How Workplace Options built an innovative manager enablement program

How do you empower managers to conduct meaningful performance reviews when they’ve never been trained to do it? That was the challenge facing Workplace Options (WPO), who discovered gaps in the confidence of their leaders only eight weeks ahead of a major performance cycle. Instead of just helping individual leaders prepare for the next cycle of reviews, the organization opted to invest in ongoing leadership development and enablement – year-round.

WPO has been at the forefront of global employee wellbeing since 1982. Today, they are trusted by Fortune 500 companies and serve over 88 million people at more than 127,000 organizations across 200 countries and territories. As the largest independent provider of holistic well-being solutions, WPO has built its reputation through a comprehensive global network of credentialed providers and professionals who support individuals to become healthier, happier, and more productive – both personally and professionally.

Laura McAtee is the Senior Employee Engagement Manager at WPO and has been with the organization for six years. Her role spans multiple areas of focus: overseeing career development programs, managing performance and engagement initiatives, organizing global employee events, and supporting diversity and inclusion efforts.

“We look at the whole person – mental health support, physical wellbeing, work-life resources, everything that’s inside and outside the workplace,” Laura explained. “When someone feels like their whole self is taken care of by the company, they’re probably going to perform better.”

This people-centric philosophy has guided WPO throughout its 43-year history, but the company's internal performance management process needed a refresh to better align with its mission of holistic support.

From disjointed PDFs to streamlined performance management

The performance management process WPO had been using internally needed an update. The existing process was fragmented, with each department maintaining different approaches to performance reviews. Managers found themselves navigating a complex landscape of varying PDF templates in their HRIS, inconsistent review schedules, and unclear evaluation criteria. They also struggled to manage:

• Scattered timelines
  Reviews happened on employees’ anniversary dates, which meant managers were doing reviews constantly throughout the year.
• Lack of standardization
  With no universal rating system or consistent questions due to the various performance processes by department and role, leadership was unable to compare performance across teams or departments.
• Limited data insights
  The manual, PDF-based process made it difficult to analyze organizational performance trends or make data-informed decisions about development needs.

Without a unified approach to performance across the organization, performance conversations felt disconnected and administrative rather than insightful and supportive.

Empowering managers with dedicated support

While the performance cycles weren’t optimal, they worked well enough. During this time, WPO had already partnered with Culture Amp to support employee engagement, and the turning point came with feedback from engagement surveys. The survey insights, along with 1-on-1s with managers, revealed that more support was needed around performance management.

Laura recalls, “We got comments saying, ‘I don’t feel like I’m getting an accurate performance review’ or managers saying, ‘I’m not sure how to support my employees, and I want to be a better manager.’”

And that sparked the HR team to take the feedback and run with it. It was clear there was a need, and with the support of organization leadership, Laura and her team began the process of improving performance culture at WPO. They decided to do this by:

• Moving from their current HRIS-based review process to Culture Amp’s Perform platform
• Developing a comprehensive manager enablement program
• Standardizing their performance review process across the organization

This allowed them to transition from scattered, static PDFs to a dynamic, unified system. It also empowered them to invest in meaningful performance training for managers and implementation of consistent timelines, questions, and rating scales for all employee reviews.

Launching a new manager enablement program in only eight weeks

With a clear direction on where to start, Laura spearheaded the development of a new manager enablement program. The catch? They were only eight weeks out from the next review cycle, so she needed to move quickly.

To pull it together, the HR team worked to integrate multiple elements into an integrated program that leveraged:

• Customized content
  WPO adapted Culture Amp’s development materials to reflect preferred internal language and messaging.
• Interactive workshops
  Breakout rooms provided safe spaces for manager questions and development.
• Culture Amp Masterclasses
  People Science-designed trainings, led by WPO’s dedicated People Scientist Thaddeus Rada-Bayne, gave managers the foundational knowledge needed to provide meaningful feedback and foster constructive conversations.
• Multilingual support
  All materials were translated into Spanish and French to enable global accessibility across the organization.

