Revolutionizing people decisions for a global animation studio

The animation studio lays significant emphasis on employee well-being. Thus, it sought ways to evaluate employee performance holistically and measure job satisfaction levels at their workplace.

It needed solutions to address concerns such as:

• Limitations of conventional performance reviews

The studio understood the emerging concerns about the conventional ways of measuring employee performance. Moreover, it realized that these processes could be lengthy, complex, flawed, even misleading due to subconscious evaluation biases. It sought a revolutionary alternative that could encourage employees to work better by focusing on their overall growth.

• Lack of an efficient performance management system

The absence of a holistic approach to performance evaluation spiraled into a performance management system that did not meet the HR management’s expectations. Its performance management system had loopholes, such as:

• • Slow response time and unsatisfactory responses
  • Focus on annual review paperwork instead of performance improvement
  • Inept feedback trend instead of a continuous review process
  • Focus on data-driven analytics instead of employee well-being

• Uncertainties in the employee development plan

The studio’s inability to formulate the ideal employee development plan added to the challenges. It required a robust platform that could address all the concerns mentioned above, offering comprehensive information. The latter was imperative to building an efficient people-centric initiative in tune with its core values.

• Lack of structure in evaluating employees’ strengths and weaknesses

The client wanted to focus on weighing its employees’ strengths and weaknesses, nurturing the former and strengthening the latter. The idea was to create strategic plans that could help every individual use his/her agency and creativity to devise solutions that empowered the firm cumulatively. Simply put, the goal was to help every employee grow, eventually facilitating the company’s growth.

• Inadequate insights into employee satisfaction

Furthermore, the studio wanted to understand what its employees felt about the organization, how satisfied they were with their salary cycles, HR policies, work environment and other essential factors. It also wanted to learn from the employees any problems that needed to be addressed, possible solutions, and ways to enhance the overall work-life satisfaction and health of all involved.

The alliance between the client and Mercer | Mettl

Mercer | Mettl’s association with the studio stemmed from its ongoing work with the studio’s parent company. The latter has been employing Mercer | Mettl’s 360 feedback platform for some time now. Its satisfaction and the software’s ease of use prompted the company to approach Mercer | Mettl to upgrade its HR practices. The result was a customized employee-centric set of solutions that offered rich insights into the internal workings across all studio departments. Based on these insights, the studio’s decision-makers successfully understood its employees’ state of mind, strengths and weaknesses, satisfaction levels and expectations. Such profound insights enabled the implementation of better policies and training and development programs.

When the animation studio approached Mercer | Mettl to ascertain whether its employees were happy, it readily accepted the tools suggested by Mercer | Mettl. The collaboration was set in motion after a few trials and customizations.

360 feedback

Studies indicate that the key to sustained job satisfaction and motivation lies in providing employees timely, fair and accurate information about their performance. 360 feedback’s fundamentals are based on the concept stated above. Mercer | Mettl intended to equip the client with a highly unbiased and comprehensive employee development plan based on such a thorough feedback process.

Mercer | Mettl’s 360 feedback platform has established credentials as an excellent tool for succession planning, identifying and training skilled talent, nurturing high-potentials to assume influential roles, among others. The studio wanted to employ the platform for the following:

• Surveying employees about what they felt about one another
• Providing feedback on how leaders, mid-level and senior-level individuals perceived their colleagues
• Developing an understanding of what the employees felt
• Identifying their strengths and weaknesses
• Addressing skills such as listening, planning and goal setting
• Evaluating subjective areas such as teamwork, character and leadership effectiveness

The idea was to gain a holistic perspective of the studio’s employees working in Tokyo and Riyadh. Here is how Mercer | Mettl enabled the same:

Open-ended feedback with detailed competency ratings

Competency ratings are an essential component of Mercer | Mettl’s 360-degree feedback because every employee is measured on a set of competencies integral to his/her job role. Using the platform allowed the studio’s employees to get dedicated feedback on all their competencies as reviewed by themselves, their managers and their peers. Besides, there were open-ended suggestions for improvement. The broad idea was to ensure that every employee understood how he/she was perceived professionally through constructive and actionable feedback.

