The Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority Makes Employee Appraisals Exciting and Fun
Customer Profile
The region of Reno and Lake Tahoe, Nevada is sometimes called "America's Adventure Place," offering top-notch skiing, golf, casinos, and other attractions for thrill-seekers. But the organization responsible for luring those thrill-seekers to the area found itself spending too much time and effort on the less-than-thrilling process of employee performance reviews.
The Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority (RSCVA) was established in 1959 to promote convention and tourism business for the Washoe County area of Nevada. The RSCVA is the marketing arm for conventions, tourism, special events, and recreation in the area. And it has done a good job: Meetings & Conventions Magazine has honored the RSCVA with its coveted Gold Service Award for excellence in meeting and convention services ten years in a row. The RSCVA and its Executive Director of Human Resources, Steve Casper, wanted to achieve that same excellence in employee performance management.
Unlike other convention and visitor bureaus across the country, the RSCVA owns and/or operates several facilities, including the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, the Nevada State Fair Grounds and the Reno Sparks Livestock Events Center, the National Bowling Stadium and the new Reno Events Center, the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts, the Visitors Center at Incline Village, and two golf courses. That means the RSCVA employs approximately 400 people at six different facilities and at its Reno headquarters.
Challenge
When Steve Casper joined the organization in 2000, only some of the full-time staff were receiving regular employee performance appraisals (part-time staff received no formal feedback). Those appraisals that were being done were paper-based, standard performance appraisal forms that were laboriously filled out by overworked managers. The process was cumbersome and haphazard.
Casper had used an automated employee performance appraisal system at a previous employer. "I really liked the idea of electronic performance forms," Casper said. Computer access wasn't a barrier: All of the RSCVA's supervisors have a PC or access to one, and two-thirds of its employees do. "We wanted to make the process easier. We wanted to have a system that let the managers focus on the review rather than the forms that needed to be filled out," Casper said.
So Casper set up a rudimentary EPM system himself, using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. "It was a step in the right direction, because it allowed the managers to use computers to complete the forms, but it didn't do much for the administration of the process itself. It still involved a lot of phone calls and e-mails to remind everyone to do the work," Casper recalled.
Casper set out to find a better system, with the goal of cutting in half the time that HR staff was spending on managing the annual employee performance appraisal process. It was at the Society of Human Resource Management Convention and Trade Show in 2002 that he first saw a demonstration of Halogen eAppraisal™. "I was immediately attracted to the demo and to the promise of the product."
Solution
The RSCVA team reviewed two other EPM software products. "Halogen was just a leap ahead of the other two EPM systems that we reviewed, so the decision was a no-brainer," Casper recalls.
The Halogen product fit with Casper's goal of finding technology that helped his small HR staff devote less time to administration and more to training and field activities.
"This product was clearly right up that alley. I was able to show the overall benefit of Halogen pretty easily," first to the RSCVA's CEO and senior staff, and finally to its 13-member Board of Directors. The Board gave Casper the go-ahead to purchase Halogen eAppraisal in October 2002. The first set of employee reviews was conducted using the new software the following spring.
The RSCVA trained 35 supervisors on eAppraisal shortly before it rolled out the product in early 2003. Since then, the organization has conducted several sets of staff reviews using Halogen eAppraisal, "and each time is easier than the last," Casper said. "This year, we've had people saying, 'this is so great, it's so easy to use'." And the HR team is spending "nominal" amounts of time managing the evaluation process, he added.
Benefits
One increasingly popular feature is Halogen eAppraisal's self-appraisal tool, which lets RSCVA staff rate their own performance to compare with the evaluations given by their supervisors. "When we started using Halogen eAppraisal, about 25% of our staff used the voluntary self-appraisal feature. Now it's up to 60%," Casper noted. Supervisors compare these self-appraisals with their own evaluations to get a more complete picture of each employee's work.
"Thanks to Halogen eAppraisal, the time spent by HR staff in managing the annual employee appraisal process has been cut by 75%," Casper said. "The process was consuming almost all of our time in HR," he noted. "Now, we have time to do a lot of other important things."
The benefits extend beyond the HR staff. For managers, Halogen eAppraisal has meant less time filling out forms and the freedom to work on employee appraisals while away from the office. For employees, eAppraisal has meant regular, accurate feedback on their work. "People see that they are getting their reviews done in a timely manner, which wasn't the case before," Casper said. "Now, all reviews are done before salary increases, and the merit component of their pay is calculated with the help of the scoring matrix in the Halogen product."
The RSCVA is so pleased with Halogen eAppraisal that Casper has provided more than 20 positive references for Halogen Software. "I have a lot of confidence in Halogen and in this product," Casper said. "Nothing is perfect in this world, but the level of performance and the incremental improvements over the past three years make me very happy that we bought Halogen eAppraisal."
