While simple performance management may sound like an impossibility, the HR team at Fannie Mae feels as though they’ve achieved a simple and focused system that pleases managers, employees, leadership, and the HR department.

Their simplifying process began with defining four elements:

Challenge: An overly complicated, cumbersome system.

Analysis: What truly matters at the core of performance management?

Solution: Improve process and technology to focus on what matters.

Results: Managers can focus on coaching and providing feedback.

Once defined, they built a homemade system and tested it on the leadership team. Confident about their plan, they moved forward with an overall implementation in 2015, but feedback came back negative. To redefine the system, they conducted focus groups, collected feedback from leadership individually, sought advice from Oracle, and researched best practices and benchmarks. They made changes in three areas—goal setting, ongoing feedback, and year-end processes.

Major Changes

• Goal Setting
  • Eliminated 60 percent of manager input fields
  • Upgraded to Oracle R10
• Ongoing Feedback
  • Encouraged one-on-ones in regular cadence
  • Made mid-year reviews required for off-track employees instead of everyone
• Year-end Process
  • Eliminated 360 system
  • Encouraged holistic view of performance
  • Enhanced reporting
  • Upgraded to R11

After these changes, the team collected feedback through random sampling and focus groups. They heard the following:

• Goal setting was easier and more useful.
• Managers enjoyed the simplification of mid-year reviews.
• Managers felt more invested in relationships with employees.
• Real-time feedback occurred more often, allowing for timely improvements and corrections.

Today, the Fannie Mae team serves as proof that simplifying processes can be difficult, but worth it. To learn more about the path to a simpler performance management system, watch the full presentation here.