Building a High-Performance Culture
By Marife B. Zamora

Based on a talk given at the John Clements Corporate Planning Session on December 20, 2006 at the Manila Golf Club.

Carol asked me to give my thoughts on my leadership at Convergys and my personal experiences—what has made me successful as a leader. Please allow me to veer away from talking about myself and delve instead into how we in Convergys in the Philippines are able to sustain a leadership position by building a high performance culture. Until I came to Convergys, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several elements in any organization’s makeup and success—along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials and the like—I came to see that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. We at Convergys are very honored that you consider our company as a role model in this area. I will be sharing with you some of our best practices and strategic initiatives which have helped Convergys grow into a high-performance company, a leader.

Let me begin with two quotations that you perhaps may have heard before.

The first is: “Firms become victims of the very success of their past.”
The second is: “It is where you are that makes it hard to get to where you could be.”

These quotes certainly ring true, don’t they? We have all heard of companies that have failed to capitalize on their initial success and suffered as a result of inability to adapt to the changing business environment. Indeed, building high-performance organizations requires the unrelenting drive to resist the inertia of complacency and the pitfall of mediocrity.

At Convergys, building a high-performance culture is integral to our Vision and Strategy. It empowers everything we do as a company. Our strategy is to “Create superior shareholder returns by developing a high-performance culture that delivers differentiated value in attractive markets.”

This involves two things:

People. We organize and align people to successfully execute strategy, commit to the development of people, align incentives to performance, and focus the organization on client benefits and competitive advantage. They say that computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love and understanding.

Performance. We enhance leadership to drive fast and effective decisions, strengthen project management, drive personal accountability, and institute a metrics-based management approach.

Now, it is one thing to pay lip service to this strategy, and it is another thing to translate this strategy into reality. At Convergys, three success factors have led to the development of our high-performance culture. This high-performance culture has fueled the rapid growth of Convergys in the Philippines—from one employee to nearly 10,000 in three short years—dare I say the fastest growth seen in the Philippine contact center industry.  If life was so easy that you could just buy success, there would be lots of successful companies in the world. Successful enterprises are built from the ground up. In April 2003, I wouldn’t have come back to work for anything less than this fantastic opportunity to build Convergys from nothing, or rather from one, as I am employee no. 2.

The first success factor that has contributed to our high-performance culture is a critical, enterprise-wide strategic initiative called the Performance Transformation.

Why did Convergys need to change?

Benjamin Franklin once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  To see our vision become reality, we cannot be satisfied with the status quo.

The ultimate barometer of a publicly-traded company’s success is how it performs against its financial measures, namely, revenue growth, operating income, and earnings per share. Because we wanted to improve our financial performance relative to competition, change was necessary.

Thus, the Performance Transformation Initiative was born.

The Performance Transformation Initiative is a discipline program to improve Convergys’s performance through focused business metrics and increased accountability. The program helps us fundamentally change the way we operate as a company with the goal of producing the following results:

1. Improved growth, profitability and overall performance of the business;

2. Clear alignment across the organization regarding our strategy and operating model;

3. Tighter linkage of individual performance and accountability to operating plans and our strategic plan;

4. And greater focus on development of the talent we need to lead the business;

Through the performance transformation, we are moving the business from its current state to a more competitive results-oriented future state. To do this, Convergys must change:

1. From a slow-moving reactive company to a responsive, forward-thinking company;

2. From working in bureaucratic silos to “One Convergys” working in collaboration and communication;

3. From a company which lacked clear consistent direction to one with a clear strategy translating to role clarity at the individual level;

4. From a company which lacks accountability to one in which rewards and consequences are performance-based;

5. And from one which is wanting in leadership to one in which visible, decisive leadership and action can be seen from all levels of the company.

Metrics management is an integral part of the Performance Transformation Initiative which has affected most employees. Simply put, more of the day-to-day work of all employees is now measured by performance metrics, with the goal of producing the following results:

• Increased accountability for performance
• Management driven by data rather than anecdote
• Improved visibility into underlying drivers of business performance
• Better operational and financial results for Convergys
• Performance is measured using individual Scorecards and unit-wide Dashboards. Scorecards provide information about individual performance, and have become part of the annual review process. They feature top-level metrics that indicate an employee's performance

Dashboards provide information about business unit or resource unit performance, and are used by managers to make decisions. They feature a list of top-level metrics that indicate performance against specific initiatives within a business or resource unit. Scorecards, metrics, and dashboards are a way of life in Convergys.

The second success factor in our high-performance culture is our unique approach to Strategic Talent Management.

To sustain competitive advantage, it is of prime importance to develop your talent. There are three reasons why talent development is critical.

First, in a rapidly growing industry such as the call center industry, there is not enough fully developed management talent around. There is not only a war for the agent workforce, but also a war for supervisory and management talent.

Second, career development is critical to attracting and retaining talent. In Convergys, career advancement is one of the top drivers for retention. In fact, many of our employees came to Convergys for opportunities in career development.

Third, we need to develop people quickly and effectively to increase their competencies. In other industries, managers are typically in their mid-thirties. In our industry, we cannot wait that long to develop our talent. At Convergys, we have high-performing managers as young as 24 years old, an indication of the lightning-speed career development we provide.

