Canadian HR Reporter

www.hrreporter.com 23 individual performance to corporate objectives. The HR team also needed a way to manage succession planning more strategically. It knew it needed to replace its outdated, paper-based performance management system with a platform that could generate actionable insights and support continuous feedback from the manager level to the C-suite. Letting talent shine Working with TELUS Employer Solutions, BGIS implemented a new performance management solution that it branded myOptimizer. Using various new tools, the leadership team can set goals, establish weightings and define success metrics quickly and easily. Managers can then cascade these objectives with specific performance goals for their teams that employees can view at any time. By enabling people managers to add ratings and comments throughout the year, the organization has successfully built a continuous coaching approach that is improving performance, creating transparency and enabling accountability for managers and individual contributors. Best of all, it's eliminating surprises at review time. To s u p p o r t t e a m m e m b e r s ' professional journeys, the system also allows them to indicate their career goals and work with their managers to build an individual development plan. To help the human resources team stay on top of things, the solution also tracks progress meetings between managers and employees. "Because the tool is easy to use and very intuitive, the organization has embraced it. The tool has provided a living, breathing document that managers can update as required and the team can easily track their performance," says Ron Shory, senior vice president of human resources at BGIS. In addition to saving time and improving employee engagement and retention, the new platform also generates the insights needed for strategic succession planning. The performance data feeds the company's myCareer tool, which allows leaders to define interim and planned successors for all key roles. By replacing the previous manual process, the company now has a consistent way to manage succession with the data insights to support ongoing decisions. The HR team can also use the data to design new ways of working while spotting gaps and opportunities in the succession strategies. Managers can spend more one-on- one time with employees, offering them the coaching and continuous feedback they need to achieve their goals. As performance has increased, so has employee engagement and retention. "During the pandemic, we have had over 95 per cent of our team set with objectives that are assessed and evaluated on an ongoing basis. This has sparked opportunities between leaders and individual contributors through their career development discussions. Even working virtually, the tool allows real- time feedback with the real-time results to make decisions easier," says Shory. Reimagining the future Just like its counterparts at the public utility, the BGIS team found that auto- m at i n g i n c o n s i s t e n t , i n e ffi c i e n t processes reduced the time spent on complex manual tasks and let the company focus on leveraging data to do more strategic work. In both organizations, the human resources teams are now working with advanced analytics to generate the workforce insights they need to support complex decision-making. Many global executives say workforce insights are a key output of their HR technology investments. These insights are helping human resources leaders to step into the role of workplace and workforce architects who are reimagining how and where work will be done, while preparing their organizations for a data-driven, talent- first future. CHRR

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