Behavioral profiling

The feedback platform included insights on every individual’s relationship-building abilities, decision-making qualities and resource management skills, among other areas. Such profiling helped uncover their hidden strengths while accentuating their improvement areas.

Training needs identification

The feedback process, upon completion, offered insights into weaknesses that could be worked upon through group training and personal efforts. Based on the client’s organizational goals and objectives, the custom reports helped it understand its teams’ tasks and skills needed to meet those goals and objectives collectively and individually.

Personal development plans

Once the responses were analyzed and compiled, Mercer | Mettl’s system rolled out extensive reports tailored to every individual. The highlight of these reports was a comprehensive personal development plan to make employees self-aware and work on themselves in a more focused manner. Individuals could easily analyze and extract reports’ information, enabling them to chart their developmental journeys and improve their entire teams’ skills and cohesion.

Employee satisfaction survey

The key to maintaining a high-functioning team for any organization lies in treating the team members as valuable assets. Such a situation demands that voices are heard, and employees are engaged at work effectively. The animation studio’s HR managers understood the prerequisites to build a high-performing team. Hence, its HR managers approached Mercer | Mettl for suggestions to identify, understand and resolve employee dissatisfaction in both its offices across Riyadh and Tokyo.

Mercer | Mettl’s introduced the company to its standard employee engagement test. However, it was pleased with Mercer | Mettl’s 360 reports’ ease of use and holistic approach and sought a similar construct for its new solution. Thus, a custom Employee Satisfaction Survey was created, bringing together the best of both platforms. The customized survey was added to support the 360 feedback platform to guarantee a holistic exercise, encouraging active participation from all employees.

The survey helped the studio understand:

• Individual and team-level expectations across behavioral and performance-specific aspects
• Compatibility between individuals and the teams with which they worked
• Individual motivators that kept employees dedicated toward growth and development at work
• Whether the employee expectations matched with the work/ team environment that had been provided to them
• The participants’ sense of accomplishment concerning the tasks they performed
• The employees’ satisfaction with the organization’s management, leadership and planning strategies
• The participants’ satisfaction with the organization’s physical work environment
• The extent to which the participant was likely to exert additional effort toward her/his work and engage in behaviors contributing to the business’s success
• Ways to establish a higher level of comfort and collaboration across teams

Essentially, the survey helped measure employee satisfaction levels accurately by gathering inputs across 7 key parameters divided into several sub-categories:

Physical work environment  |  Work-life balance

HR practices  |  Performance management  |  Diversity  |  Communication

Senior leadership  |  Managers  |  Co-workers

Work tasks  |  Processes  |  Resources  |  Sense of accomplishment

Say  |  Strive  |  Stay

Career opportunities  |  Learning and development

Pay  |  Benefit  |  Recognition

Based on the 360-feedback style reports, the custom Employee Satisfaction Survey offered statistical data and scores concerning various engagement and satisfaction levels, spread across all the above parameters and sub-parameters. This granular and detailed analysis presented some exceptional highlights to help the studio maintain and develop the best of its HR policies and people decisions.

Mercer | Mettl’s set of products enabled the reputed animation studio to improve its current people-centric processes by augmenting them with contemporary tools. Both platforms’ insightful features helped nurture an environment where employees constantly felt heard, appreciated and empowered. The tools provided management with substantial data to work upon and offer structured growth plans. This paved the way for highly advanced and holistic developmental strategies centered on a culture of regular feedback and healthy communication.

The Way Forward

Given the immense value added by Mercer | Mettl’s platforms to the client’s practices, the studio plans to continue with these evaluations and surveys periodically. Hence, their alliance with Mercer | Mettl promises to be a pleasant and lasting relationship.