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It doesn’t take much effort to find a business press article that encourages the elimination of ratingbased performance management (PM) systems. TIAA is a Fortune 100 financial institution with 12,800 employees that manages investment accounts for more than 5 million people employed in 16,000 institutions. It decided to approach anecdotal employee dissatisfaction with their PM processes more deliberately, designing a multistage, multi-year research project. “Asking the right question to start the research process was critical,” shared Michelle Shail, manager of talent management at TIAA. “Should we eliminate formal reviews and/ or ratings?” was the wrong question, even though it was, in part, the annual review ratings that caused the dissatisfaction among employees. TIAA discovered that the right question was actually two questions: “How can we develop a PM process that will drive desired business outcomes?” and “What PM process will best fit our culture?” Their first step was to conduct quantitative and qualitativeanalyses of employee survey data from the prior five years. It partnered with i4CP to develop insights, connections, and guidance. Based on employee survey feedback, TIAA discovered that many employees found that the current PM process didn’t help them improve their performance—one of its key goals. TIAA tallied time spent in the PM process and discovered the 71,800 hours was mostly spent on compliance documentation, not conversations between manager and employee. Additionally, employees were concerned about eliminating the rating system because it was integrated into their compensation system. TIAA conducted direct benchmarking interviews with human resources (HR) professionals in more than 35 companies to help design a possible new system. Based on the HR interviews, TIAA learned that any great PM system contained three elements: (1) individual goal setting aligned with organizational goals, (2) coaching and feedback from both managers and peers, and (3) reviews that truly differentiated performance and transparently linked compensation with performance. “Every organizational culture is different. Ours is very focused on developing detailed documentation. Yet we discovered that employees and their managers wanted PM information condensed and put in snippets.” TIAA designed a new PM system that focused on increasing coaching and feedback; incorporated accountability not only for business results, but also individual behaviors; simplified documentation; and increased management capability. To testcomponents of the new program, TIAA launched three different pilots (research studies). The first pilot tested the “Get Feedback” tool for peer evaluations—research had revealed that employees wanted to control who evaluated them and who had access to that evaluation. The second pilot evaluated the critical behaviors list. It learned that nine key competencies or behaviors were critical to achieving company goals. They grouped the desired behaviors into three categories quality, people, and character. The third pilot evaluated replacing the formal mid-year review with two brief check-in conversations, which were flexible in terms of timing but focused on employee goals and behaviors to accomplish those goals. They used focus groups to determine if the check-in interviews of the new process were taking place between employees and their managers and whether these provided the desired personal development feedback. They used discussions with 49 volunteer employee ambassadors, who were both passionate about the new process as well as strong performers, for additional feedback and to get critical buy-in among employees. While it’s early yet to determine if this new PM program will be successful, one thing it is doing is saving time—one to three hours per year for every employee and 5 to 18 hours for every manager