learning and collaboration programs. We focus on identifying ‘blockers’ to our cultural innovation and set about targeted countermeasures to address them.”

For instance, the company’s meetings, according to Cobban, were frequently ineffective. Problems included “people being late, unprepared, poor agenda, too many people in the meeting, too many meetings generally.” A program called Meeting MOJO was conceived to overcome this particular blocker. Under MOJO, every meeting now has a meeting owner (MO) who in turn appoints a joyful observer (JO). The MO, according to Cobban, ensures that the meeting has a clear agenda, that it starts and ends on time, and that there is “equal share of voice” throughout the discussion. At the end of the meeting, the JO provides feedback to the MO about whether the meeting was a success according to those criteria. “The results have been dramatic,” Cobban says. “More of our meetings start and finish on time, and they now have more structure and engage more attendees.”

“If you give people a sense of purpose and get out of the way, it’s far more powerful than trying to incentivize somebody with money.” — Paul Cobban

In addition, in 2017, DBS launched DigiFY, a mobile learning platform and online course intended to transform the company’s bankers into digital bankers. The program imparts skills in seven categories: agile; data-driven; digital business models; digital communications; digital technologies; journey thinking; and risk and controls. By the time employees achieve mastery in the three-part course, they are qualified to teach its precepts to their coworkers. Once the company decided it required digital bankers, it methodically set about defining, creating, supporting, measuring, and developing them.

As Cobban explains, all these changes took place within a traditional performance management system; what’s more, they were divorced from financial incentives. “We have not set out to change the culture of performance management directly through compensation. My experience is that it’s not effective in shaping a company,” he says. “Our performance approach is very conventional. We have an annual appraisal process. We have KPIs that we need to meet. If you give people a sense of purpose and get out of the way, it’s far more powerful than trying to incentivize somebody with money.”

Creating Buy-In at the Customer Center

Improvements to the customer center at DBS exemplify the shifts taking place within the organization at large. Beginning in 2014-2015, at the customer center as well as throughout the enterprise as a whole, performance management was used to drive the digital agenda. DBS’s head of customer center Geeta Sreeraman states that while the center, like most contact centers is “a highly KPI-driven environment;” the KPIs were very aligned to the bank strategy. “And our focus was, and continues to be,” she adds, “how do we participate in this whole digital transformation?” The answer was to use technology to engage the staff, improve efficiency, and enhance the customer experience.

A top priority was changing the mindset of the 500-plus customer care representatives. This was accomplished in part by enlisting the employees to collaborate in the creation of the unit’s KPIs. “We don’t want a top-down KPI that doesn’t account for their challenges,” Sreeraman says. The “culture of cocreation,” she observes, resulted in “a lot more buy-in.” Moreover, management regularly reviews and refines the unit’s metrics as the nature of engaging with customers changes. For instance, DBS customers increasingly use chat to handle simple banking issues. As customers turn to phone calls as a last resort to address more complex technical problems, KPIs related to the average time of a phone call are of lesser relevance. Metrics relating to first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction become more critical.

By the time customers do make phone calls, then, there is a strong possibility that they’re experiencing a problem that they were unable to solve using self-service online tools. DBS began using speech analytics not to punish poor performance but to understand both the challenges faced by call center staff and customer pain points. “A lot of our high-emotion calls were because of confusion,” Sreeraman says. If, for instance, the analytic tools revealed that callers were frustrated because they couldn’t access their bank statements, the company specifically trained employees to assist customers in accessing their statements online. (This solution had the added benefit of supporting DBS’s agenda to get its customers to go digital.) Similarly, if an urgent problem arises, the company can figure it out more quickly by registering an increase in negative emotions associated with calls.

