How a UN agency is reinventing performance management feedback

Five key lessons from our culture change work.

For over 70 years, a United Nations (UN) agency has worked to save countless lives and created new opportunities for the underprivileged. 14,000 employees across 190 countries passionately commit to realizing a world where people can see their full potential. Many companies and nonprofit organizations operate on vast scales, but this UN agency faces an added challenge: it has one of the most diverse workforces of any organization on the planet. Despite its diversity, the global team works together to distribute over 5,000 products to vulnerable people all over the world.

Given the multiple obstacles such as war zones that the UN agency must overcome every year to serve these children, the organization’s many years of service underscores the multicultural savvy in its institutional heritage. Yet improvement is always possible. Three years ago, the agency undertook an organization-wide cultural transformation project to better the way employees received feedback. May & Company’s team was ready for the challenge.

Reviewing the review

As in many organizations, the annual performance reviews did not work as intended. Managers dreaded giving the reviews, employees hated receiving them, and the feedback often arrived too late to do any good or was too protective of the employee to be useful. Beyond all those typical challenges, a tangle of divisions along hierarchical, cultural, and gender lines made constructive criticism difficult as there were many communication differences to overcome. Unaccustomed to Western norms, field employees in non-western cultures could take feedback as an insult when it was not delivered within their cultural norms. This caused unhealthy workplace dynamics resulting in low scores on the UN agency’s global staff survey.

Organization leaders decided they needed to promote a feedback culture within the organization to improve the feedback skills of their employees. They needed to learn how its cultural divisions hampered communication and how to overcome blind spots and inhibitions. To rewire the company’s performance management culture, they asked May & Company to analyze the UN agency’s performance culture and lead workshops of the agency’s 150+ offices and facilities. Over the next three years, five of our experts on cultural change would lead 160 workshops all over the organization, reaching 10,000 employees in 96 countries from executives in the central headquarters in New York to supply drivers in Mozambique.

A deep dive into workplace culture

Before we designed the intervention, a workplace culture analysis including 140 individual interviews and focus groups across all hierarchy levels revealed the organization’s underlying system of clashing cultures. Yet across all of the cultures within the UN agency, employees felt a strong sense of pride and contribution from their work. This feeling formed the foundation of the performance management feedback concept we engineered. The organization would move away from the annual paper pushing and toward a continuous learning cycle. Performance management needed to become the driving factor for the organization’s success.

We envisioned an agile performance management culture characterized by context, development, forward thinking, and differentiation. Performance check-ins would take place quarterly with feedback provided frequently, on-time, and in a constructive manner taking changing goals and priorities into account. Such a culture of recognition, learning, and development would make this organization the leading agency within the UN when it comes to performance management.

The performance management culture would connect employees’ individual contributions to the agency’s overall purpose and vision. Employees who demonstrated skills and behaviors informed by the organization’s core values would receive praise. Accountability and deliverables would have a clear connection to context beyond their role. Based on our analysis, we built our intervention around four pillars: framework consistency, data evidence, people skills, and organizational support and change.

1. Framework Consistency: The agency’s employees have a common understanding of a continuous learning cycle as its performance management culture and policy.
2. Data Evidence: People have increased trust in the performance process by having better and cleaner performance data quality. This includes business cases, figures, and calibration rounds.
3. People Skills: Leaders build a common understanding of the skills and behaviors needed within the agency with an emphasis on how behavior from the top affects employees further down the organizational ladder.
4. Organizational Support and Change: The organization will need to lay the foundation to continually promote and support the performance culture change. This involves an in-depth look at effectively changing roles and responsibilities.

To effectively deliver this workshop agenda in different intercultural country contexts, we de-constructed Western concepts and assumptions and tweaked the design content with our intercultural experts to be appropriate while applying techniques effectively. Empathy and intercultural awareness were a prerequisite to understand the different staff perspectives, nuances, and circumstances of each country. We mapped informal relationships and patterns within the UN agency and combined relevant intercultural research with a series of systemic questioning to understand informal societal structures and living conditions of country staff in order to embed concepts appropriately.

With our years of experience, our consultants determined that analysis must always proceed design. Organization leaders needed to understand what is happening in the organization now before determining what needed to change and how. Here are five key lessons on cultural change interventions that we learned from our work with the UN agency.

Key lessons for culture change

1. Understand the core patterns of a workplace culture. By understanding the agency’s core cultural patterns, we were able to create a focused problem definition to determine the right culture change interventions. This was key to promoting feedback and learning to improve performance management, concludes Elaine Lowe, Chief of Performance Management and Career Development in New York.
2. Focus on the outcome, not the person. We coached managers to clearly explain the impact of someone’s behavior as a way to depersonalize criticism, a prime area of tension uncovered through our analysis. Many of the UN agency staffers liked this new feedback tool. “It gives employees a way to talk to their managers in a way that will minimize the potential for a negative reaction, whatever they are talking about,” states Elaine Lowe.
3. Ask open questions and listen to the answers. Misunderstandings are often the result of employees either not understanding the rationale behind an order or managers not understanding the challenges that employees face. This may be particularly true in cultures that prohibit speech between people, such as cultures where women are not supposed to speak directly to men. Sharing more points of view introduces more friction, but it also makes a more creative outcome more likely. “If more people express their views, then we have a better chance of tackling problems creatively,” says Pablo Gimenez, one of our consultants.
4. Make new friends. Bringing people together who might otherwise not have any contact can also help improve communication. “One of the interventions that I suggest is starting a buddy group, bringing people together who have different points of view and different mindsets,” Dina Zavrski-Makaric, explains one of our consultants. She also suggests picking local team members who have gained a more international perspective through education or experience to help introduce new concepts to the local team. “They can be your champions of change,” she says.
5. Push the purpose. Reminding people of the larger goal can also be a good way to overcome cultural inhibitions. “If it’s a submissive culture where females don’t speak up to males, for example, we give managers the license to say, “Yes, this is the cultural context but the agency values, culture, and way we want you to operate and be effective, means you have to take up your role in this way. You have to give feedback, it’s not a choice,” says Vijay Naidoo, one of our South Africa based consultants. “The UN agency’s employees are really committed to helping kids, to helping their society, and they really love what they do,” says Giménez. “The level of commitment I’ve seen here, I would say, is much higher than the one I’ve seen in the corporate world.”

Practice, practice, practice

One workshop cannot overcome a culture engrained over decades of work. That’s why it’s important to keep practicing the lessons learned any intervention workshop. “Behavioral change comes over time, over conversations between managers and employees. It’s about observing and learning from everyone in the different countries to overcome the cultural barriers that hinder these important conversations.” Elaine Lowe believes the culture change workshops from May & Company ignited these important conversations that will eventually lead to better a performance feedback culture across the organization.

Giménez is confident that in many offices, the workshop did spark an important conversation about performance management feedback. Some participants afterwards told him that they have “been dealing with feedback issues for years but there was no space, no place where we could discuss, and talk about how we can improve them.” Managers can now understand the perspectives of their employees, who now understood the feedback’s connection to the agency’s vision and purpose. However, we stressed that the workshops are only the beginning. “If anyone thinks that you can run after one performance management workshop, and then the lights are on forever, no, that’s not true,” says Naidoo. “It’s practice, practice, practice.”