2014 HRM Impact Award Winner

Message from Cargill’s Chief HR Officer and Corporate Vice President, LeighAnne Baker

Cargill is honored to receive recognition for Everyday Performance Management, which represents an industry best practice. Focusing on ongoing one-on-one discussions and coaching ensures continued strong performance from both Cargill employees and teams. Everyday Performance Management enables both managers and employees to be more focused, agile, and aligned with our business strategies creating positive outcomes for all employees and Cargill as a whole.

PROJECT TITLE

Cargill's Everyday performance Management

PROJECT SUMMARY

In 2010, Cargill's complex external environment was changing rapidly, requiring the company to become more agile, reduce complexity, and simplify processes in order to focus on creating value to our customers. In response to these business priorities, Cargill implemented Everyday Performance Management (PM), an evidence-based practice that leveraged extensive internal and external research that pointed at the opportunity to simplify PM, adopt a new mindset, and focus on what really matters.

The design and implementation of Cargill’s Everyday PM followed three key principles: (1) Focus on Everyday PM. Our central premise was that day-to-day manager and employee practices are more critical to effective PM than are annual, event-based procedures; (2) Strengthen employee and manager capabilities. Investing in strengthening PM-related capabilities of both managers and employees enables Everyday PM. These include building trust, effective communication, and effectively delivering and receiving feedback; and (3) Simplify PM Requirements. This principle is meant not only to save time and labor costs, but also to reduce the extent to which PM is viewed as an annual administratively-complex event that contributes very little to individual and organizational performance. The primary focus of Everyday PM is more frequent manager-employee one-on-one discussions throughout the year. The simplified process has less system requirements in order to dedicate more time for collaboration between the manager and employee to strengthen the relationship, build trust, and increase employee engagement.

After one full year, an evaluation of the employee experience and engagement with Everyday performance Management shows that we have successfully streamlined and simplified our PM process by focusing on ongoing employee-manager discussions, reducing administrative requirements and removing ratings. These changes have resulted in increases in both manager and employee satisfaction and engagement.