Performance Management Automation & Transformation of Remote Talent Development at RGIS

RGIS – Humble Beginnings

Headquartered in Auburn, MI, RGIS (Retail Grocery Inventory Services) started with humble beginnings in 1958 as a family-owned business focused on offering an economical alternative to in-house inventories. Since then, RGIS has transformed into inventory management pioneers.

Global Inventory Services & Technology

Today, RGIS takes clients beyond the count with integrated inventory services that include store surveys, space management, store remodels and resets, RFID solutions, and asset optimization. With a presence in over 40 countries and over 34,000 staff members, RGIS has positioned itself as a global leader in reliability and efficiency.

Given the complexity of managing remote, on-site, and field staff across multiple locations and countries, and the company’s increasing need to facilitate and standardize useful development discussions with employees, the HR team began looking for a new performance management system. The expectations for a new system were high: it has to be scalable and robust enough to handle the needs of a diverse set of employee groups – from both a technological and business standpoint, while at the same time offer ease of use, flexibility, and an intuitive user experience for managers and employees.

Overview

RGIS needed to centralize and automate its employee performance management processes across remote and field staff. The leadership and HR teams also wanted to take a substantial step forward in developing talent, supporting management, and overseeing compliance. Using emPerform, RGIS has achieved consistency and visibility in performance management and highly improved processes for continually engaging, assessing, and developing its valuable employees.

The Challenge of Overseeing a Remote Workforce

RGIS employees are spread across Canada and the United States, primarily operating through fieldwork and site visits. The company does not have offices or locations visited by staff daily, making administering, tracking, and reporting on performance reviews very challenging, especially when done manually.

RGIS’s existing Word and paper-based performance review process consisted of multiple versions of documents that had to be maintained, emailed, printed, and consolidated. The result was a performance management process based on the manual gathering of information, creating a tremendous amount of work for HR.

Likewise, reporting was completed manually using spreadsheets, which meant the HR team could not track the status of reviews and could only report on performance data ‘after the fact.’

Finally, having standalone documents did not provide the opportunity to validate ratings or track if comments and feedback were fair and consistent.

Overall, the existing process was time-consuming, lacked consistency, did not allow for effective tracking and analysis, and did not support its goal of developing talent.

“RGIS lives in a very virtual world, which makes consistent processes and systems critical to our success.”

– Amanda Culver, Organizational Effectiveness Leader – RGIS

The Search for a New Performance Management System at RGIS

RGIS began searching for a new performance management system that would support their primary goal: Talent Development. “For RGIS, growth and development is a core factor in the associate experience. We needed a system that would encourage the growth of staff members within their roles and beyond for their careers and elevate the company as a whole,” said Amanda.

RGIS had a list of requirements for a new software system, including a cloud-based solution that users could access from anywhere, the ability to tailor the software to their unique review processes, a system that would be easy to use and maintain, and finally, functionality that that would allow for approvals, reporting, multi-rater input, and consistency.

“emPerform stood out as a simple, user-friendly system that met the needs of our business.”

The Impact of emPerform at RGIS

Performance reviews and 360° assessments across all of RGIS employees have now been fully automated using emPerform, leveraging the flexible workflow engine and out of the box configurability native in the platform. emPerform automatically alerts staff of due dates, allows for ongoing tracking and documentation of performance and feedback, and at the same time, gives HR full oversight over performance status and compliance.

The elimination of time-consuming paper-based processes has drastically reduced the amount of time spent administering reviews and allows HR and managers to better track and develop their teams’ performance.