Strategic HR Technology Investment: A Comprehensive Checklist for Global HR Teams
Experian is the leading global information services company, providing data and analytical tools to clients around the world. They help businesses manage credit risk, prevent fraud, target marketing offers and automate decision-making. Experian also allows people to check their credit report and credit score and protect against identity theft. In 2016, for the third year running, they were named one of the “World’s Most Innovative Companies” by Forbes magazine.
Increase employee engagement
Reduction in performance review efforts
Employee participation within 2 weeks
Experian Data Quality, one of Experian’s business units, is tasked with ensuring that contact data is accurate and fit for the purposes at hand. With offices in Boston, San Francisco, and New York, the unit’s employees share the goals of educating businesses in the power of their data and providing software and solutions in order to help automate that process.
Clearly, tracking progress toward those goals is essential to Experian Data Quality’s employee performance and growth. But it hasn’t always been easy.
When Mark Nemeth, Head of Performance Optimization, began his position at Experian Data Quality, he found himself wading (or, more likely, drowning) in a sea of Word documents–one for each employee’s annual performance review.
“The documents would get lost,” Nemeth explains, “with lots of going back and forth. There would be multiple versions across different emails, with printouts not matching attachments. There was no process to reference those documents and no way to do so systematically, even if we wanted to.”
This review “system” had to be started over from scratch every year, the whole process taking four months from “So where did that document go?” to performance review, goal setting, and follow-up conversations.
It’s no surprise that Nemeth was concerned about lost productivity. Each employee was devoting a third of the year to an annual review process. Even more concerning was the employes’ lack of engagement in the process: “They were complaining about the lack of apparent connection between individual goals and company goals because we did not have a central system to track our goals and performance,” Nemeth noted, adding that when employees become dissatisfied and disheartened, employee engagement goes down.
“There were a lot of costs to doing performance review the old way.”
Mark Nemeth didn’t want to start from scratch. He wanted a performance management solution that would integrate with Experian’s existing HR information system. “I wanted other bells and whistles: such as gamification. Engagedly had everything on my dream list.”
Primarily, Nemeth wanted to develop a way to measure engagement: “Employee engagement is this amorphous thing that everyone talks about but can’t figure out how to measure. But it’s the number one indicator of how successful an employee will be.”
Through Engagedly’s gamification features, employees at Experian Data Quality can assign points to one another through the use of custom badges. Employees can give someone a “neighbor badge,” for example, for organizing fundraising for a local charity or setting up a staff lunch. In addition, staff can add “resource badges” to the profiles of those workers who take the initiative to help their fellow employees solve problems.
“Now we have brought science to the psychology,” Nemeth says, indicating the visual ease with which he can track employee engagement across the business. “Nobody gets promoted just for doing their job. They need to grow in their career. When it comes time for promotions, senior management can pull up any profile and tell at a glance how many badges an employee has earned.”
Engagedly has been effective for measuring and tracking engagement and was smooth to implement as well. The software is, according to Nemeth, “very user-friendly and self- explanatory”; within two weeks everyone was up and running, with 100% employee participation.
Nemeth reports that he has seen employee engagement and satisfaction improve by nearly 10% and anticipates seeing these numbers translate into improved employee performance as well. “From the process standpoint,” he remarks, “we have revolutionized the efficiency of reviews.” A process that once took four months now takes four weeks. And best of all, measuring employee growth isn’t limited to annual reviews. Whereas the old system provided no way outside of the annual review process to align individual goals, Engagedly has created a “living, breathing system” that connects performance to goals all year long.
Engagedly has created a “living, breathing system” that connects performance to goals all year long.”
Nemeth reports that he has seen employee engagement and satisfaction improve by nearly 10% and anticipates seeing these numbers translate into improved employee performance as well. “From the process standpoint,” he remarks, “we have revolutionized the efficiency of reviews.” A process that once took four months now takes four weeks. And best of all, measuring employee growth isn’t limited to annual reviews. Whereas the old system provided no way outside of the annual review process to align individual goals, Engagedly has created a “living, breathing system” that connects performance to goals all year long.
And this is just the beginning. “The support I’ve gotten from Engagedly’s team has been world class,” Nemeth says. “I am in active talks to expand the use of Engagedly to the rest of Experian. My dream is to go global with the tool, expanding it to our international offices.”
