Using EPM to Advance Corporate Values
Accuracy, fairness, and timeliness are the key goals that any quality newspaper strives to achieve in its news coverage. They should also be the key goals of any employee performance report.
In 2004, that was the challenge facing the HR executives at Lee Enterprises (NYSE: LEE), a century-old company with a passion for local newspapers. At the time, Lee’s 6,700 employees, working in 44 daily newsrooms and 200 weekly and specialty publications in 19 states, added up to one huge human resources headache when it was time to conduct annual performance appraisals.
Now, all full-time and regular part-time employees in Lee’s workforce of 11,000 get regular, efficient evaluations of their work and development, using web-based employment performance management (EPM) software. And Lee’s Human Resources managers can generate relevant, high-quality performance reports faster than Britney Spears can generate headlines.
More importantly, Lee has found that its corporate values and the goals of its employees are better aligned, thanks to an integrated, efficient EPM process.
Lee’s search for a better approach to employee performance management began in 2002, after Lee acquired Howard Publications. With this acquisition, Davenport, Iowa-based Lee became the 12th largest newspaper company in the U.S. Key to the successful acquisition of Howard Publications was Lee’s focus on maintaining company values, while integrating a variety of corporate cultures. The addition of these 2,400 new employees forced the company to look for better ways to manage its workforce. And they've kept on growing. Today, Lee Enterprises is America's 4th largest newspaper company.
Lee has always felt strongly about employee satisfaction and development. But it was suddenly taking under its wing a large group of employees it didn’t know—and who weren’t familiar with Lee’s company values. That made it particularly important to have in place an effective and universal employment performance management process.
Lee’s HR managers knew that an EPM process would give employees and their supervisors the opportunity to discuss both individual and corporate objectives, and to jointly plan ways to meet these objectives. These plans help the employee develop, and they also help Lee promote its company values and meet its corporate goals. That’s why an effective EPM process is so important.
Some of its new enterprises were not regularly conducting employee performance appraisals—some had never done so. In most sites, appraisals were being conducted using paper forms or word processors. Others were done using an online (but not web-based) system.
The first step in creating an effective EPM process was to find ways to meet Lee’s policy commitment that every regular part-time and full-time employee has, at a minimum, an annual review. So Lee’s HR team set out to find new tools to further assist them in managing their expanding workforce.
Regional HR managers are responsible for several enterprises and work primarily out of one or two central locations in each region. Lee management looked for an evaluation toolkit that would allow them to centralize and amalgamate the patchwork of evaluation processes in use throughout the company, so that each location would use the same system, and so that regional managers could manage the process and compare results across the company.
It quickly became clear that an online process would best fit the company’s demands. And early adoption of technological solutions was already part of the corporate tradition at Lee—over 30 years ago, one of Lee’s newspapers was the first in the world to be produced totally by computer.
Lee isn’t alone in trying to promote its corporate objectives through more efficient EPM. Gartner Research predicts that the EPM software market will demonstrate at least a 15% compound annual growth rate through 2008, as companies turn to web-based technology to improve the way they grow and develop their human capital. “Studies have shown that there are clear impact results from strong performance management practices, and EPM software is an important enabler of these practices,” Gartner analyst James Holincheck wrote in a strategic analysis report in June 2004. (Employee Performance Management Software MarketScope: Strategic Analyst’s Report, June 10, 2004 by James Holincheck)
Lee managers went looking for a solution that met specific criteria that included:
- The ability to access forms online from any location
- A centralized process
- A solution that was intuitive and simple to use
- The ability to produce high-quality appraisals
- A solution that would be cost-effective
To select its EPM solution, Lee’s HR managers established criteria to use as a baseline, and began to compare EPM software vendors. Other factors such as adaptability, ease of use, and flexibility were considered.
The company selected a product that met or exceeded each of its selection criteria— Halogen's eAppraisal. eAppraisal is a web-based employee performance appraisal solution that offers centralized access to past performance reviews and objectives and authoring tools to improve appraisal quality. The product fit well with Lee’s existing HR structure, and offered a solution that would assure timely performance feedback to employees.
Lee already had an Internet-based platform in place on which to build its new performance review regime. In 2003, Lee launched an internal HR resource center called LINK—Lee Information, News and Knowledge.
Using Halogen eAppraisal and LINK, the company is helping its employees—new and old, centralized and far-flung—to understand better Lee’s corporate mission, and their individual roles in fulfilling that mission.
“In that way, this new process is helping to harmonize some of the differences in culture among our newsrooms. It’s helping us create a more integrated workforce,” says Kelly Livingston, an HR generalist at Lee.
Halogen eAppraisal was integrated with LINK in March 2004, and slowly expanded to cover almost all employees. Employee response has been positive, Mrs. Livingston says. “Supervisors are finding it really easy to utilize,” she adds. “And employees are able to use the system to keep notes of their accomplishments, so it is easy for them to write their annual self-appraisals.”
Each employee completes a self-appraisal as part of an annual performance review, rating themselves on the same competencies that their managers use for evaluation. Based on a combination of the employee self-appraisal and the manager’s evaluation, a development plan is created for each full-time employee.
The new system has allowed the HR department to ensure better, more comparative appraisals, and spend less time administrating the performance review process. The resulting appraisals are accurate and the process is fully automated, making it very easy to manage.
A key benefit for management is that regional vice-presidents and HR managers can easily do comparative reporting, by looking at a specific region and analyzing its performance compared with other regions. “This makes it easier for the HR manager who is not at the same property everyday,” Mrs. Livingston says. “Administratively, it allows a much easier way for the company to make sure performance appraisals are taking place and are being done successfully.”
Lee’s HR managers expect to see real, measurable data to back up current anecdotal evidence, which is telling them that the process is working much better than before.
For example, they know that as of the end of 2004, all of Lee’s full-time employees were getting regular performance appraisals under this initiative. And 100% of its newly acquired newspapers were conducting performance appraisals, up from 85% prior to implementation of the eAppraisal system.
Not only does the new system make annual evaluations easier and more accurate, but it is also improving communication between Lee managers and their staff. “This new process adds a step for some supervisors, because some of them weren’t doing formal evaluations in the past,” Mrs. Livingston notes, “but this process has already sparked a lot of great conversations between supervisors and their employees.”
So far, Lee’s new web-based employee performance management system is exceeding the company’s expectations. The appraisal process is faster, more accurate, and universal across the company. It is improving manager-employee communications. It is also contributing to the creation of a seamless workforce across Lee’s many corporate offices, working to achieve the same corporate goals. And that helps Lee get on with the business of producing great-quality periodicals and newspapers.
