Aspectus is a global brand, marketing and communications agency who work with the technology, financial services, capital markets, energy, industrial and professional services sectors.
We spoke to Tamsin Jackson, People and Experience Director, to understand how they improved their performance development processes with StaffCircle’s intelligent communication tools and continuous feedback.
Making communication easy
Aspectus has experienced large growth in recent years and as such they needed a performance management platform that would support their growth.
Tamsin explained: “We were growing quite significantly, from what felt like a smaller business where there was less process. Things such as reviews were done by your manager, but each team had a slightly different process and nothing was centralised.
We used emails for company-wide communication, but this only worked up to a certain point, and as you grow, the more emails you get. We didn’t want our employees to skip over, lose or miss important company emails. We needed an internal hub that we could record of all communications and important announcements or events.”
The platform’s company feed allows customers to post important information to company-wide or custom feeds so that employees never miss a memo again. “StaffCircle allows you to resend [a communication] to everyone that hasn’t opened it just help increase engagement, so that’s a useful function.” With the option to ‘like’ and comment, leaders can see which employees are interacting and which aren’t.
Paperless performance management
To meet their growth, the Aspectus team needed to digitise their performance management processes. Whilst performance management was always completed, their processes were inefficient. They were looking for a solution that could offer autonomy and a clear record of their employee’s performance, without the need for countless sheets of paper.
StaffCircle’s digital platform automates the entire performance management process. Allowing customers to drive performance management with best-practice automated processes, backed with dedicated engagement and development tools. Performance management has gone paperless, enabling real-time custom insights and businesses are reaping the rewards.
Tamsin shared the Aspectus experience: “Objectives and reviews were all done professionally before, but there were times where they had been recorded on a piece of paper and put to the back of a cupboard or the bottom of a drawer, only to be found at the employees next year’s review.
Now, with the StaffCircle platform it’s front of mind. People have more ownership of their own objectives and goals for the year ahead, as well as allowing everyone to have a record of reviews and progress as well.”
Complete team visibility
The move to a digital performance management platform has led to clarity for everyone at Aspectus, with the whole HR team now able access valuable data insights.
Tamsin said: “Beforehand, sector heads were only able to see the progress of those they directly managed. Now in StaffCircle, they can have an overview of their whole team’s performance and objectives, enabling an overview of team skills, for training opportunities and recruitment.
Continuing: “We use a lot of the reports for the board pack. The 9-box grid is really useful because that’s a combination of performance and potential of each employee. It’s helpful to see an overview of the team or the entire company to see where they sit on the grid and where people are in terms of their objectives.
One of the biggest elements of the reporting we use is the engagement statistic that allows us to report on the communications we send out. It’s a lot higher than it would have been if we were just sending things out via email.”
Continuous feedback
StaffCircle has seen many HR leaders turn away from the traditional annual appraisal in favour of continuous feedback. It provides a better employee experience, opening up real-time communication on progress to improve engagement around performance and development.
Tamsin shared with us the Aspectus slogan, ‘Feedback is Fertiliser’ which the company embraces as their way of helping their employees to grow, by providing feedback and reviews to employees in a way that is beneficial to them.
She explained: “We very much go by feedback is fertiliser. For us, this means that we try and have 360 feedback, and give transparent feedback. Everybody gains feedback as they go along, throughout the day, month, week, and year. By the time they get to their annual review, all the feedback is in there and nothing should come as a surprise. It’s a positive way of enabling employees to grow, develop and improve.
We need to know how and where those areas of improvement are, so feedback is essential, as is delivering it in the right way.”
To enable Aspectus to provide feedback, that is positive, timely and enables engagement and development, we asked how StaffCircle support.
Tamsin shared: “StaffCircle gives us the platform to put the feedback in. We try to give feedback in person and over the phone too, just to ensure that the tonality is right. Working remotely, I think that sometimes gets lost in translation so it’s important. But I think where StaffCircle comes into its own is the ability to record the feedback – it’s great to be able to access that comment or review later on.”
Performance management in 2024
Finally, we asked how Tamsin, and Aspectus, hope to continue succeeding with the support of StaffCircle into 2024 and beyond.
Tamsin finished: “We’ll continue to record everyone’s KPIs and objectives and use StaffCircle as our people database. Whether that’s to look at holidays and absence or ensure everybody has up-to-date and precise recorded reviews. I want to ensure the team are clear about their goals for the upcoming year, and their line managers know their goals and how to support their progress.
The communication hub is huge for us so making sure that continues too. All the communications we send out need to go through StaffCircle, and people need to feel natural and open to going in the hub to browse whether they want to know something.
You can see the huge amount of data our StaffCircle platform holds for everyone across the business, at macro and micro level, and we use it for so many more things than that, so I just plan to continue doing so moving forward.”
If you’re interested in how StaffCircle can support transform your organisation’s performance management through improved engagement and digital insights, get in touch with the team.