CIO Bulletin

A smarter way to reward high-performing people: beqom

beqom was founded in 2009 with the mission to help the world's largest enterprises keep their people motivated and productive through comprehensive, equitable, and transparent performance and rewards. Founded in 2009 by former SAP employees Fabio Ronga, Tanya Jansen, and Stephan Pohl, set out to blaze a trail in the industry by offering one of the first comprehensive compensation platforms that transforms how companies reward and recognize their people, attract and retain top talent, and address pay equity and transparency. Today, more than 120 of the world's largest enterprises trust beqom to help manage the compensation of millions of employees. It's a testament to beqom’s commitment to excellence and its unwavering focus on delivering innovative solutions that help clients achieve their goals.

At the heart of beqom’s mission is the belief that providing employees with a sense of purpose, engagement, and fairness is essential to building productive and high-performing workplaces. That's why beqom recently introduced a next-generation performance management solution that aligns personalized rewards with real-time performance and people data, taking the employee experience to the next level. beqom is passionate about making a real difference in the world and helping its clients succeed. With a proven track record of success and an unwavering commitment to driving progress and delivering value, beqom is leading the way in transforming compensation and performance management for the modern enterprise.

Managing performance is a flawed concept

The very nature of the idea that we can manage anybody else’s performance is probably misleading at best. People manage their own performance, and we can inspire and drive them in different ways, but ultimately, it’s the individual who has to perform, the individual who decides where they put their time and energy, and the individual who decides if they are going to give it 70% or 100% that day—or indeed every day.

So perhaps we’ve been misnaming this topic of performance management all along. Yes, there have been attempts at finding a better term, and we’ve seen the emergence of names such as “performance development” and “performance enablement”, but they have not quite caught on.

So where do we go from here when it comes to performance management? Do we believe that with a process of continuous feedback and regular check-ins, as has become so popular in recent years, we can now manage people’s performance better? I’m not convinced that’s the case or that we are even addressing the right question.

Time for some innovation

Enter the “employee passport” concept, an innovative new means of addressing the age-old question of how we fairly assess and address performance.

The passport provides concrete evidence of an employee’s performance, growth, and development, as perceived by not only their managers but their peers. It includes documented and regular peer feedback, manager check-ins, agile goals, and flexible reviews.

The passport approach brings to life an in-depth analysis of the individual. The employee can gain an understanding of the behaviors they demonstrate and those they don't, and use the insight to shape their development and brand within the organization. The passport helps an employee:

Gain a deep understanding of their blind spots through 360° insight
Access a personalized dashboard to gather insights
Agree and track their development with their manager
Own and drive their checks-ins through data-driven insight
Set and action their personal goals
Request and give feedback from anyone in the organization

Perhaps most importantly, the passport puts accountability into employees’ hands. Employees can actively own their passports to demonstrate the feedback, behaviors, and goals accomplished throughout the year.

The passport can positively promote the employee to seek more feedback, to update and progress their goals, and to showcase contributions to date. It levels up the relationship between the manager and the employee, ensuring an adult-to-adult discussion where both the employee and the manager come with objective data to the performance discussions. With two sets of objective data, beqom reduces the subjectivity and bias that can often feature as part of performance discussions.

More importantly, the performance conversation can now focus on true outcomes, objectively assessed, and can join both parties—manager and employee—in managing performance together. A passport to performance outcomes can enable the type of performance management practices that put accountability at the center, while at the same time building trusted relationships.

Implementing a passport to performance approach

To implement a people-centric passport approach and deliver an engaging employee experience requires having a performance system in place that empowers the necessary elements of an employee passport, such as continuous feedback, supported coaching, check-ins, 360° surveys, and agile goal-setting. The information derived from these activities then needs to be made available to employees and managers so that they can own their own growth and development, make data-driven decisions, and continuously improve performance.

Fabio Ronga, CEO