Last updated December 9, 2024

How Prosci drives performance globally

Writer, Culture Amp

Prosci, a leading change management organization, is headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado, with offices across the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Prosci specializes in helping people and companies navigate change, so the company was uniquely prepared to implement a new performance management system. To meet the needs of a global workforce, they turned to Culture Amp.

Scott McAllister, CEO, and Laura McGann, CPO, sat down with Kailey Marshall, their Culture Amp Customer Success Coach, for a candid conversation on how they approached the process.

Finding the tools to align a global workforce

Prosci began its performance journey with a few simple goals. They wanted every team member to understand how their daily work contributes to the company’s success. In addition, Laura says, “We wanted to ensure that team members are investing in their growth and development and that managers are really engaged in their development work.”

Laura, who confesses to hating the term “performance management,” explains that at Prosci, they see performance and development as closely related. They call the program “goals and growth” because it covers both the performance side and career development.

At the start of the process, Prosci faced three major challenges:

1. Making sure leaders understood the “why” behind performance

Prosci wanted leaders to recognize how the goals and growth process connected to business KPIs and values – and Laura knew this had to start from the top. If managers don’t focus on goals and growth, their direct reports won’t either.

For Laura, starting from the top meant getting buy-in from their CEO Scott. At first, he didn’t see the need for a performance platform; he thought collecting data with a simple survey tool was enough. However, as he learned more about what Culture Amp offered, he began to recognize the value of implementing an all-in-one platform.

Reflecting on that, he says, “I talk a lot about the team member experience being our top priority, so we have a high bar to be held accountable to, and you can't just make it up as you go along. If you say that's your top priority, you've really got to invest in [it].”

2. Bringing consistency to the performance process

As an international organization, Prosci’s saw its business units approaching performance in different ways, some of which were still paper-based. Aggregating performance data had become more cumbersome as the organization scaled, and leaders were ready to go digital. Scott says, “We want to create a consistent experience for our team members in LATAM, Australia, and Europe the same way we would in a headquarters market.”

To accomplish that, the company sought a flexible global platform not designed around US cultural attributes. Laura explains, “We needed a partner who understands the complexities of running a global business and what's important in every market.” Culture Amp felt like the right choice.

They appreciated that employees could provide feedback in their native language with Culture Amp’s built-in language support. Scott says, “I don't speak every language that every one of our team members speaks, but we can all communicate through a common platform.”

3. Improving team member ability and clarity

Prosci leaders also recognized that employees needed more support to set effective goals, have meaningful 1-on-1 conversations with managers, and give each other better feedback. “We were seeing a lot of comments in our employee engagement survey saying, like, I want more feedback. I'm not getting the feedback I want,” Laura recalls. “It was a great place to start our change from, because our employees were asking us for some of these tools.”

The company knew the new performance system would have to be simple to scale it globally. Culture Amp gave employees a blueprint to follow. “One of the things that it’s brought is consistency to how we have goals and growth discussions,” Scott says. “You don't need to be an expert in this. You can follow a documented structure here that takes a lot of the guesswork out.”

When employees did have questions, Laura and her team were there to help. She’s excited that Culture Amp plans to add more AI guidance to the platform. She says, “We had a lot of folks who said, ‘Okay, I'm going to write this down for this first time, and I don't know what language to use. Can you help and give me some coaching?’ So having more tools available for that is going to be great.”

Configuring the platform so it “feels like us”

At Prosci, team members are asked not only to give feedback but also to provide “feed-forward,” borrowing from Marshall Goldsmith’s concept of coaching. Culture Amp’s customization meant they could build that into the platform. In quarterly conversations, they ask, “What feedback and feed-forward do you have for this individual?”

While employees are eager to receive more feedback, Scott notes that they sometimes struggle to share honest feedback with others because they want to be “nice.” Scott says, “We’ve been trying to shift that to be more kind.” The “feed-forward” approach feels more like coaching, and employees are encouraged to say things like, “It would be even better if you did this next time.”

Laura says being able to embed specific language and company values has been “hugely powerful” because “It’s not just off the shelf. It feels like us in Prosci.” In the coming year, the company plans to implement more Culture Amp tools – Develop is next on the list – and continue to customize them around their company values.

Gaining transparency into performance, company-wide

Prosci leaders have found it helpful to have access to more data. For the first time, they can easily see where employee expectations and projects are aligned – and where they aren’t. Laura notes, “We finally have insight into performance conversations… We have insight into goals. We don't have to go digging through a PDF or a whole spreadsheet.”

Scott has found that using Culture Amp for goals and growth also gives leaders more accountability. “The system actually forces you to get into a better rhythm,” he says, adding, “I also love the reflection aspect of it. It's not just a top-down kind of discussion. You're getting a lot of that bottom-up feedback as well.”

While they don’t have statistics on this yet, Scott believes that having better goals and growth discussions and providing clarity around next steps has improved employee mobility.

The once-hesitant CEO now offers advice to others trying to gain executive buy-in. He says that even when the status quo is unsustainable, some leaders will turn a blind eye because addressing the problem costs money. He says, “I find a lot of leaders [run] towards the light when they see it, but others, they need to feel the heat to get into action.” He encourages leaders to ask, “What do we risk by not doing more in this space?” – and trust that the investment will benefit your company.