The ability to incorporate preexisting templates and resources from Culture Amp’s platform made the tight turnaround a possibility, saving Laura and her team serious time and effort. With the masterclass templates and online resources, they were able to cut prep time by at least ten hours.

When it came time to launch, the program was ready to go with different areas of growth to address:

• Terminology and framework understanding that explained what performance ratings actually mean
• Platform navigation that taught managers how to use Culture Amo’s Perform tools effectively
• Constructive feedback techniques that helped managers embrace a growth mindset and move beyond terms like “low-performing” in reviews
• Approaches for difficult conversations that helped managers navigate and adequately prepare for challenging performance discussions
• Holistic performance evaluation that taught managers to analyze team dynamics and overall performance health

And in only eight weeks, Laura and the HR team launched a fully developed manager enablement program that was built around the real challenges team leaders were facing.

Creating a culture of confident feedback

It quickly became clear that the manager enablement was having a positive impact across the organization. After the review cycle, Laura and her team could already see:

• A 3-engagement point increase in feedback quality
  The organization saw an immediate, significant improvement in the number of employees who felt they received valuable feedback performance in their review cycle.
• More accurate performance distribution
  Before the manager enablement program was implemented, performance results were skewed. After the program, the distribution was reflective of what is expected for a company of WPO’s size.
• Reviews transformed from an administrative task to an impactful tool
  The performance cycles used to be near-constant and an administrative strain, but the manager enablement program empowered managers to take control of conversations and focus intentionally on employee development.
• Meaningful time savings and visibility
  The switch from PDFs to Culture Amo’s streamlined platform—full of dynamic resources, centralized performance data, and smart insights—has made it fast and easy to understand performance as a whole.

Most importantly, the manager enablement program has created a ripple effect throughout the organization. Managers began approaching performance conversations with greater confidence, understanding, and strategic insight.

And that has prompted WPO to build on the success they’ve had so far, expanding their approach to manager enablement in several key ways:

• Offering quarterly HR trainings to supplement the program that will center on different themes such as how performance cycle results impact the company as a whole.
• Designating performance champions in each department who will be trained on everything to do with the performance cycle, so employees don’t have to seek answers outside of their team when they have questions.
• Implementing 360 feedback through Culture Amp’s Perform platform to further enhance managers’ approach to development.

Without the time constraints they faced with the initial rollout of the program, WPO will have the room to implement a more comprehensive version that explores new resources while doubling down on the elements of the first cycle that made a noticeable impact.

Building a manager-first approach to performance

Laura has come away with significant takeaways from developing WPO’s manager enablement program. A major realization has been that many organizations approach performance cycles with the expectation that managers already know how to give reviews with constructive feedback. Unless you train them yourself, many won’t know how to do it—and they won’t speak up, since they’re already expected to have that knowledge.

Instead, Laura recommends a few different approaches to ensuring meaningful review cycles:

• Listen to your data
  Use engagement surveys and one-on-ones to identify manager and employee needs around performance.
• Provide structured support
  Don’t expect managers to know how to give effective feedback without training. Instead, make the effort to understand the areas where they need support.
• Leverage expert resources
  Culture Amp’s Masterclasses, platform content, and People Science provided a foundation for learning that saved Laura from having to build a program from scratch.
• Create interactive learning opportunities
  Build non-judgmental spaces where managers can practice giving feedback and ask vulnerable questions that will help develop their review abilities.
• Standardize your review approach
  Implement the same review process across the company, even if there are many roles and responsibilities—this will help ensure that feedback can be implemented at an organizational level.

Ultimately, developing initiatives like WPO’s manager enablement program will not only build feedback into the culture as a regular, integral tool, but it will demonstrate an organization’s dedication to the development of its employees at all levels.

Learn the latest about topics and trends on employee engagement, inclusive leadership, and psychological safety by following Workplace Options on LinkedIn and subscribing to the free newsletter: Inform. Engage. Empower.

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