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A 1-pager takeaway doc from Open Org for attendees of the Humaans People Leader breakfast event on the 26th Feb 2025.

‣ About Open Org…

TL;DR… We’re a 2-person team supporting small people teams to design & manage company culture that’s anchored on transparency, alignment & clarity; clarity on ‘how we do our best work together’. As of today, people teams can access…

🌐 Openorg.fyi; for Community, Culture Support & Culture Design Cohorts 🌐 Openverse.fyi; to discover & share the worlds best open-source people & culture resources 🌐 Peoplemetrics.fyi; to track & benchmark people metrics comparative to other startups & scaleups

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Table of Contents

💭 Why is Performance Management Such a Talking Point?

Quite simply, no one we speak to ever seems confident they have cracked or perfected ‘performance’ in their company. Best practice seems to change constantly, new tools & frameworks emerge promising improvements in efficiency & time saving which never quite seems to materialise. Couple this with the fact there’s often an underlying pushback from employees who resist the idea of being ‘rated’, it’s never really been something that companies feel like they are doing well.

That possibly is partly why there are so few public examples out there of how companies have successfully approached (and succeeded) with performance management practices…which in turn makes it harder for others to learn.

Luckily, we get to see inside a lot of companies; how they think, approach, and design performance management….

⚠️ The Problems We See

We’re lucky at Open Org to spend our time in two ways;

  1. Relentlessly researching & hunting public examples of how companies approach & design culture & people experience
  2. Working closely with our community & culture support clients on their culture & PX design, which often invariably includes ‘how we measure performance’.

Here’s what we see companies struggling with day-to-day…

Resonate? You’re not alone 🙏. These are challenges we talk about multiple times a week with startup / scale up people teams… and it’s highly contextual so we try to avoid bringing ‘best practice’ to the table in our conversations here and focus on answering a few key questions first…

🧠 How We Think About Performance Management

We think one of the reasons that performance management is such a challenge for folks is that one the one hand there’s so much ‘best practice’ out there to choose from when it comes to frameworks you often don’t know where to start. 9-box grid? or Performance-Potential Matrix? 🤷‍♂️

On the other hand, there are actually very, very few genuine examples of companies publicly talking about how they do this, and do it well. In some ways though, that’s not a bad thing when it comes to performance because our belief is that this is highly contextual, so taking a cut & paste approach to this is also one of the reasons many companies struggle to apply & execute it well in their own business.

With that in mind, we tend to follow the following guiding principles on performance…

✂️ Keep it contextual, not cut & paste; What works for one business won’t work for yours. Your culture, leaders, managers, and ways of work will heavily impact how this is operationalised. You need to design something around that.

🌐 Keep it transparent; People don’t like mystery and ambiguity, especially when it comes to someone assessing & rating them, and even more especially when it likely impacts their pay & promotion opportunities. How you approach performance & underperformance should be as open, clear and tangible to folks as possible.

⚙️ Keep it fresh; This is not a one-off project. It’s never finished. You need to think of performance as an evolutionary element of your business. It happens cyclically, and what works for you now, won’t necessarily work in 2 years. You need to build the appropriate behaviours, feedback loops and habits around performance to make sure you have something that can evolve with you.