$($This case study was written by Jeff Orlando Chief Learning Officer, Leader Development and

Performance at Deloitte and Erica Bank, Deloitte's Performance Management Leader.

The Case study was published in SHRM Executive Network.$)$

$"$It was an investment of $1\mathrm{.}8$ million hours across the firm that didn't fit our business needs

anymore." That's how partner Rob Massey, Deloitte Tax LLP$,$ described the performance

management system he used for his first $12$ years at Deloitte. "Once a year, we looked back at

what people did and then created a label for it$."$

For the last $18$ months, Massey and $2,000$ of his colleagues in our tax business have been

piloting a new way of assessing and managing our people's performance, along with thousands

in other parts of our professional services business. It's been so successful that we're rolling it

out across our entire $70,000-$person organization over the next year. The key parts: check$-$ins,

frequent conversations between team leaders and team members about the work; performance

snapshots, a reliable and frequent assessment of individual performance; and pulse surveys, a

quick tool for team leaders to assess if they are creating the conditions for high performance on

their teams.

The power in this innovation: combining what we know about two dimensions of human

behavior:

$-$How$-$to$-$engage$-$and motivate$-$people$-$the primary channel here being

conversations with others

How to $-$collect and use$-$reliable$-$assessments of individual performance$-$to

help our people and the business.

Put together, it's working. Massey says, "Today we're very forward$-$looking. It's about strengths

and real$-$time communication."

First and foremost, this system is analog. It's about conversations. That may have been the

biggest leap we took in reinventing our performance management system. We've learned that

words can be as powerful as numbers; that data only tell part of the story. We need to let our

people, their managers, and their counselors tell the rest.

We haven't moved away from data altogether, the "digital" in the system. In fact, we've

doubled$-$down. We deploy it regularly and use a variety of tools that bring in perspective from

our people and leaders and use them to help manage the people element of our business in real$-$

time, to identify what conversations are needed, and to help our people understand how they can

grow and advance

Let's zoom in on the experience of one of our people to see the system in action. Here's Kay, a

Authorize the system to edit this file.

Authorize