Charisma Talent Management encourages positive attitude and supports the personal development process

Company

Established in 1995, Mega Image is the largest supermarket chain in Bucharest, with a network that includes 239 stores at the end of July 2013. Mega Image is part of Delhaize Group, international retailer established in 1867 in Belgium, operating now on three continents.

The company holds two store brands on the Romanian Market: Mega Image and Shop&Go. Mega Image aims to provide quality services and a variety of nourishing, healthy, safe and affordable products on a daily basis.

Challenge

Besides being one of the largest supermarket chains in Romania, Mega Image is also one of the largest employers in the Romanian food retail, with over 5600 employees. As any large employer, Mega Image has developed an internal program for employees’ performance evaluation which underpins further trainings and enables to identify and evaluate the competencies of each position. The final purpose of the program is to ensure the development of its own employees and by default, the company. This activity is managed by 2 members of the Performance Management team, in charge of the preparation, processing, tracking and analysis of the employees’ development plans. Once the actors involved in the evaluation, the employee categories, the evaluation criteria and scales are established, the process seems rather simple. But with over 5000 employees to evaluate, Excel as a working tool and thousands of pages to centralize, it takes more than a month to interpret the data and it requires a lot of human effort. It’s the situation Mega Image was facing in early 2013.

Mega Image separates the employees in three major evaluation groups: employees working in personnel and management and competencies specific to each position in the store and the headquarters, stores and storehouse. There is a series of general competencies specific to the administrative storehouse.

“In terms of HR, it was very difficult to manage the evaluation process in Excel. Wewere working with thousands of sheets that had to be sent via email and it became harder and harder to follow if they were sent back completed correctly or not. Moreover, the employees evaluate themselves and are evaluated by their direct managers; therefore, there is a considerable amount of information. All the forms had to be centralized manually, sheet by sheet” states the Performance Management Manager with Mega Image.

Solution

In early 2013, the company decided to implement a talent management software system in order to support the HR effort. As TotalSoft, the provider of the HR & Payroll solution used by the company, had Charisma Talent Management system in its portfolio, Mega Image decided to assess and purchase it. “Subsequent to the detailed presentation, I was very impressed by Charisma Talent Management. I was very surprised to find out that there is a solution that meets our requirements to such a high degree.”

Mega Image chose three of the Charisma TM modules: 360 Feedback, Performance Management and Career & Succession Planning. The integrated use of the modules allows the HR Department to track, manage the employees’ performance efficiently and to easily align the individual objectives with the company’s objectives. Being a web solution it does not require individual installation and the access is easy and protected by security keys and also by user and password.

During the implementation project, a special attention was paid to the match between the evaluation process Mega Image was using and the characteristics offered by the application. Given that it was a complete process, with 360 evaluation, self-evaluations, evaluations made by managers, a rigorous project analysis was conducted. Thus, the flows that were to be defined in Charisma TM did not skip any step and the results were automatically obtained and as detailed as possible.

To ensure a high adoption rate, Mega Image organized both room trainings and video trainings. These trainings can be accessed by the employees in case of doubts regarding the steps they have to follow in the application.

Results

Although it is premature to speak about the post implementation results, there are aspects that need to be mentioned.

• The evaluation process, more specifically the time spent by the employees to fill in their self-evaluation and to be evaluated by the manager, has not changed. The company did not want to impose a tight deadline. Though, the time allocated to conducting reports has changed. “The results we once obtained after several weeks of data centralization are now obtained just in one day” assesses Nicoleta Gherman, Performance Management Manager, Mega Image.
• The easy access to application, the intuitive interface and the trainings dedicated to the employees accelerated the system’s adoption and determined the beginning of the return on investment.
• The time needed to centralize and process the data was completely removed. The information is automatically updated, once those who evaluate themselves or are evaluated click “save”. “Charisma TM allows me to generate reports immediately, while offering the possibility to see a constant status of the employees who did not perform their self-evaluation. Therefore, I can send them an individual reminder notice. The statistics I can obtain are more diverse, more detailed and do not require processing time. However, there were cases when we needed further developments to adapt the platform to our requirements with regard to the post evaluation reports”.
• The evaluation process transparency has increased “Now, the employees can access their own evaluation at any time, see the manager’s feedback and request a discussion based on it. There is a clear improvement of the employee communication and perception regarding the action itself, which encourages positive attitudes and supports the personal development process”, concludes the Performance Management Manager.

[Case study written in 2013]