Customer delight

Case studies

RSA performance management survey

RSA, a FTSE 100 company and one of the world’s leading insurance groups, uses a performance management survey as an important measure of leadership and performance management. They chose ETS as their survey partner to achieve their strategic goal of embedding a high performance culture and achieving upper quartile leadership. The results are striking: overall effectiveness of performance management for the top 300 leaders increased from 74% in 2005 to 82% in 2008.

Five years ago, RSA started to instigate a culture change among their leadership. One of the objectives was improving the performance management culture across the global business. ETS developed a survey which helps measure the extent to which these processes were implemented from the point of view of the leaders’ teams, not the leaders themselves. Orlagh Hunt, Group HR Director, has been involved with the survey since its inception:

Over the five years ETS has helped RSA to refine the questions ensuring good questionnaire design, and has provided a very easily-administered survey with reports that are simple for leaders to understand. The survey and functionality of the administration system has been updated and refined to fit around changes in the business. This year, as the survey is widening to more parts of the global business, it will be available in a number of different languages.

The survey has been very well-received internally and has been a great way for RSA to keep performance management at the top of leaders’ agendas. Initially, the top two levels in the organisation were involved in the survey; a total of about 300 individuals globally. In 2008, the total number of staff surveyed was about 9,800 and this is expected to increase further in 2009. Says Orlagh:

I expect the survey will extend to more and more levels in the organisation. Now, it’s not the Group Corporate Centre that is pushing the regions to take the survey to all of their employees, they are choosing to do so as they see it as such a useful tool.

Performance management is markedly improved

The results show the extent to which leaders apply the practices themselves and drive the practices the next level down. Based on their results, leaders are given specific targets for improvement that are included in their goals – either improvement of lower scores or maintenance of already high scores.

Lower scores in the survey indicated where more development and support was needed by leaders – not surprisingly this was around the coaching and development plans aspects. The organisation provided coaching training to help address this, and they have seen year-on-year improvement in those scores. For the top 300 leaders in the organisation, results showed that scores increased for coaching and development from 51% in 2005 to 68% in 2008. Overall effectiveness of performance management for the same group increased from 74% in 2005 to 82% in 2008.

Satisfaction with the ETS solution

In ETS, RSA found an experienced provider that is cost effective and thorough in its approach. ETS continues to be RSA’s preferred partner after five years of working together.

ETS delivers on its promises and has gone beyond the call of duty to help out – always keen to be flexible to meet customers’ needs. They have delivered on time and on budget, and been very customer focused and supportive throughout. They offer very good technical solutions and the results are published very quickly after the survey. They are a great team to work with, creating a good atmosphere based on trust and the desire to do the best possible job.