Access to data enabled innovations at the customer care center. “We enhanced our internal data capabilities to make sure that we capture real-time data through dashboards,” Sreeraman says, adding that the data also facilitates any “real-time management that we need to do.” As part of having a transparent and open culture, an in-house mobile engagement app called Alive makes performance data available 24 hours a day. Managers can see which employees need additional support and which are in a position to stretch themselves. The app is also used to encourage employees to manage their own performance. They can “benchmark their performance with the rest of the cohort to assess if they are on track to meet their objectives,” Sreeraman says. Employees are encouraged to take responsibility: to self-assess, seek feedback from managers, and set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goals. This “self-driven” performance management, she says, is “where we are headed right now.”

As DBS’s recent accolades suggest, the bank has been successful in aligning its performance management system, its KPIs, and its culture with an ambitious digital transformation agenda. Of course, work remains to be done. Gledhill is interested in applying principles of performance management to the company’s teams; he also wants to deploy machine learning and advanced analytics tools to further optimize customer interactions. But as he measures DBS against the tech giants, reflecting on the audacious goal of putting the D in GANDALF, he is confident that the company will continue to make progress. “I would say we’re a long way away from some of the advanced tools and techniques these guys use, but here’s the point,” he reasons. “If this is always your North Star, you will always progressively move closer and closer to it. That’s how we look at it.”

David Gledhill

group chief information officer and head of group technology and operations

David Gledhill is group chief information officer as well as head of group technology and operations at DBS Bank. In 2017, he was the recipient of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award, becoming the first CIO from an Asian company to have won. Prior to joining DBS in 2008, he worked for 20 years at JP Morgan.

Paul Cobban

chief data and transformation officer, technology and operations group

Paul Cobban is chief data and transformation officer, technology and operations, at DBS. He joined DBS in 2009 as managing director for business transformation, and was chief operating officer of technology and operations from 2013 to 2017.

Prior to joining DBS, Cobban held a variety of roles at Standard Chartered Bank, and he also worked at JP Morgan UK as an IT project manager and at IBM as a programmer and project manager.

Geeta Sreeraman

head of customer center, Singapore, technology and operations

Geeta Sreeraman is head of the customer center at DBS Bank, where she leads a team of 600 employees. Since joining DBS in 2011, she has held various senior positions, from managing relations with regulatory bodies to leading the development of the department. Under her leadership, her group has won many accolades, include Best Contact Centre at the Annual Contact Centre Association of Singapore Awards. She started her career as a relationship manager for Citibank India.

Banking On Technology-Enabled Performance Management

By Peter Cappelli

The DBS Bank example is a good illustration of how to pull off organizational change, especially a big one. The key is to use many different levers to get employees to behave differently. In this case, performance management is one of those.

It is useful to think of organizational change as similar to trying to get an individual employee to behave differently, but you have to do it at scale. There are all kinds of reasons we keep doing things the same way, but the most important is arguably that change is both unsettling and, in many cases, risky, especially if what we have been doing has been working pretty well for us.

It helps to have a powerful need for change. Some people refer to this as a burning platform — a pressure that is big enough that we cannot simply ignore it. DBS wasn’t failing; it just wasn’t very good. The pressure had to come from someplace else.

The success of DBS seems to have come from two initiatives. The first was empowerment. We’ve long known that employees can be engaged to work hard and creatively on projects for which they are responsible and that they own. The Singapore work culture is generally quite top-down, so the decision to empower teams to take on projects is more radical than it sounds. I suspect the employees responded to it with even more energy than they might elsewhere.

The second initiative relates to performance management, specifically the creation of measures of success. It is hard to engage people in anything if they do not know how they are doing, and it is especially difficult to improve if you cannot measure whether you are doing better: Imagine trying to improve your golf game if you went to the driving range and could never see where the ball went. The truly innovative initiative at DBS was to create a measure of performance — hours of customer time — that had face validity (we can see why it is good for business and for customers to bank faster), will stay in place over time, and is comparable across parts of the bank.

Paul Cobban says that the bank’s performance appraisal system is very conventional, but the management team did make changes in it that drove behavior in a different direction. That began with new organizational measures, a balanced scorecard, and new measures of individual behaviors that the team wanted employees to execute. We should not underestimate the importance of training on those behaviors because a big cause of resistance to change is employees who aren’t sure whether they will be able to hit the new goals, so they often do not try. Good training goes a long way toward taking that fear away.

