Converga - bringing innovation to talent management with Sonar6

Background

What do you do when you have a manual talent management approach that’s adequate,but lacks oomph?

Converga began life as Outsource Australia and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of New Zealand Post via the Datamail Group.  It is the largest supplier of outsourced office services in Australasia, providing a range of managed and information services including: mail and courier; print and reprographic; financial services; database management and accounts
payable. Phew!

Having more than 650 employees based in seven Australian cities, makes HR – in particular talent management – a truly complex affair for Converga Australia.  And, with ‘Innovators in business’ as their tagline, Converga was looking to bring innovation to their talent management practices too...

Environmental Factors

As with many companies, Converga had developed and was operating its own proprietary, paper-based talent management approach.  It was proven, dependable, worked well in most areas and the Converga team were relatively comfortable with it.  But, the question was, ‘is this is as good as it gets?’

While the processes allowed a wide range of staff members – from new entrants to team leaders and specialists – to be assessed, they were incredibly slow.

“Collating, reporting and even just getting access to the information was quite difficult. It involved a lot of manual administration time, particularly when it came to data entry and maintenance,” says Tania Graziano, Human Resources Manager.

The framework Converga was using also problematic and inconsistent. Graziano says it was very simplistic and the measures that were taken were not necessarily aligned with where the business was headed.

“We may have been measuring performance, but we weren’t really measuring the potential of our employees. Basically, we looked at five or six areas, but even this was quite subjective depending on the manager conducting the review,” Graziano says.

There were no consistent guidelines for assessment; each manager decided the criteria for his or her team.

Then another curve ball was thrown in for good measure – Converga also needed to align strategically with its owners, New Zealand Post and the Datamail Group, both of whom were early adopters of Sonar6 technology.

Requirements

In short, there were three major problems with existing talent management practices that needed to be addressed:

1.    It was a painfully slow and labour intensive process
2.    The performance factors measured were not consistent and in many cases, were subjective
3.    Alignment with the parent company’s talent management practices was required

Couple this with the fact that Converga has 650 staff spread over offices in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Hobart and the problems were clearly exacerbated!

The wish list went something like this…

•    Converga needs a cost-effective, centralised system that can be easily accessed and used from multiple locations.
•    The solution has to be easy to use and appealing to Converga’s staff (irrespective of their level of IT confidence or capability!) 
•    The solution needs to capture enough information to generate meaningful results – it needs to apply consistent measures in terms of both performance and potential.
•    The solution must not be so laborious or complicated its use will be restricted to a few people within the company.

“We needed something that was tailored to suit and scaleable, something that could be moulded to the company both now and in the future as we grow. We also wanted a solution that gave us visibility; that enabled us to look at historical as well as present performance.
“We were looking for something that produced a measurement or review that was meaningful. We were reticent about developing a ‘bell curve’ for performance management and the message that sent to our staff,” Graziano says.

Sonar6 Solution

Even on the face of it, the Sonar6 toolkit and approach was well suited to meet Converga’s needs.  And, this initial judgement was reinforced by talking with Datamail Group who had been using Sonar6 for more than two years.

“I spoke with Christine Watson at Datamail and she was very complimentary about Sonar6 – the tool itself, its capability and the people behind it.”

As a result, the decision to implement Sonar6 was made very quickly.

Converga reviewed their existing paper based approach with Sonar6 to see what was workable and what fundamental changes were required.  They also worked with Datamail - who were familiar with the Sonar6 system -to develop a set of aligned performance measurements.

Graziano says there were some to-ing and fro-ing over the metrics and tailoring the system to best meet Converga’s needs.

“The team at Sonar6 was able to implement pretty much all of what we wanted and implementation was very smooth on the whole.”

Summary

Tania Graziano says Sonar6 is helping Converga attain a new level of HR professionalism.  Sonar6 has delivered what Converga wanted in terms of usability, consistency and capability, plus it’s brought a few additional, unexpected benefits too.

And apparently, this is just the beginning …

“We’ve been using Sonar6 since November 2007 and we’re still using it in a very generic fashion. The next phase is for us to tailor this more to individual business units.

“We’re very happy; Sonar6 has been a breath of fresh air for us.”

Innovators in business? … check … innovators in HR? … check!

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