This anecdote is a part of a series from the People Matters June cover: Travails of Team building. The story focuses on learning the first principles of attracting and enabling the core team from entrepreneurs. Read it in two parts Travails of team building: Learning from startups and Travails of team building: Enabling, not retaining.

From a business planning standpoint, our business planning cycle is a trimester cycle. Every four months we get together and assess how we have done in the last four months, and assess what we need to do in the next four months to ensure we stay ahead of the curve. But what we realized was that if our business itself is regrouping every four months to assess performance – the performance management system cannot be a yearly cycle. It is absolutely impossible for people to set their goals for the year in April when every four months it is going to be revisited. So last year we took a conscious call and aligned our performance management system with our business planning cycle – which is every four months. It was a huge step – what we were saying that every four months, entire organization gets into a goal setting exercise, the entire organization reviews and evaluates the people against the goals set for the trimester. 

For an organization which is 6000-people strong – to be able to do goal setting and performance reviews and ratings every trimester is a huge exercise. The initial reaction was that it was going to take a lot of time, it will be an administrative hassle, but we solved all of that by putting the right technology in place, the right education for all our managers – so much so that we are able to do the entire goal-setting as well as goal-setting for the next quarter as well as performance review for the previous quarter in a matter of 15 days. To be able to turn around such a massive exercise of goal-setting and performance review for a 6000-member organization over a period of 15 days every 4 months – I don’t think there are too many organizations which can do that.

It was important for us to do that because otherwise our PMS would not speak to our business planning exercise. I would see a huge difference in terms of productivity of people, efficiency of people, and alignment of people with organization goals and vision.