Global investment bank Nomura revamped its performance management system to support new and existing staff following its acquisition of part of Lehman Brothers bank, delegates heard at the CIPD performance management conference.

Nomura bought Lehman’s following the American banks’s famous collapse in 2008 and took on thousands of new staff.

But former Lehman staff struggled with the existing performance management system, HR professionals from Nomura explained.

Former Lehman staff declined to use the “complicated external” performance management system and concerned about staff morale and performance, Nomura worked with employees and stakeholders to develop a new in-house tool, over a number of years.

Speaking at the conference, Anna Vasconcelos, vice president, talent strategy and performance, and Dr John Mahoney-Phillips, head of talent strategy and performance, said that the issue they faced was around user support.

Many employees experienced trouble with the existing system, but there was not enough support in place to handle the queries effectively, they said.

Mahony-Phillips said that talking to staff and managers, between countries, had been an important step.
This was enabled by opening a support centre in India, which was open early enough for Japanese employees to use it and late enough for staff in the New York offices.

Changes in evaluations were also made to create a globally unified system, especially in the mid, or interim, reviews. “You’re rating an individual and those who have a low rating are not going to be particularly motivated,” said Mahoney-Phillips.

“Your entire focus is on the six months past and what you’ve done and says nothing about the future six months. So our shift was to change the way we thought about mid-year, focus it on a dialogue about what more you needed to do to make sure you were as close as possible to your year-end objectives.”

But the reviews are not done entirely without a rating system. Focusing on the words ‘on track’, ‘above track’ or ‘off track’, the system aims to establish progress as well as review rather than simple present standings.

After one year of implementing the new strategy, Nomura found that 97 per cent of employees had engaged with the web-based review systems, had liaised with their managers and had outlined their own objectives – with the remaining three per cent being those on extended leave, who could not participate.

The system was built inside standard People Soft with a small amount of customisation.