Even with all these efforts, organizational changes typically fail. They are working at DBS in part because the leaders smartly let the new practices drive culture changes and aligned efforts to move employees in a new direction. DBS leaders provided a compelling vision of becoming a digital company, empowered employees to act on that vision, measured how they are doing, and gave them the skills to succeed. As with any successful change, it is a lot more work to make it happen than it sounds from a story. The key element here is leadership commitment: Put time and sustained resources into the effort and see it through to a conclusion.

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, served as senior advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for employment policy from 2003-2005, and since 2007 is a distinguished scholar of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore.

About the Authors

David Kiron is the executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review ’s Big Ideas Initiative, which brings ideas from the world of thinkers to the executives and managers who use them.

Barbara Spindel is a writer and editor specializing in culture, history, and politics. She holds a Ph.D. in American studies.

Contributors

Michael Fitzgerald, Carolyn Ann Geason, Allison Ryder, and Karina van Berkum

Acknowledgments

David Gledhill, CIO, DBS Bank

Paul Cobban, chief data and transformation officer, DBS Bank

Geeta Sreeraman, head of customer center, DBS Bank

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Data-smart city solutions, case study: performance management and lean process improvement - results washington, an operational excellence in government success story.

• May 31, 2017
• Operational Excellence in Government

This resource is part of the Ash Center's Operational Excellence in Government Project.

Executive Summary

This case study is one of three highlighting successes identified as part of the Operational Excellence in Government Project. The purpose of the case studies is to elevate and document the successes, and in doing so to provide a greater amount of detail than is typically available about such efforts. The case studies explain the implementation steps, the key challenges, and the driving factors for success. With this work, we hope to reduce the cost of identifying opportunities for efficiency and cost savings across all layers of government, and to accelerate the transfer and deployment of successful cases.

This case study describes how the state of Washington implemented two key operational efficiency strategies for government — performance management and employee-driven process improvement. The effort, called Results Washington, sets priorities and then focuses on delivery to achieve results that make a difference in the lives of Washingtonians. Results Washington was launched in 2013 by Governor Jay Inslee. He established five top-priority statewide goals and challenged state government leaders to track their progress against these goals and to apply Lean thinking and tools to improve their processes. Highlights of the success of the initiative include:

Performance management. Every activity of state government aligns with one of five priority goals: World-Class Education; Prosperous Economy; Sustainable Energy and a Clean Environment; Healthy and Safe Communities; and Effective, Efficient, and Accountable Government. Indicators of progress toward these goals are tracked on a public dashboard ( www.results.wa.gov ), and the underlying data is publicly available too. Success to date includes:

• 50 percent of the nearly 200 Results Washington goals are on track to meet or beat targets  
• Many of the indicators tracked are complex challenges that require collaboration across departmental lines, such as homelessness, pollution, offender recidivism, and teen pregnancy. State employees work with private and nonprofit partners as well as customers to devise strategies to deliver results.    
• Monthly progress meetings are public and are also live-streamed. All data, agendas, and meeting results are published to the Results Washington website.

Process improvement. Lean process improvement empowers employees to remove bottlenecks and unneeded processing steps. This puts problem solving where it is most powerful, in the hands of those who best understand processes- from the frontlines of service delivery to backend administration. This approach has proven successful- a study showed that $4.5 in value to taxpayers is returned for every $1 invested in the Lean process improvement program. A total of $33 million in savings and avoided costs have been achieved, as well as countless hours saved via streamlined processes, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.

