Success Story
How we helped an award-winning non-profit tech firm structure their career pathways & refine their performance management framework.
About Simprints Technology
Simprints Technology (Simprints) is a nonprofit technology firm originating from the University of Cambridge. Established in 2012, out of a hackathon, the firm has built a strong ecosystem of partners including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID and Innovate UK. Their core product is a biometric fingerprint scanner paired with an Android app, customised for people in developing countries who lack proof of legal identities.
Challenge
Pre-empting retention issues as they scale
As Simprints began to grow rapidly, it almost quadrupled in size in less than a year to around 40 employees. However, with the rapid growth, HR issues started emerging in areas such as career progression.
Beyond career progression, issues in performance management also surfaced. Employees were unclear about how they should develop professionally and what they had to do to be eligible for promotion.
Knowing that these issues could result in potential employee retention problems in the coming years, Simprints realised that they needed to structure their career pathways and review their performance management framework. For starters, Simprints focused on the job function with the largest headcount, their engineering team.
Solution
An engineering career pathway integrated with a competency framework
While some engineers aspired to lead teams, others aspired to be the very best at their craft without the responsibility of people management. Thus, we developed a dual-track engineer career pathway to cater to their needs. Besides adjusting the general structure of the career pathway, specific definitions for each grade and track could be made clearer by integrating it with a competency framework. To that end, we developed 2 main competencies and 5 sub-competencies that provided a framework to clearly define what was required at each grade and track. This meant that employees were able to visualise what their careers could look like and what competencies were needed for each grade.
An updated performance management framework
The second aspect that we worked with Simprints on, was their performance management framework. Despite having a performance management framework, questions asked throughout the process were generic. This meant that feedback given was dependent on what the appraiser wanted to include. Furthermore, some team members felt that the process should also encourage individuals to build on their strengths. We therefore updated their questions to tie it back to the newly developed competency framework and also added questions that were reflective of their desire to capitalise on team members’ strengths. In doing so, individuals would have greater clarity on how they could develop professionally and whether they were eligible for promotion.
Additionally, some team members felt that an equally-weighted performance rating from all 360-feedback nominees was unfair. For example, team members could exploit the system by only nominating people who would rate them favourably in the 360-feedback. To address this, we recommended that only direct managers should be able to give performance ratings for the individual, after taking into account qualitative feedback given by 360-feedback nominees.
