Following the joint CWU and Openreach SD workshop on 7 February 2017, this letter contains a summary of ‘Our Performance in SD’.
In July 2016 Openreach SD formally recognised that our approach to performance management in SD was not right. Since that time, working with the CWU, there has been a lot of good progress towards creating a healthier performance culture including:
* From July 2016, Openreach SD closed all historic informal coaching plans. Only formal plans where there was evidence of performance shortfalls in more than one area were progressed;
* We have put in place 5 key principles to support ‘Our Performance in SD’ approach. Please see Annex A in this letter;
* HR and senior leadership continuous reinforcement around the importance of having great conversations;
* Establishing a specialist HR Services Case Management team who work closely with SD HRBPs and SD line managers to make sure performance plans are in line with the ‘Our Performance in SD’ approach;
* CWU meeting with the case management team to understand the approach and support they offer;
* Clear top down messages on the shift in primary focus from productivity to customer success.
* Openreach SD committed to introducing team based measures and removing individual targets and G bandings.
As a result of further consultations with the CWU, Openreach SD proposes the following additional changes to support the focus on team success with individual coaching where it is needed:
1. Openreach SD is committed to moving performance conversations away from the minutia to conversations that are more purposeful, for example a discussion akin to ‘You were 3 minutes late twice this week’ is not meaningful nor will it contribute towards great performance.
2. We communicated ‘Our Performance in SD’ on 5 April 2017 and on that date switched off the current ‘team based working’ dashboard and the ‘my performance’ app.
3. The ‘Our Performance in SD’ dashboard will be made available to our managers on 24 April 2017 and to our team members on 2 May 2017.
4. Following a review of all individual focused reports, Openreach SD has established the following principles outlining how and which reports will be used to support great conversations:
i. There will be no reports detailing individual productivity data circulated to SD operational managers (OMs and SOMs) except where covered by points 4.vi and 4.vii. below;
ii. Compliance data will be available to operational managers at an individual level in line with our mandatory requirements and job standards. A list of the compliance reports containing individual data has been sent to the CWU separately;
iii. Data at an individual level will be available to operational managers for new recruits to help understand who needs additional coaching support and in which areas. This data will be available during the early stage of an individual’s new recruit journey until they move into the regions or for a maximum of 12 months, whichever comes first;
iv. Data will be available to operational managers and the individual for those who have undertaken core upskill training in UG, FTTP, FTTC, and Broadband. This data will be relevant to the skill attained and used to help identify individuals who need additional coaching and support in relation to that skill. This individual data will be available for maximum of 3 months;
v. SD operational managers will use the new team level dashboard and work with their teams to discuss and address team performance issues with supportive engagement of the CWU SPOC and local branches;
vi. In circumstances where the team has not been able to collectively address the issues they had identified or need help in identifying the opportunity; individual performance data may be made available subject to point 4.vii below. The data will be aligned to the improvement needed in the ‘Our Performance’ dashboard. This data will be visible on an individual basis to those team members it applies to. The team will agree a proposed timeframe for which it will be available and when the position has stabilised to an acceptable level, which will be evident in the dashboard, the provision of individual data will cease. Please see the dashboard and a breakdown of the measures it contains in Annex B;
vii. Individual data will be held centrally by our Production Planning teams, who will act as custodians of the data, providing reports to the team in line with points 4.ii, 4.iii and 4.iv above. There will be an additional quality gate for the release of individual performance data in line with point 4.vi to make sure it is ‘appropriate’. The quality gate in Annex C has been agreed between Openreach and the CWU.
viii. There are exceptions to providing individual data in relation to points 4.ii, 4.iii, 4iv and 4.vi. above:
§ If there are any reasons to believe we may have a misconduct case/safety breach, data will be released using the same approach as with the existing ILM agreement, in that it will not be the sole basis of an investigation. This approach acts as the quality gate;
§ The FEB report will remain available to OMs, however only 5 week trended data will be visible as we will remove the daily drill down data from the report as well as the weekly view (timescales to be confirmed). Please see Annex D for an example of the FEB report. We will also be providing clear guidance to the SOM and OM community as to how the report is utilised on a trended basis. The guidance will be agreed between Openreach and the CWU and sent separately
to the CWU. The release of drill down data will be subject to a similar gating process as 4vii. which will be agreed with the CWU.
5. The GM and SPOC monthly meetings will have a standing agenda item of ‘Our Performance’ so progress on a team and GM basis is reviewed and understood locally. This will include sharing where individual data has been released in accordance to points 4.iv. and 4.vi.
6. To help embed the transition to ‘Our Performance in SD’ from 1st July 2017 for a period of 6 months there will be no further informal or formal performance management plans raised. Openreach SD hope that the CWU will see this as a genuine step towards truly embedding the new approach, creating an opportunity for us to review together what works and what else needs to be changed.
7. As a result of the progress made on resetting performance to date and with the continued support received from the HR Services Case Management team, Openreach SD is confident that current performance plans are aligned to the 5 key principles, however we recognise our approach to ‘our performance in SD’ has evolved and therefore will further commit to:
i. closing all unsupported plans prior to 1st July 2017
ii. reviewing all supported informal plans by 31st May 2017 and close any not aligned to the ‘our performance in SD’ approach. NB successful plans will close naturally in this period.
iii. any remaining supported informal plans after the review in point 7ii. will be reviewed between the SPOC and GM similar to the exercise we carried out last year
iv. any formal plans as of end June 2017 will be reviewed between the SPOC and GM similar to the exercise we carried out last year
8. Before 24 April 2017 we will share the following with the CWU:
i. A summary of the reports we propose to provide to the SOM and OM,
ii. A list of the compliance reports available at individual level
iii. The guidance to managers about the use of the FEB report,
iv. The quality gates in Production Planning for the release of individual data
v. An overview of the current numbers of formal and informal cases and examples of formal and informal plans
vi. Communications to Team Members on ‘Our Performance is SD’ in line with the communications plan. See Annex E in this letter for the communications plan.
Openreach SD will continue to work with the CWU on embedding the ‘Our Performance in SD’ approach. Following the launch of ‘Our Performance in SD’ Openreach SD would like to propose a formal review after 3 months with the CWU national team and at 6 months with the CWU national team and SPOCs so both parties can understand how the approach is working and most importantly how it feels for engineers.