Performance Expectations
- Michael Cannon (Unlicensed)
- Ankur Gupta
- Vishakha Pinge
This page will be merged into Career Progression and removed by April 1, 2023.
Performance management’s intent at Axelerant is to ensure holistic feedback and support through recurring relevant feedback. Your responses help us ensure that this intent succeeds.
Why holistic feedback
When @Ankur Gupta, @Vishakha Pinge , and @Michael Cannon (Unlicensed) were retrospecting upon the 2021-22 Performance Management program, they concluded that we were creating views of people that didn’t act in Axelerant’s best interest as per Being Axelerant.
They discussed situations like team members with high-percentage KPIs yet lacking behavioral skills like demonstrating teamwork, clear communication, or respectfully handling conflicts. The team member’s growth was limited, or there was interpersonal tension. Then there was the inverse scenario of team members of Being Axelerant | Our Values and Principles. Yet, their role-driven KPIs poorly reflect their functional skills like coding, budgeting, documenting, etc.
Further, we found data that demonstrated a lack of recognition for a person’s contribution or impact to Being Axelerant | Our Purpose, such as empowering team members or creating excellent customer experiences.
Therefore, instead of going deeper into role-based KPIs to determine a person’s fit with Axelerant, we are stepping back to consider the team member as a whole.
The following three concepts form Axelerant’s holistic feedback framework.
Good Axelerant role model
Impact–goals planned and carried through
Role competence
By creating a common framework for our people–one that balances strengths and weaknesses–by what matters most to Axelerant, we’re consistently providing a safer environment to engage within. Further, when we have a new role, we can immediately provide feedback for that person to consider and act upon without being delayed by system setup or troublesome KPI definitions and data acquisition.
Success measurements
Success at Axelerant is being a role model through demonstrating collaboration and competency in your role while also making a positive difference for our community and clients.
Good role model
A good role model at Axelerant constantly demonstrates accountability, capability, coachability, and working well with others as shared within Being Axelerant | Our Values and Principles.
Every Axelerant team member will have the three-question Performance Promoter Score (PPS) framework asked about them. The first question is required, as the other two provide supplemental information about the score.
How do you feel about recommending them to work with others?
Why do you feel this recommendation level?
When relevant, what would it take to raise your recommendation by one level?
The scoring options are standardized by recent National Institute of Health research about the correlation between emoticons and sentiment clustering.
The Good role model KPI threshold is 8.2, with Moderately positive being the desired sentiment between peers. When a person is below the threshold, that coach will investigate why to help the person overcome the situation.
More at Using the Performance Promoter Score to Measure and Improve Performance.
Personal impact
The second holistic team member metric is personal impact, as in how you make a positive difference amongst the Axelerant community or for our clients. A person’s impact typically aligns with organizational, domain, group, or team goals.
A person’s impact could be demonstrated by planning and executing documentation updates, operationalizing a process, performing above and beyond, creating and leading a program, developing a proof of concept, producing contributions, etc. These impacts can also be experiments or short-term high-priorities to help Axelerant or its stakeholders overcome a new situation.
There is no defined listing of personal impact doings because contributions, interests, priorities, requirements, trends, etc. differ per person. Aspects within an Individual Development Plan could be considered impact areas, given a direct correlation to Axelerant’s community or clients.
Using the following three questions, Personal impact scoring follows that of the Good role model.
How do you feel about their positive impact on Axelerant best interests?
Why do you feel this impact level?
When relevant, what would it take to raise the impact feeling by one level?
The Personal impact KPI threshold is 8.2, with Moderately positive being the desired sentiment between peers. When a person is below the threshold, that coach will investigate why to help the person overcome the situation.
Role competency
Optionally, we use one or two role-based Key Performance Indicatorsarchived for the third and final holistic metric. These Key Performance Indicators (KPI) intend to measure what genuinely matters to Axelerant of a role and ensure we are working to that event than effort dilution through gamification or well-intended than effective effort.
Axelerant typically collects KPI data through the digital exhaust we create in our day-to-day work. Therefore, no human interaction is required, like utilization information based on billing time versus time logged or group satisfaction ratings.
Official KPI Data Sets
Reference
Data Collection & Frequency
Role model and impact sentiments are collected each quarter through a 360º peer group using the Quarterly Peer Feedback form.
The 360º peer group, of up to 7-people, is provided by the UTIL0360 Team Member Peers automation. The script looks up reporting and career managers, coaches, coachees, engagement stakeholders, department and group satisfaction peers, hiring managers, and skip-levels as relevant. When the peer count beyond managers exceeds 6-people, then a random assortment of folks is selected.
Read a 360º peer-group-related comment for more.
Monthly Performance Awareness
At the start of each month, we will send automated messaging via Slack to notify you of your performance management scoring. You might consider Performance Coaching or zzz Mentoringarchived to help refine your efforts or your Individual Development Plan. Our Performance Coaches can help you with self-awareness, role expectations, and other personal and professional development training each month.