How Blueprint Medicines empowers employees to develop their careers with Culture Amp

Blueprint Medicines is a biotech company that discovers, develops, and commercializes precision medicines that treat genomically defined cancers and rare diseases. To help employees learn, grow, and keep pace with the company’s scientific approaches, Blueprint Medicines uses Culture Amp to measure employee engagement, identify employees’ desired career paths, and enable employee development.

Blueprint Medicines is a precision therapy company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2006, the biotech company is advancing multiple programs for systemic mastocytosis, genomically defined cancers, and cancer immunotherapy that are designed to help patients live longer, happier lives. They believe that patients deserve treatment advances that go beyond incremental progress, and patient care can be transformed through better science.

Jennifer Shevlin is the Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Blueprint Medicines. After first joining the company as an HR business partner (HRBP), Jennifer now leads three of the company’s teams: HRBP, Learning & Development, and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (ED&I).

Challenge: Create an efficient, scalable approach to employee development

When Jennifer joined Blueprint Medicine in 2019, the company had just over 200 employees and was rapidly expanding. In the past four years, their headcount has grown 300%. Upon Jennifer’s arrival, there were a number of thoughtful learning and development programs in place – but there wasn’t a streamlined system to guide managers or employees along their career development journeys.

Instead, employees completed performance reviews and development plans in Microsoft Word and emailed documents to their managers. Managers then relayed those documents to HR reps, who stored them in personnel files. Files tended to get buried beneath the day-to-day shuffle of a fast-paced work environment and were seldom referenced throughout the year.

While the company’s best managers and most disciplined employees stayed on top of their development plans, the vast majority of people struggled to keep track of development plans and follow through with development actions. Ultimately, the system wasn’t as efficient as it could be, which made it difficult to measure progress or build development plans based on an employee’s individual needs.

Jennifer knew that this process wasn’t scalable – it was too manual and relied too heavily on the individual managers to keep feedback and development plans top-of-mind.

“We are literally in the business of extending and saving lives. So, the ability for someone to learn and grow quickly is not a ‘nice-to-have’ – it’s something we expect all employees to invest in. We also care deeply about our employees as individuals. We want them to learn more and learn faster here than they do at other organizations, so they can make a bigger impact on the world. Therefore, we invest a lot in making sure people have opportunities to learn,” said Jennifer.

To reinforce employees' existing commitment to the company’s mission, Blueprint Medicines sought technology with several features. First, it needed to have the ability to structure consistent performance reviews. Second, it needed to provide a process that's effective and easy to maintain, so employees can stay continuously engaged in their development. Finally, the technology needed to enable a view into how employees are using the tool.

Solution: Use Culture Amp to create personalized development plans, measure progress, encourage educational opportunities, and boost accountability

Before Jennifer went searching for the right technology, she took a step back.

“Instead of taking the approach of searching for technologies first and letting the technology guide our process, we decided to identify what we want performance to look like at Blueprint and the outcomes we're trying to achieve. That put us in a position to pick a technology that enables us to execute on our vision."

To get there, Jennifer formed a cross-functional, multi-level internal task force that focused on defining the company’s performance philosophy. Tapping into external research, expert panels, and structured exercises and workshops, they made space to think creatively about what performance could and should look like at Blueprint and why it matters to the company and to employees.

With a vision and philosophy in place, the team researched different technologies and evaluated them against their goals. They discovered Culture Amp and found it to be a user-friendly system that would allow managers to customize, administer, review, and interpret employee performance and development plans as quickly as possible – all in one platform.

“We loved that Culture Amp puts employee interaction front and center to drive engagement and foster a culture of meaningful and proactive development” explained Jennifer.

By the end of 2019, Blueprint introduced Culture Amp’s performance solution to implement a more structured, seamless, and digital employee review process. They also used Culture Amp to build a customized survey to gain the insights they needed to take further, data-informed action. Specifically, the survey determined:

• Employees’ level of engagement and enablement
• Employees’ feelings and attitudes about their position and growth trajectory at the company
• How Blueprint compares to similar companies via benchmarking data embedded in each survey

“Culture Amp makes it easy to customize the survey templates. There's good benchmarking data in the survey, and we have the flexibility to filter the benchmarks so we can put our data into context. The analysis tool is also really easy to use, which allows us to get deep insights into engagement drivers, our strengths, and opportunity areas, all while looking at the data through different demographic lenses,” Jennifer said.

Building from this strong foundation, Jennifer worked closely with Culture Amp’s People Science team in 2022 to integrate Blueprint’s competencies into Develop, an employee development tool that creates personalized employee development plans and science-backed workflows that prioritize individual motivators and education opportunities.

Now, with Develop, Blueprint’s managers have quick and easy access to employee competencies, development goals, and ongoing performance, which they can leverage to further inspire action and celebrate employee growth. Additionally, Blueprint Medicines uses Develop to:

• Reduce recency bias and establish a clear path to career progression
• Leverage employee data to support frequent, thoughtful development conversations
• Foster collaboration between managers and their direct reports
• Track goals and facilitate growth conversations
• Automate processes to save time and improve efficiency

Results: More transparent career path development, measurable employee growth and progress based on trackable data, and a more engaged workforce

According to Jennifer, the Develop tool has encouraged greater levels of employee motivation and support for career development overall. This bears out in the results of Blueprint’s employee engagement surveys, which show employees are responding well to the learning and development programs:

• 97% survey participation
• 80% engagement score
• 93% positive score for, “I am proud to work for Blueprint.”
• 88% positive score for, “I know what I need to do to be successful in my role.”
• 80% positive score for, “My manager has shown a genuine interest in my career aspirations and actively supports me in pursuing my career goals."
• 80% positive score for, "My manager provides me with useful feedback about what's working well and how I can improve."

Now, many employees complete self-reflections to actively share their achievements, learnings, and growth areas with their managers. Meanwhile, managers are better equipped to handle development conversations, understand what opportunities are valuable to individual employees, and make more informed decisions about how to support and develop their teams. Managers are also encouraged to use Skills Coach, and some have even independently adopted use of Culture Amp’s 1-on-1s feature.

Looking ahead: Career Paths

Jennifer is excited to introduce one of Develop’s newest features, Career Paths, to help bring clarity to employees in their current roles.

Career Paths helps management teams build attainable career trajectories based on specific roles and expectations. With a transparent view of the necessary competencies and proficiencies for success in each role, employees can work with their managers to set reasonable expectations as they continue their company journey.

“The beauty of having this tool is that it outlines career paths and expectations across roles, helps employees better understand what's expected of them in their current positions, and shows them what to focus on to prepare for future roles,” Jennifer said.

As the SVP of HR, Jennifer knows that every decision matters. Culture Amp has offered valuable insights and assistance whenever necessary – examining and providing analysis on survey results throughout Develop’s implementation and beyond.

“The experience has been really collaborative, and I get a lot of good insights. You can see the expertise that Culture Amp brings. It’s been a really positive experience for everyone,” she said.