TIAA's Journey of Crafting the Right Performance Management Solution For Its Culture

If you are thinking about redesigning your performance management process, you aren’t alone. In fact, a large majority of companies are either considering or have already begun implementing change. The problem is that as we search for the perfect performance management solution, we as human resources professionals and social scientists are swimming in research, benchmarking data, and case studies that are pointing us in completely contradictory directions. And the decisions and dilemmas seem endless:

• Ratings or no ratings? What rating scale should we be using?
  
• How frequently should coaching and feedback be delivered? Should we allow our employees to solicit and share peer-to-peer feedback?
  
• Should we encourage stretch goals or goals that reflect the day-to-day job?
  
• How heavily should we weight competencies versus goals?
  
• Should we incorporate competencies in reviews or are they falling by the wayside?
  
• Do documentation requirements hurt or help the organization and its managers?
  

A new case study from i4cp (available exclusively to i4cp members) focuses on TIAA’s journey to redesign its performance management process, but what makes this work so unique is that it focuses on the journey itself, rather than attempting to share a silver bullet solution to performance management. I would argue that the best performance management process is one that drives your desired business outcomes, fits within your culture, and appropriately links to other interdependent human resources processes. In other words, the solution should be different for every organization (hence the inundation of conflicting ideas in the media today). Ask yourself these preliminary questions:

1. What business outcomes are you hoping to drive?

Do you need increased collaboration and innovation or higher productivity and efficiency? Would you like for employees to be competitive or share in successes and failures?

2. What process fits best within your existing culture?

Do you work in a highly regulated environment or one that tolerates more risk? What is the change appetite of your employees? What else is going on simultaneously as you redesign performance management?

3. What other human resources processes are linked to performance management?

Examples might be compensation, promotions, talent planning, employee relations, reductions in force, etc.

We are happy to share the process TIAA followed to learn more about ourselves in order to redesign our performance management process in hopes that other organizations may find it a useful guide for taking a similar journey. We don’t expect your outcomes to be the same, but taking the time to understand your own employees’ needs can drastically enhance your credibility and confidence that the changes you are implementing address the longer term vision of your organization and aren’t just a fad.

Download the case study now (i4cp members only)