Performance Management with 2,500 employees

The largest manufacturing operation of a Swiss pharmaceutical giant was implementing a global initiative to combine LEAN Management with a Process Oriented Organization (POO). The company’s leaders were influenced by Kotter’s Leading Change and his concept for flat hierarchies posed a challenge to the company’s philosophy of providing every employee with an individual performance review. After the restructuring to POO, in some instances, leaders found themselves with 70 or more direct reports.

As a solution, we helped developed the ‘Peer Review’, where a group of technicians would rate themselves anonymously, coordinated by an elected speaker and have individual performance ratings as a result.  

The change management program around the introduction of Peer Review, which affected more than 2,500 employees in the Swiss plant and which was initially met with a lot of resistance, lasted 24 months, and the results 5 years later are outstanding:

·      Employee Engagement is the best it has ever been (84%).

·      The implementation of the Peer Review process is seen as a success from both employees and management. Retention improved and the company was able to attribute productivity gains to higher engagement.

As a welcome side effect, the HR function turned from administrators to drivers of change and gained the ability to successfully drive many other changes that were necessary to make LEAN and the Process Oriented Organization a huge success for the company.