How Tonkin + Taylor humanized their performance system with a culture of continuous feedback

Tonkin + Taylor had an established performance system in place – but feedback conversations could feel routine and impersonal, leaving employees with few actionable insights to level up in their roles. Partnering with Culture Amp helped the organization build an intuitive, human-centered process where open, honest dialogue allows their people to thrive.

Tonkin + Taylor Group is comprised of leading employee-owned environmental and engineering consultancies and testing businesses with offices across New Zealand and Australia. The Group is made up of four companies, delivering solutions to clients across five continents – Tonkin + Taylor in New Zealand, Tonkin + Taylor in Australia, Geotechnics, and Chadwick Geotechnics.

As an employee-owned organization, Tonkin + Taylor has always placed emphasis on workplace culture as a strategic priority. Kavita Khanna leads these efforts as the Executive Leader of People + Workplace. Since joining Tonkin + Taylor in 2015, Kavita and her team have focused on creating systems that support managers and employees, enhancing the employee experience, promoting a safe collaborative work environment, attracting, and retaining top talent from all over the world.

Challenge: An ingrained but inconsistent feedback system

In 2019, Tonkin + Taylor reviewed their performance management system, following a strategic reorganisation and realignment. From the data it became clear that while employees understood the process of evaluation, they were not clear on how they were being evaluated.

"As simple as it seems, the problem was we never told people what ‘good performance’ actually looks like,” said Kavita. “We needed managers and employees to understand performance isn’t a fixed state you’re stuck in forever. It’s a dynamic process that revolves around feedback – and an evaluation process should give individuals an active voice. It would require nurturing through coaching and good feedback conversations.”

Kavita and her team wanted to translate their already conversation-rich process into a people-first tool that could support the organisations focus on growth and development. Specifically, they needed a data-driven but human-centered process that engaged people throughout the year, assessed employees as individuals, and allowed feedback to be shared across different teams and projects. They sought a product that would serve them well – a product that aligned with the core philosophy that good experiences create engagement and engaged employees are effective and drive high performance for a business. That is when they discovered Culture Amp. It was one of the very few tools in the marketplace, at the time, that combined insights on engagement, experience and effectiveness.

Solution: A personalized, people-first performance platform

The business case for investment in the tool focused on the three Es – engagement, experience, and effectiveness – and how they work together to drive business performance in a meaningful way.

“We showed leaders across our organization how partnering with Culture Amp would make everyone’s work not only better, but easier. Having dynamic, authentic feedback conversations isn’t something that’s just nice to do or good for HR. It’s business critical.” - Kavita Khanna, Executive Leader of People + Workplace

Culture Amp set Kavita’s team up with a customer success coach that got to know Tonkin + Taylor as an organisation. This allowed Culture Amp to develop a tailored solution – one that could meet Tonkin + Taylor’s teams where they already were, uplift the elements they already had in place, and adapt new tools to their particular needs.

Soon, Culture Amp’s Performance Management tool was synced up with Tonkin + Taylor’s entire performance cycle, expanding their twice-yearly review program into a culture of continuous, feedback and learning.

Actionable feedback at any time, with just a few clicks

As part of the implementation, Kavita’s team ran a small pilot with Culture Amp’s continuous feedback tool to demonstrate just how simple sharing impactful insights could be. This was a deliberate tactic.

“We knew that, once people tried it, the tool’s convenience would drive others to try it as well,” said Kavita. “Sure enough, once we had a few champions, they were pushing the product for us.”

Having a customised platform that felt familiar to the organisation made it easy to give and receive useful feedback. Managers could leverage Culture Amp’s readymade templates and data-backed prompts to send quick, detailed performance notes at any time, not just when formal reviews rolled around. While employees could lean on embedded coaching resources to successfully act on them.

1-on-1 tools to facilitate conversations

Culture Amp’s 1-on-1 feature also encouraged managers and employees to check in frequently, so they could proactively talk through points of concern, diagnose any potential issues, and resolve them head-on.

“Culture Amp helps by structuring the conversation for you,” said Kavita. “You can input the topics you want to cover, and it creates an agenda that ensures discussions flow naturally. It’s not just about going through the checklist but finding out what’s working for people and what’s blocking them from achieving their goals.”

This became especially important with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meeting regularly through Culture Amp meant dispersed employees working from home could not only stay connected to their teams, but also lean on built-in tools that helped them continue effective conversations remotely.

Organisational-wide efficiency and transparency

Additional Culture Amp features like goal-tracking and calibrations meant that teams could not only set and work toward specific OKRs, but automatically record and follow performance data over time to get a more holistic view of each individual’s professional progress.

Once Culture Amp’s full platform was up and running, Kavita was thrilled to see teams across Tonkin + Taylor Group finding new and productive ways to use it.

“For example, we had feedback from employees that our shareholding nomination process was not transparent, and it was not clear how the organisation made decisions on choosing shareholders each year.” she said.

There had been work already underway to create more transparency around the criteria for selection.

“But then, the Chair of the Board announced we were going to start doing it on Culture Amp. While the team had to find a new way of using the performance platform, it made the process simpler for the applicant and supported decision-makers with quality data. We continue to improve the process and experience for our people. It is when you start getting suggestions from users on how they would like to extend the use of a product that you know that product is well and truly embedded and a useful indicator of benefits realisation.”

Results: A workplace built on open dialogue, engagement, and trust

Since partnering with Culture Amp, individuals across Tonkin + Taylor have forged a deeper understanding of their performance goals and expectations. Plus, there’s been a marked upswing in the way teams use quality feedback to drive professional growth. Some notable wins include:

• 88% participation in the performance cycle, with features like Culture Amp’s continuous feedback tool and 1-on-1s integrated seamlessly across Tonkin + Taylor’s performance management system.
• 60% engagement with Culture Amp’s continuous feedback tool in the last 12 months, with most of the Tonkin + Taylor team using it to quickly draft and send performance notes.
• 8-point rise in belief that performance is evaluated fairly, with Culture Amp’s science-driven calibrations ensuring reviews are carried out equitably and consistently across all roles
• 6-point rise in belief that performance feedback is useful, with Culture Amp’s personalized templates, guided 1:1s, and goal-tracking software giving employees actionable ways to grow

“People wanted to know how they were doing, how their careers would develop, and what the organization expected of them – the simple, human needs of anybody working in any organization. We wanted to show that active feedback could contribute to growth and build connections.

A lot of the behavioral changes were about not seeing feedback as something separate from work, but something you should regularly do as a part of work.

That meant shifting it from an awkward, isolated process you have to do once or twice a year to a regular part of your role. And Culture Amp’s platform helped us normalize it. It helps particularly if the leaders are already tuned to the importance of culture in driving performance and enabling strategy.”