Selected individual project results include:

• One million hours [1] of time saved waiting in Department of Licensing lobbies using process improvements and partnering with private driver-training schools  
• 15-percent [2] decrease in speed-related deaths  
• 20-percent [3]  faster processing of DNA tests at the Crime Lab, reducing the backlog by 10 percent and cutting staff overtime 56 percent   
• $6.2 million in recovered overpayments from Department of Labor and Industries, a 28-percent increase in one year  
• $2.3 million in savings a year on long-distance phone calls

One key to the success of Results Washington is that it is both top-down and bottom-up. Top-level executive sponsorship has been consistent and high profile — the governor not only presides over monthly meetings, he walks around in state agencies asking employees for input and holds department heads accountable for delivering results that span the silos of government. Employees are empowered — a third of the workforce has been trained in how to improve processes, and 11 percent of all state employees have participated in a Lean process improvement project — it is becoming part of the organizational culture.

The state employees who have accomplished this did not do it alone — the public and the private sectors both contributed. The public contributes ideas via an interactive survey on the state website and through public results meetings. Private-sector Lean process improvement experts from 130 companies have contributed thousands of hours of expertise teaching, coaching, and mentoring state staff working on process improvement projects. 

Other state and local governments do not need to reinvent the wheel but can instead borrow from what Washington has done on both performance measurement and process improvement. As Rich Roesler, former acting director of Results Washington says, “We steal ideas from other states and welcome people to steal our ideas.”

The pages that follow describe how Results Washington was implemented and how it operates, and provide resources to help other jurisdictions achieve more efficient operations.

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Using people analytics to drive business performance: A case study

People analytics— the application of advanced analytics and large data sets to talent management—is going mainstream. Five years ago, it was the provenance of a few leading companies, such as Google (whose former senior vice president of people operations wrote a book about it ). Now a growing number of businesses are applying analytics to processes such as recruiting and retention, uncovering surprising sources of talent and counterintuitive insights about what drives employee performance.

Much of the work to date has focused on specialized talent (a natural by-product of the types of companies that pioneered people analytics) and on individual HR processes . That makes the recent experience of a global quick-service restaurant chain instructive. The company focused the power of people analytics on its frontline staff—with an eye toward improving overall business performance—and achieved dramatic improvements in customer satisfaction, service performance, and overall business results, including a 5 percent increase in group sales in its pilot market. Here is its story.

The challenge: Collecting data to map the talent value chain

The company had already exhausted most traditional strategic options and was looking for new opportunities to improve the customer experience. Operating a mix of franchised outlets, as well as corporate-owned restaurants, the company was suffering from annual employee turnover significantly above that of its peers. Business leaders believed closing this turnover gap could be a key to improving the customer experience and increasing revenues, and that their best chance at boosting retention lay in understanding their people better. The starting point was to define the goals for the effort and then translate the full range of frontline employee behavior and experience into data that the company could model against actual outcomes.

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Define what matters. Agreeing in advance on the outcomes that matter is a critical step in any people-analytics project—one that’s often overlooked and can involve a significant investment of time. In this case, it required rigorous data exploration and discussion among senior leaders to align on three target metrics: revenue growth per store, average customer satisfaction, and average speed of service (the last two measured by shift to ensure that the people driving those results were tracked). This exercise highlighted a few performance metrics that worked together and others that “pulled” in opposite directions in certain contexts.

Fill data gaps. Internal sources provided some relevant data, and it was possible to derive other variables, such as commute distance. The company needed to supplement its existing data, however, notably in three areas (Exhibit 1):

• First was selection and onboarding (“ who gets hired and what their traits are”). There was little data on personality traits, which some leaders thought might be a significant factor in explaining differences in the performance of the various outlets and shifts. In association with a specialist in psychometric assessments, the company ran a series of online games allowing data scientists to build a picture of individual employees’ personalities and cognitive skills.
• Second was day-to-day management (“ how we manage our people and their environment”). Measuring management quality is never easy, and the company did not have a culture or engagement survey. To provide insight into management practices, the company deployed McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index (OHI), an instrument through which we’ve pinpointed 37 management practices that contribute most to organizational health and long-term performance. With the OHI, the company sought improved understanding of such practices and the impact that leadership actions were having on the front line.
• Third was behavior and interactions (“ what employees do in the restaurants”). Employee behavior and collaboration was monitored over time by sensors that tracked the intensity of physical interactions among colleagues. The sensors captured the extent to which employees physically moved around the restaurant, the tone of their conversations, and the amount of time spent talking versus listening to colleagues and customers.

