Major Insurance Company Uses 360 Pulse™ To Provide Feedback To Its Leaders
Within many HR organisations there exists a healthy tension between those charged with recruiting talent from outside sources and those tasked with identifying and developing internal talent. This major insurance company, with many thousands of employees and agents across the world, was in the process of changing its corporate culture, and easing that tension by improving employee development, and strengthening its focus on performance management.

Attracting, retaining and developing best in class talent is a huge challenge for many companies, especially those operating in the Financial Services sector. From the board through every layer of senior management, commitment was gained to making the preparation of employees for both existing and future challenges a strategic initiative. The challenge was: “How?”.

“The company has grown significantly and because its businesses are complex and diversified, we, like so many other companies, have realized the need to develop our people as aggressively as we can,” said the head of executive development. “While we still need to complement that with bringing in outside talent, we recognize the need to expedite the development of internal talent and to identify where our gaps are, both immediate and longer term.”

The overall strategy was set to evolve their senior level Training and Development and Succession Planning processes to a comprehensive Talent Management process. While the Succession Planning process was already in place and substantial management training and development was already taking place, the magnitude of the task was fully appreciated and a 3 to 5 year timeline was established for the transition.

The first step was defining the leadership framework, a competency model defining competencies and behaviors known to be critical for success in the organisation. Once we defined the competency model, we asked the logical question – how are we going to be able to assess employees and determine if they are living these competencies or where the gaps are?”.

We decided to choose a partner to design and implement an online web-based 360 Feedback process. “While we had worked with [paper based] 360 Feedback programs before, we wanted to introduce a process that would enable us to provide this tool to all our leaders, not merely the few that we could administer manually.

After looking at 20 different offerings, the company selected 360 Pulse™ from Pilat. The software was only part of the implementation challenge. The company and Pilat also worked together to ensure that:

• the questionnaires were well designed so that they elicited truly useful and actionable feedback linked directly to the Leadership Framework
• the process and reporting focused on driving and enabling focused individual development
• the feedback was well used. Merely giving leaders feedback does not drive development; there has to be a process via which they engage with the feedback and turn it into development activity that they commit to and implement.

The system is installed in-house behind a firewall. A central administrator can, in a matter or minutes, create a new project, assign a selected list of individuals to it and launch them. The administrator can choose create and choose from multiple questionnaires, scales, source categories, processes, chasing protocols, reporting options, etc. All administration is then managed by the system; participants are e-mailed with instructions and directed to one of a number of web-sites (each tailored to different purposes); participants nominate providers who are also automatically engaged in the process. No system training is required. Once the data is collected and ready, reports can be produced in hard copy or made available to the participants via the web.

Approximately two years on, and based on impressive acceptance of the process and development results, the company has upgraded the system to enable it to extend the coverage into other parts of the business and to levels other than senior leadership.

Throughout this period, the company was reviewing its top talent and developing plans to better deploy that talent. However, other information needed about the individuals was largely collected and reported on manually, and was often incomplete or out of date. The company is now integrating Succession Pulse™, a web-based Talent Management module, into 360 Pulse™ and thinking about extending into Performance Management.