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London Gates Education Group Graduates to Performica
Data-driven guidance helps connect, engage, and retain employees.
Performica helps our teams createa free, open, positive,
and friendly environment
core to our company values.
Yulia Desiatnikov
CEO London Gates Education Group
Challenge
London Gates has a large, diverse, and distributed workforce. In addition to providing students with a premier education, the organization prides itself on embracing the tools and technologies that enable it to measure and monitor its own performance. When typical HR tools failed to help London Gates identify its top performers and gain insight into their success, the organization began looking for a solution.
Solution
Performica delivers the data-driven guidance London Gates needs to retain and engage its top employees, identify workers needing assistance, and establish a real-time collaboration loop demonstrating the organization’s commitment to transparency.
Results with Performica
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Provides a continuous feedback tool between employer and employees, promoting an open culture and elevating engagement levels.
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Identifies high-performing, high-potential, and at-risk employees for recognition, nurturing, and decisive action.
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Delivers insight into potential issues such as employee burnout, poor communication skills, or mental health challenges so adjustments can be made to avert attrition.
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Measures the effectiveness of initiatives such as new training programs, so HR budgetary funds are directed appropriately.
London Gates Education Group is a rapidly growing international company with educational centers in the UK, Israel, France, Italy, Latvia, and Georgia. It allows students to gain British-accredited qualifications, experience a multicultural environment, and learn to speak and socialize in English fluently without leaving their homes or interrupting their regular studies. London Gates’ graduates go on to attend some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in England and throughout the world.
Powering a diverse distributed workforce with real-time data
London Gates is committed to empowering its diverse, distributed workforce — continually working to elevate employee productivity, engagement, and to reduce turnover. It also wants to identify high-performing leaders among its employees and those with lagging performance or who may be at risk of attrition. For most companies, these observations are made subjectively or gathered informally (if at all) during annual performance reviews. But as a data-driven organization, London Gates wanted to do better. That’s when it found Performica.
Performica leverages real-time employee data from HRIS, CRM, and other business applications to paint a data-backed picture of employee performance, effectiveness, productivity, morale, peer interactions, and communications. In short, it provides employers like London Gates with a 360-degree view of an employee’s place within the company and the likelihood they will contribute positively to the company’s culture.
The Performica platform is a powerful human resources business intelligence tool that combines disparate data and helps employers understand it through charts, graphs, and key performance indicators. Additionally, Performica is a workforce and management-facing tool with a user-friendly interface to collect, review, and analyze data.
OrgGraph™ identifies influencers
For London Gates, one of the most potent components of Performica is the OrgGraph™, which diagrams every working relationship within the organization using digital trace data to determine which employees are working closely together. The OrgGraph™ helps London Gates identify the influencers among its workforce, highlighting connections between employees and teams that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Influencers affect a company’s culture — either positively or negatively. Using the OrgGraph™, London Gates can zero in on highly engaged, strong-performing, well-regarded employees whose positive influence and extensive reach elevate overall morale within the organization. These employees may be rewarded or promoted as a result of their contributions.
Conversely, the OrgGraph™ also highlights influencers who score poorly on teamwork, skills, or other metrics and, with their broad reach, could negatively impact their peers. Often, intervention strategies such as empathetic listening, coaching, or training can positively change the trajectory of these employees.
Peer Rank Score provides accurate performance insights
One popular feature in Performica is the Peer Rank Score. It uses the OrgGraph™ relationships to identify close colleagues, then regularly solicits peer feedback where employees place their close colleagues on a two-axis matrix, creating pairwise comparisons on skill and teamwork. Then Performica translates the ratings into Peer Rank Scores using a proprietary algorithm, showing where employees rank in the organization on skill, teamwork, and in aggregate.
“When we saw the Peer Rank Score in Performica, we were instantly impressed,” recalls Nina Simonyan, Human Resources Manager at London Gates. “The scores are a quick visual way to identify our best workers and those needing extra coaching.”
Initially, the HR team was concerned that the peer review score could be misinterpreted as an oversimplification of employee performance. However, once they understood the math and algorithm backing the scoring, they were reassured that the framework was sound.