The insights: Challenging conventional wisdom

Armed with these new and existing data sources—six in all, beyond the traditional HR profile, and comprising more than 10,000 data points spanning individuals, shifts, and restaurants across four US markets, and including the financial and operational performance of each outlet—the company set out to find which variables corresponded most closely to store success. It used the data to build a series of logistic-regression and unsupervised-learning models that could help determine the relationship between drivers and desired outcomes (customer satisfaction and speed of service by shift, and revenue growth by store).

Then it began testing more than 100 hypotheses, many of which had been strongly championed by senior managers based on their observations and instincts from years of experience. This part of the exercise proved to be especially powerful, confronting senior individuals with evidence that in some cases contradicted deeply held and often conflicting instincts about what drives success. Four insights emerged from the analysis that have begun informing how the company manages its people day to day.

Personality counts. In the retail business at least, certain personality traits have higher impact on desired outcomes. Through the analysis, the company identified four clusters or archetypes of frontline employees who were working each day: one group, “potential leaders,” exhibited many characteristics similar to store managers; another group, “socializers,” were friendly and had high emotional intelligence; and there were two different groups of “taskmasters,” who focused on job execution (Exhibit 2). Counterintuitively, though, the hypothesis that socializers—and hiring for friendliness—would maximize performance was not supported by the data. There was a closer correlation between performance and the ability of employees to focus on their work and minimize distractions, in essence getting things done.

Careers are key. The company found that variable compensation, a lever the organization used frequently to motivate store managers and employees, had been largely ineffective: the data suggested that higher and more frequent variable financial incentives (awards that were material to the company but not significant at the individual level) were not strongly correlated with stronger store or individual performance. Conversely, career development and cultural norms had a stronger impact on outcomes.

Management is a contact sport. One group of executives had been convinced that managerial tenure was a key variable, yet the data did not show that. There was no correlation to length of service or personality type. This insight encouraged the company to identify more precisely what its “good” store managers were doing, after which it was able to train their assistants and other local leaders to act and behave in the same way (through, for example, empowering and inspiring staff, recognizing achievement, and creating a stronger team environment).

Shifts differ. Performance was markedly weaker during shifts of eight to ten hours. Such shifts were inconsistent both with demand patterns and with the stamina of employees, whose energy fell significantly after six hours at work. Longer shifts, it seems, had become the norm in many restaurants to ease commutes and simplify scheduling (fewer days of work in the week, with more hours of work each day). Analysis of the data demonstrated to managers that while this policy simplified managerial responsibilities, it was actually hurting productivity.

The results (so far)

Four months into a pilot in the first market in which the findings are being implemented, the results are encouraging. Customer satisfaction scores have increased by more than 100 percent, speed of service (as measured by the time between order and transaction completion) has improved by 30 seconds, attrition of new joiners has decreased substantially, and sales are up by 5 percent.

The CEO’s guide to competing through HR

We’d caution, of course, against concluding that instinct has no role to play in the recruiting, development, management, and retention of employees—or in identifying the combination of people skills that drives great performance. Still, results like these, in an industry like retail—which in the United States alone employs more than 16 million people and, depending on the year and season, may hire three-quarters of a million seasonal employees—point to much broader potential for people analytics. It appears that executives who can complement experience-based wisdom with analytically driven insight stand a much better chance of linking their talent efforts to business value.

Carla Arellano  is a vice president of, and Alexander DiLeonardo is a senior expert at, People Analytics, a McKinsey Solution—both are based in McKinsey’s New York office;  Ignacio Felix is a partner in the Miami office.

The authors wish to thank Val Rastorguev, Dan Martin, and Ryan Smith for their contributions to this article.

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