Overview of AMP
AMP’s is an energy company that turns sustainability ambitions into reality. They deliver practical solutions that tackle the challenges of climate change offering affordable and practical decarbonisation solutions and managing the growth of intermittent renewables. AMP’s mission is to create a smarter energy future, and their simple but powerful values are: Be honest; Work hard and Enjoy it. Head of HR, Jamie Carroll and HR Manager, Anne Fairman met with us to explain how Actus is supporting their HR and AMP’s overall business strategy.
Background
Jamie and Anne have both been with AMP for five and a half years. Together with Olivia Briscoe, HR Business Partner and the wider HR team, their focus has been on implementing streamlined HR systems and processes to improve and simplify ways of working across AMP. As part of reviewing the performance management process, they identified how ineffective and manual it was, prompting the need for significant improvement.
The Challenge
It was clear that the performance management processes were disparate and far too manual, and the goal was to help people work more effectively together in a consistent way. There were numerous different appraisal documents in circulation with no consistency across the business. Additionally, it was important not to overcomplicate things from a HR perspective, especially as the business was going through a period of significant change, compounded by the challenges of COVID-19.
“We had a lot to do in those first few years and it was important for us to put foundations in place that we could build on. There were three simple things that we needed to focus on; ensuring our people all had clear SMART objectives, that they had regular touch points with their line manager, and a positive annual appraisal discussion reflecting on overall progress and performance of the previous year” said Jamie who went onto explain how they defined a performance review framework and launched it alongside Actus. “So the two really go hand in hand” explained Anne. They also pointed out that while some of the Actus functionalities remained unused, their HR strategy involves gradually developing their framework and introducing more functionality year on year.
Why Actus?
Jamie and Anne explained that they were really attracted to the simplicity of Actus, rather like their company values. They were able to launch a stripped back version of the system, and each year have developed it a little bit further by introducing a new element or module to really embed it.
Jamie explained “There were so many other changes going on for people at the time, we just wanted to do a bit of a drip, drip, drip approach and for it to land well – which it did and continues to do” Anne agreed, explaining how it is nice to launch different aspects each year to “keep it fresh without overcomplicating things”
Working together
Jamie, Anne and Olivia work closely with their Client Success Manager Jane who checks in with them monthly. Olivia has developed a way of managing probation reviews through the platform which saves a lot of time and admin. They have also launched the recognition module which not only encourages wonderful peer to peer feedback but has made the selection of the Company reward and recognition winners by the CEO much more efficient as they can quickly and easily download a report from Actus when previously it was all manual.
“To summarise, Actus has played a key role in helping shape a high performing culture and improve ways of working; for us it also now means we can tap into where we’ve got key talent and where we could provide further support or development”
Customising Actus to meet specific needs
Anne and Jamie went onto explain how helpful Jane had been “She’s fantastic, super helpful” both parties agreed. She has helped them to develop a specific one to one template that supports their engineer’s incentive scheme and has further helped them with custom reports which saves time by making sure the exact information they need is at their fingertips.
Results and Next steps
Over the past two years100% of AMP employees had agreed SMART objectives recorded in Actus and annual appraisals were completed which would have been virtually impossible with the previous set up. The business has recently introduced SMART objective weightings (using the priority scale feature) which will tie into a more accurate overall performance rating next year and the Actus reporting will be helpful in managing this process.
“Actus has been a great platform for us, we’re doing things differently in the business now and can continue to use it to underpin the HR strategy going forwards”
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