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Case Study

DB Breweries - using integrated reviews & succession planning to find tomorrow's leaders today

DB Breweries is an iconic New Zealand company with an 80-year history. The national brewer produces and markets some of the world’s best known brands including Heineken, Export Gold, Tui and Monteith’s. With an award-winning senior management team and over 500 staff, DB is dedicated to employee development; finding and cultivating the company’s future leaders.

DB has a reputation of rewarding employees who demonstrate leadership ability, and identified a need for a system that would enable senior management to identify potential leaders more readily...

Environmental Factors

DB has a strong culture of employee engagement and development; the company has won acclaim for its ‘success in creating productive senior teams’ and is well known for its enthusiastic and committed staff. The HR team is an integral part of the business with a seat on the executive team and a heavy focus on employee development.

Historically, DB’s staff performance and succession planning was predominately paper based with face-to-face reviews twice a year. While this met the company’s performance management requirements, HR Manager Brenda Milbank says ensuring reviews were completed on time and to a consistent standard was sometimes a challenge.

“We could never be 100% sure everyone got a review - or that they got a quality review.”

“We struggled to measure competencies. The existing system was all about hard measures – whether or not someone had achieved their objectives. We had no real way to capture ‘how’ people were doing their jobs.”

Complicating matters further was the fact paperwork generally stayed with the reviewing manager, making it difficult for the HR team to collate and use the data to identify development opportunities.

And because review information couldn’t be collated, DB’s succession planning was a separate process entirely. Once a year, the executive team would meet with managers to identify high potential individuals who would then join the Leadership Development Group – again involving a lot of paper shuffling.

Despite the existing system not being ideal, it worked well enough to meet DB’s leadership development needs at the time. The company wasn’t looking to replace the system until a chance visit from Sonar6’s Mike Carden.

Mike: “We initially approached DB through Sheffield. DB is an iconic kiwi company with a great attitude to people management, so exactly the sort of company we love working with. We were keen to get them on board.”

Brenda: “Mike came in to show us Sonar6 and we immediately saw the potential. Our GM of HR said it was one of the best tools he’d seen in a long time – we immediately scheduled another meeting.”

Requirements

Brenda and the HR team quickly came up with a list of must-haves to solve their current issues after seeing Sonar6. They wanted the system to:

• Show succession between different levels of the company
• Filter the company review data by location, payband, region and management level
• Measure both performance in the current role and potential for the next level of management
• Capture both hard (what) and soft (how) performance indicators
• Include a way to measure DB’s all important cultural values: how well employees demonstrated behaviours & values
• Provide value for money
• Be easy to use!

Brenda worked closely with Sonar6 Implementation Consultant Elaine Gallagher-Dekker during the needs analysis stage.

“As we progressed with the project we identified other areas where Sonar6 could be applied. Elaine was always helpful, suggesting how we could use the system’s features to our advantage. She was great to work with.”

Sonar6 Solution

While Sonar6 was a good fit with DB’s existing processes, the company still undertook a thorough analysis and testing process to make sure the implementation would run smoothly. The decision to use Sonar6 wasn’t a difficult one to make, but the team found themselves using the system for a lot more people, and in more ways, than they’d originally intended!

“Moving to Sonar6 was an easy decision. It’s a really good fit with the way we were already doing things, so we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Even better, it’s easily adaptable so we didn’t have to change our processes to fit the software.”

DB originally intended to use Sonar6 only for succession planning for 50 middle to senior management employees, but Brenda explains the scope soon expanded.

“We revised that pretty quickly, the more we played around with Sonar6 the more we realised what we could use it for, so it made sense to get everyone involved from the start.

“It did mean we ended up with something very different than what we started out with but the final offering was much better than what we expected.”

DB initially ran focus groups to identify competencies to measure the performance across all functions for each level - team member, team leader, operational leader and strategic leader. They then ran the first review round with select teams to make sure results were consistent and based on the feedback, tweaked the system further.

DB’s managers were trained in Sonar6 at the beginning of the year and they in turn trained their teams. The train-the-trainer system worked well for the company:

“It was a seamless transition and managers found it really easy to train staff to use the system. It’s very user friendly. You don’t have to spend a lot of time learning how to interact with it. It’s a very intuitive system.”

After a year of refinement, Sonar6 is being used for everyone at the company – from merchandisers to executive management. It has completely replaced DB’s existing system.

The feedback Brenda has received from managers shows just how popular Sonar6 has proven:

“I have found the Sonar6 exceptionally effective and it is now easier for me to regularly view my performance and that of my team. You can easily navigate through the system. The ability for my team to rate themselves prior to going into the review ensures that both parties are prepared and makes for a productive discussion.”

“The system is great … very quick to review and compare my thinking with my staff’s. Plus the added benefit of not having to fill out all the paper work. Well done to you and the team!”

Summary

DB has just completed its first full review round, which Brenda says was extremely successful. It’s much easier for HR to track review completion and quality, and the executive team has a much more solid foundation for its all-important leadership development and succession planning decisions.

While it’s still early days, Brenda and the HR team is already seeing positive results from Sonar6 and making plans for further enhancements.

“After the next round of reviews, we’ll start using the 360 functionality. One competency we have for everyone at DB is ‘Building Customer Loyalty’ – it’s not just for the sales guys. The 360 reviews will let us get valuable internal and external customer feedback on our employees.

“We’re also thinking of extending the system to identify readiness for promotion and willingness to relocate – we keep finding more things we want to use Sonar6 for, so it’s great the system has the flexibility that allows us to do that.”

There are also plans to further develop reporting and planning functionality, target the learning and development spend, identify internal coaches for each competency which is more than enough to keep Brenda and the HR team busy for some time!