An organization-wide strategic talent management plan is necessary. At Convergys, we define Strategic Talent Management as: “A process of managing employees, especially those identified as having leadership talent, along the entire employee life cycle from recruitment to retirement.” Strategic Talent Management is a process of selecting, developing, and advancing key talent to build a high-performance culture. The initiative provides a means for improving, on a sustained basis, the overall talent profile and management process across Convergys. It also provides career opportunities for talented personnel.

The objectives of this initiative are:

The Convergys Performance Management system is crucial to developing our high-performance culture. We at Convergys believe that performance management processes are business processes, not HR processes. While the goal is to enhance employee performance, ultimately we want that enhanced employee performance to increase our ability to achieve business results that are in alignment with our business strategy.

The online Personal Development Center supports every step of the Performance Management process. Performance appraisals are documented online. We have a goal manager that allows employees and their supervisors to track business goals as well as personal development goals. Employees can even perform 360 competency assessments, soliciting performance feedback from several sources.

The Personal Development Center is a robust Learning Management System that integrates all Employee Development, Performance Management, and Talent Management activities and processes. All employees have access to the PDC and are able to self-manage nearly all of their development functions and performance management processes.

In an organization with a population of 73,000, the challenge is how best to deploy employee development that is effective and efficient. Learning resources are available to Convergys employees in a variety of formats, including self-paced, web-based e-Learning, Instructor-led classroom training, virtual classrooms, cyberlibraries, and teleconferences.

The Management Development Program is an OD function designed to address the dearth of talent in the industry. It aims to establish, develop, and place future managers for timely and effective implementation of new and ramping programs. The Team Leader MDP was created to ensure that there is a pool of team leaders always available to meet the demands of the business. The Team Leader MDP initiative is on its second year of implementation.

After being identified as high-potential talents via a series of competency assessments and panel interviews, agents who are being eyed for team leader positions go through a rigorous 35-day curriculum. Upon certification, the new team leaders are placed back into their business units. The MDP process ensures that trainees are ready to assume a target post and that vacancies are filled with better-trained, homegrown management.

Already on its second year, the MDP has graduated six waves of trainees, equivalent to 175 new team leaders, approximately 30 percent of our total TL population.

The third success factor that drives our high-performance culture is our emphasis on continuous process improvement.

Successful companies are never stagnant. They make sure that they are constantly making incremental improvements toward better performance. At Convergys, we have institutionalized this mindset through our Continuous Improvement strategy.

Continuous Improvement is an important part of our culture. CI drives our focus to continuously improve the value we provide to our customers. Our improvement efforts target reducing the costs of poor quality, eliminating wastes and reducing errors and variations. We recognize that both small improvements and major change are an essential requirement for providing our customers the maximum value.

With the objective of developing a high-performance culture focused on continuously improving both Convergys’s and our customer’s processes, we have incorporated quality management techniques from diverse sources ranging from the GE Workout program and Six Sigma to the Japanese manufacturing Kaizen.

Involving all employees is essential to our approach. To support total participation, we have empowered and equipped our employees with a standard improvement methodology, tools and training to drive their own improvements.

Our standard improvement methodology, which approximates the Six Sigma disciplines and tools, is the common approach used across the organization, emphasizing the importance of customer-focused, fact-based decision-making, root cause analysis and problem resolution. This is critical in order to develop solutions that address the root causes of the problem and ensure that the implementation of the solutions will stick.

Our Green Belt and Black Belt Certification program ensures that employees across the organization are adequately trained and possess the necessary skills and competencies to drive improvements.

To adequately equip employees, we have deployed the appropriate resources to help employees accelerate their improvement efforts including our CI portal—an Intranet Resource Center that is accessible by all employees. Through the CI Portal, employees can submit and track their improvements and access the CI tools to aid in their improvement efforts and share and adopt best practices through Best Practices Knowledge Base.

To encourage ongoing participation and energize our organization, we execute an extensive communications and marketing and rewards and recognition program. These efforts encourage and reinforce the desired behaviors for our CI culture. On an annual basis, we recognize the best completed improvement efforts. Award recipients receive a commemorative plaque and cash award.

I can tell you that as a company, we have embraced CI—it’s how we run the business and demonstrate our commitment towards our high-performance culture.

You may ask, what results have we achieved because of all these?

Since we implemented the Performance Transformation, our corporation’s stock price has increased significantly.

Our talent management strategy has also been very successful. It has resulted in growth and upward mobility of our people. The number of promoted employees has increased as our operations have grown. With 243 promoted employees promoted for 2006, we have already exceeded last year’s total of 230. Since 2003, Convergys Philippines has promoted a total of 549 employees.

We also have had great success with Continuous Improvement. In 2006, we have completed 22 initiatives and 40 more are under implementation. These initiatives have resulted in almost US$ 700 thousand in savings. We have also empowered 500 managers and leaders by training them on skills needed to drive improvement efforts on their own. Furthermore, 27 employees are Certified Green Belts, and have been acknowledged to have obtained a level of training and experience in solving problems and improving processes.

To sum: the Convergys story demonstrates that building a high-performance culture is an organization-wide concern. The three factors I have mentioned—Performance Transformation, Strategic Talent Management, and Continuous Improvement—have led to our high performance, both on an organizational and individual level.

Let me end with a quotation from Jim Orr, our Chairman and CEO, who demonstrates commitment to our high-performance culture from the top. According to him, “Developing our talents and capabilities is critical to our career growth and to creating a high-performance culture. A high-performance culture is necessary to achieving our bold vision. If we all commit to this, we will be successful as one Convergys and as individuals.”

Thank you very much, and have a good day.

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