Award Honors Firm’s Highly Successful Approach to Performance Management
REDW LLC, one of the Southwest’s 10 largest certified public accounting and business consulting firms, is pleased to announce that the Firm was recently selected as the winner of the 2016 BDO Alliance USA Conference’s “Most Valuable Innovative Idea†award. The designation was a result of the creative and highly successful performance evaluation process created by REDW’s Audit & Consulting department, as presented at the conference by A&C Operations Manager, Jessica Taylor. Â
The BDO Alliance USA Conference, held annually, brings together more than 1,000 BDO Alliance members to network and discuss updates to best practices in accounting and auditing, tax, human resources, marketing and business development.
During her presentation, Jessica quoted a 2015 Harvard Business Review study that showed that the typical performance management process, which can involve completing forms, holding meetings and creating ratings, can take close to 2 million hours a year to complete.
“As we studied how those hours were spent, we realized that many of them were eaten up by leaders’ discussion behind closed doors about the outcomes of the process. We wondered if we could somehow shift our investment of time from talking to ourselves about ratings to talking to our people about their performance and careers – from a focus on the past to a focus on the future,†said Jessica.
To address that issue, REDW developed an approach that gathers feedback from multiple sources, takes less than five minutes to complete and encourages frequent coaching conversations to fuel future performance.
Three key features helped make the process successful:
- The ability to request feedback from multiple Managers or Principals instantly
- The ability to quickly access and submit feedback from a laptop, tablet or cell phone
- The ability to easily share the feedback with Managers and Career Advisors
Managers and Principals receive an email requesting an evaluation for a specific Team Member and Engagement. Because the documents reside in the Cloud, they can be completed and submitted virtually anywhere – from laptop, tablet or cell phone. The prepopulated fields and questions display prompts to guide them through the form. Upon completion, they simply click “sign and submit.â€
In the first quarter of using this system, REDW sent over 100 evaluation requests. Thirty percent were completed in the first 24 hours, taking less than five minutes to complete. By the end, they had achieved a 99 percent completion rate – more than 3 times the typical completion rate under their old system.
“We’re honored our efforts are being recognized by fellow BDO Alliance USA members,†said Mike Allen, REDW Principal and Head of the Audit & Consulting practice. “At REDW, innovation has been a welcome challenge, and we’re embracing that challenge as an opportunity to innovate all aspects of our business, from product/service offerings, sales and marketing, talent management, training and development, and process and technology. A huge kudos to our team, as we proactively take on the role of change agents to improve service delivery, client and talent experience.â€
