WP Engine’s HR Team Uses 15Five to Enhance Employee Performance

WP Engine offers the leading digital experiences platform for WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system. WP Engine serves more than 85,000 customers across over 140  countries. Five percent of the web visits a WP  Engine-powered site every day. 

WP ENGINE’S 15FIVE FEATURES 

• Check-ins
• 1-on-1s  
• Best-Self Reviews
• High Fives

WP Engine’s mission is to help its customers win online. Its digital experience platform for  WordPress gives companies of all sizes the agility,  performance, integrations, and intelligence tools they need to drive their business forward faster.  And when your product is responsible for powering half a million digital experiences across the globe,  you need a workforce that’s as confident and motivated as it is skilled.  

Erin Barber, Vice President of Employee  Experience, and Sarah Randall, People Operations Manager, are directly responsible for this mandate. That’s why their team convinced Senior Leadership to break from the traditional performance review cycle in late 2015.  

BENEFITS 

• Increases communication frequency and effectiveness.
• Manages expectations around individual performance and growth. 
• Reorients review process from retrospective to forward-looking. 
• Modernizes employee-management tools & processes. 

Though they acknowledged the risk in dropping  this ingrained HR “safety net,” its challenges  clearly outweighed the benefits: 

1. Despite the level of effort, traditional reviews were not an effective tool for managing performance in a timely fashion.  

2. Performance ratings hindered meaningful conversations. 

3. Employees wanted to talk about development and growth, not just past performance. 

Quite simply, traditional reviews weren’t getting the job done. Managers needed a better way to invest their time when it came to assessing their employees’ performance. Relying on them to reactively adjust their communications on their own wouldn’t work, and Erin and Sarah realized they needed to provide them with proactive tools to improve this dynamic. 

Resetting Direction 

The answer to their challenge wasn’t more reviews. Rather, it involved more clarity around roles, expectations, and goal-setting, which required an adjustment to HR’s entire approach to performance.  

Erin and Sarah therefore, put the entire strategy planning process under the microscope. This involved mapping out exactly how they wanted employees and managers to feel about their performance and development opportunities,  and what they wanted their impact on the company to be.

Four core components emerged  to serve as the basis for the criteria driving their evaluation of HR software solutions that would help them accomplish these things: 

• Ongoing feedback 
• Peer feedback 
• Developmental feedback (self & manager reviews) 

Using this framework to review their options, it became clear that 15Five most closely aligned with their updated priorities. WP Engine had  already trialed 15Five’s Weekly Check-In and  Objectives (OKRs), so Erin and Sarah were familiar with its philosophy in this area: 

• Traditional performance reviews are  primarily retrospective 
• Looking backward and recapping are not as  effective as looking ahead 
• Self-Reviews emphasize how employees want  to grow and what they should focus on going forward

Based on this synergy, the positive experience with their trial, and their appreciation of  15Five’s strong principles and transparency with its clients, they knew they’d found the right  Performance Management partner. 

“Not only from a product perspective, but having a  philosophical alignment around transparency is  why we believed 15Five would be a great partner.  Their commitment to an open dialogue, to having us  be able to influence the product roadmap, and grow  together distinguishes them in the industry.” 

ERIN BARBER 

Launching a New Solution

Erin and Sarah eased into this new era of performance management for WP Engine.  

Rather than jumping in with full reviews right away, they began with regular check-ins. This gave the organization time to develop new habits and incorporate 15Five into their regular cadence of work, which built trust when it came time to begin reviews. It also built trust in 15Five  throughout the organization so that, when reviews did begin, employees knew what to expect during those conversations.  

Over time, WP Engine established a regular cadence of individual and group communications that have led to more productive discussions throughout the year.  

As Sarah expressed, “It’s one thing for a company  to say you should always be having ongoing  conversations and give that feedback in the  moment, but this really was a tool to help  facilitate that.”  

Such communications included: 

• TOWN HALL  Takes place every Thursday and includes HR related updates, reminders about their core pillars, and reinforcement of their new culture of  2-way feedback. While check-ins every 2 weeks are the expectation, some groups have started doing them even more often.  
• 1-ON-1’S Although not initially required, manager adoption occurred organically as they recognized the positive impact on communications with their employees. 
• BEST-SELF REVIEWS Full reviews occur every 6 months and have become more efficient as a result of ongoing dialogue about critical issues throughout the year. 
• HIGH FIVES Continued celebration of coworkers through digital high fives, recognizing global counterparts for their impact on the organization. 

Enjoying Positive Change 

WP Engine began seeing results in the first year of implementation. Not only have Erin, Sarah, and their team successfully drawn people into the new system, but they’ve achieved true staying power.  

The numbers so far bear this out: 

• 65%  Ongoing Check-In Utilization 
• 91%  Self-Review Completion

Additionally, the overwhelming majority voted to adopt digital high-fives. Time savings has also been part of the net effect.  The Employee Experience team specifically discouraged managers from writing more than a  few bullets or paragraphs coming out of reviews.  Since they’re flagging and addressing issues as they arise through regular Check-Ins and 1-on-1s,  there’s no need for lengthy reviews. Instead, this gives managers the ability to focus on meaningful conversations related to development. 

Feedback from newly hired employees is another unofficial barometer for program success. Since launching, WP Engine’s workforce has grown by 25% to 530 employees. As Erin has noticed,  15Five’s platform consistently makes an instant impression. 

Excitement is spreading to other areas of the organization as well. Director of Software  Engineering Jessica Underbrink didn’t participate in the pilot, but ultimately went all-in when she later experienced the difference for herself.  “I love it! I’ve been able to let go of my old  processes I used to do in Google, and I do all my  1-on-1 notes through 15Five.” Hearing this was music to HR’s ears, given how instant adoption by engineering and product teams is rare, with full-on adoration even rarer. 

Learn about how 15Five can improve performance management at your organization.