Transcript: Meet our Perform Plus team

Transcript

So we’re really proud about Perform Plus. It’s shown now that it’s actually had really positive impacts across a whole range of diverse clients and teams within clients. And the great thing is not only does it drive productivity, it improves quality and also it does it without relying on massive investment. And also it really empowers the teams. The other thing is that it’s not just about incremental change, it actually has led to some really profound improvements within our clients and their organisations so it’s actually one of the best ways we have of driving business transformation within our clients.

So we created Perform five years ago as a coaching methodology. It’s a 12 week programme where we work face to face with managers and with their teams to install new work habits and make them better at their job. But we knew that we needed to innovate in Perform and that’s why we’ve partnered with Google and we’ve created Perform Plus.

Perform Plus is a digital solution that enhances the Perform offering. We’re bringing face to face coaching with cutting edge technology to make a meaningful impact with our clients. The first thing we did was take the traditional whiteboard and turn it into a digital huddle board. We want to be able to evolve with our clients - we’re seeing more remote workers, dispersed teams and employees expecting these digital capabilities, so the ability to connect, engage and join the huddle anywhere in the world is vital.

We wanted to bring game play into work and have developed gamified features across the platform to help keep team motivations aligned to company priorities even as they change - so that means keeping people engaged but more importantly on the right track.

Going digital with Perform means we can deal with far more data than before to discover trends and context that leads to better quality coaching and decision making, allowing us to have greater impact with our clients.

So one of the main benefits I’ve found through one of our investment bank programmes was a 78% uplift in cases progressed past a certain milestone which, across a 12 week period, is really a great return and a good success.

At Sage this looks like a dramatic improvement in our retention rate of over 2%, which is incredible. We’ve also seen dramatic improvements in productivity, over 70%, and critically we’ve seen a reduction in the number of credits and refunds that we issue to our customers.

A 60% rise in general productivity, a 50% rise in number of cases per worker per week. The thing that stood out for everyone involved in the programme is that this is a team that’s out of the office, in people’s houses all the time and never felt like a team, never felt like they were connected to anyone else. And through this process after week one people were saying, ‘I feel like I’m part of a team now’.

So looking at the future of Perform Plus, we really want to explore the best of Google Cloud technologies so we’re looking into Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence to build a smarter Perform Plus so it becomes a digital coach because that way we can actually drive transformational change at a bigger scale, one huddle at a time.