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Published December 2008

Harbor Group Management Co. Automates, Elevates Performance Management

 

  Kellye Whitney

An organization's size doesn't limit its talent management efforts. For instance, diversified property management organization Harbor Group Management Co. — which manages shopping centers, office buildings and multifamily residential properties throughout the United States — has some of the same performance management concerns for its roughly 500 employees as an organization 10 times that size. These concerns include how to keep employees challenged, engaged and simultaneously build enough opportunities for them to grow into.

The company also is concerned with maximizing and promoting performance. Ronald Bates, former vice president of human resources at Harbor Group Management Co., said the company chose to make talent management part of its mission not only to attract and retain the best employees but to promote a culture that values integrity and success. Accelerating employee performance is one of the best ways to enable organization success, and that meant the organization had to limit the time spent on its semiannual review process.

To develop consistent, enterprise-wide processes emphasizing employee development and rewarding performance, Harbor automated its performance management system, significantly reducing the time needed for semiannual reviews.

"The company has always taken performance management very, very seriously," Bates said. "When I first came aboard, we had a paper system. As the company grew and became more diverse geographically, it became harder to manage. We made the decision to invest in performance management software that would allow us to improve the workflow of employee assessments and the product delivered to the employee through the review."

The change allowed Harbor to design performance reviews for each of its job families using competencies and performance measures inherent to each position. Revised forms kept managers focused on the goals and objectives agreed to by employees and managers, as well as the traits necessary to meet those objectives. As a result, Bates said some of the company's managers can spend more time with each employee and do a better job coaching and mentoring.

As part of the semiannual review process, Bates prepared a report and met with the company's partners to discuss the company's talent landscape. Before the performance management system was automated, the process took some 135 hours, which included collecting the necessary forms, coaching managers and finally preparing the report and getting ready for the partner meeting.

"It was horrendous, and I had to face that in six more months," Bates said. "We talked about almost everyone, the high performers, folks that are meeting expectations and, of course, what are the plans for the folks who are not meeting expectations? When you look at the paper form, the standard deviation between a highly ranked employee and a lowly ranked employee was terrible. The new system narrowed standard deviation down to a perfect bell-shaped curve — plus, it took me 16 hours to do."