Amplifying Employee Voices
While the Peer Rank Score and OrgGraph™ have become invaluable to London Gates, they are far from the only tools available through the Performica platform. Leadership at all levels of the organization can easily access performance, morale, and influence information for members of their teams. Performica is also an essential tool to allow every employee to make their voices heard by creating an open, inviting feedback loop. “We’ve found that Performica is an excellent instrument to help us identify and resolve employee conflict by giving employees a voice they know will be heard,” notes Nina.
“We’ve now been using Performica for eight years,” says Aleksei Balakirev, Head of London Gates’ Riga location. “It helps us identify, prevent, and address certain HR problems and trends we may have missed otherwise. Many of our employees have a clinical psychological background, so we like to compare Performica to tools that behavioral therapists use, such as a short survey filled out before or after a session. A psychotherapist may miss something, but with Performica, we can predict risks more accurately because we have more data to work with.”
Streamline conflict resolution
Performica helps London Gates recognize and more quickly resolve issues within its teams. For example, management noticed that one group was consistently underperforming, and Performica identified a lack of communication within this team. “Identifying the cause of the underperformance is essential to resolving it, and with Performica, we were able to address this issue and work to improve the team’s overall performance,” Aleksei says.
In another instance, Performica data showed employee satisfaction decreased in a specific department. “Looking closely at the data, we found that the dissatisfaction was due to high workloads,” explains Aleksei. “We were able to redistribute the work and improve satisfaction. In this way, Performica helped identify employees at risk of burnout and intervene before it became a larger attrition problem.”
Identifying employee assistance opportunities
Mental health awareness is a critical initiative among employers, and London Gates is no exception. Recently Performica identified a trend that might not have been immediately visible otherwise. “We noticed a decrease in the skill scores of a senior manager,” says Nina. “Despite their relatively consistent teamwork scores, this person’s performance began deteriorating.
”The organization’s leadership team, which includes psychologists and psychotherapists, initiated a conversation and recognized that the manager was suffering from severe depression and referred the individual for medical help. The quick action helped stabilize the situation, and the individual continues employment with London Gates.
As a result of this case, London Gates introduced a policy where top managers meet with a mental health professional every three months as a preventive exercise to answer questions and learn to identify and respond to situations of concern preemptively.
Effective onboarding
Progressive employers like London Gates closely monitor new employees to ensure effective onboarding and measure early performance indicators. Performica offers a feature called “close attention,” which allows a company to select a specific person, such as a new hire, to appear more frequently in peer reviews.
A newly hired academic manager working with teachers was among the first people included in the close attention survey. “People complained a lot about her work style,” AlekGsei recalls. “We are a fairly open-minded company, yet she had a more conservative approach. Several people approached their manager and asked to no longer work with her. Her manager was considering firing her due to these concerns.”
Fortunately, London Gates’ HR department first suggested a review of the data Performica had collected. “When we did that, we discovered that quite a few people adored this person,” Alexsei continues. “She has a background teaching college students, whereas we work primarily with children. Many of the comments were that she tended to treat everyone as adults.
Based on that peer feedback, we decided not to make a hasty decision but to give our culture time to make an impact on her. It worked, and she remained with the company and was able to meaningfully contribute. Performica helped us see a different perspective and not make a hasty decision based on just one aspect of her work.”
Fueling informed, data-backed decisions
London Gates does not tolerate workplace bullying, and Performica has proven to be an asset in helping the organization root out potential adverse situations.
One example is a case where a coworker accused an employee of bullying and gossiping about fellow employees. After conducting surveys and gathering feedback within Performica, the London Gates HR team discovered that most people were fully satisfied with the accused employee. The team was able to look back over multiple years of data and found no cause for concern in either performance or teamwork. “With Performica, we’re not relying solely on emotions and quick reactions. We have real data that informs every HR decision we make,” says Alexsei.
An Essential Tool
Performica allows London Gates to identify its best employees at a glance — and detect those needing additional support, training, or redirection. Performica also promotes London Gates’ corporate culture of transparency and radical candor. Employees regularly share extended feedback, fostering constructive communication that helps every employee improve. As a direct result, the company has seen a positive impact on employee engagement, team performance, and retention rates.
“It’s hard to calculate a precise ROI for an HR tool. But I can tell you that we could not run our HR department without Performica,” concludes Yulia Desyatnikov, CEO of London Gates. “Performica helps our teams create a free, open, positive, and friendly environment core to our company values.”