The Journey to Review365

Appraising Ben. 

Every school has a Ben. Ben doesn’t prepare lessons or mark pupils’ work on time; Ben has poor classroom control; Ben uses outdated pedagogy and Ben is uninspiring; BUT each year Ben’s classes get grades comparable to those of other colleagues in the department. In time I discovered that the reason for this was that, as soon as parents found out that their child was in Ben’s class, they enlisted the services of a private tutor. 
As I sat across the table from Ben and his union representative, I realised that I needed an appraisal system that was capable both of addressing under-performance and of recognising those many teachers who go the extra mile. 

Learning from the Best. 

The starting point of the journey to Review365 was in November 2010 when I had the opportunity to visit the Human Resources team at the Basel headquarters of Novartis, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It has the value and turn-over the size of a small country and its continued profitability depends on developing new drugs and medicines each year to replace those that are going out of patent. Novartis' success relies on attracting and developing the best talent in the world. There, the rewards for high performance and the cost of poor performance are literally measured in hundreds of millions (£s). 

The success of Novartis is founded on teams working collaboratively to develop drugs which go to market in a timely fashion. They use a 3 x 3 grid developed by The Harvard Business School to evaluate performance. 

This performance management tool combines two aspects: 'performance outcomes or results' on the y axis; and 'attitudes and behaviours' on the x axis. In the pharmaceutical industry, the loss to rival companies of experience and insight to rivals usually results in a delay in a patented drug getting to market that can reduce the profit margin on a drug by tens of millions of dollars. Thus, Novartis’ appraisal structure recognises that there is little point in rewarding a manager who get greats results and exceeds his personal objectives, if, in so doing, he causes a number of his work colleagues or subordinates to leave the company because of his poor attitudes and behaviours. During my days with Novartis, I realised that ‘attitudes and behaviours’ were the key to a successful school appraisal structure. 

‘Results’ v ‘Attitudes and Behaviours’ in Schools: 

The case of Ben illustrates that it is important that school appraisal structures take into consideration the 'attitudes and behaviours' of teachers. The attractive aspect of the Novartis approach to appraisal is that it doesn’t just look at outcomes or, in school terms, academic results. Rather it gives scope to evaluate how teachers do their job, distinguishing between colleagues who conduct themselves in a professional way on a daily basis and teachers like Ben.

An appraisal structure that looks at the key teaching competences allows appraisal to focus on teacher improvement and development and not just on results. 

Such a structure also provides scope to recognise those who are team-players, those who are excellent practitioners and those who go the extra mile for their pupils. It also provides a mechanism to highlight areas of relative strength, which might be harnessed by the school in spreading 'best-practice'; or of relative weakness, which then become areas to focus on in the following year. 

The Appraisal Grids: 

Over the past seven years, it has been my privilege to work with two exceptional senior management teams at Berkhamsted School, UK, and JESS, Dubai to develop a series of competency grids which effectively define those who are 'Requiring Improvement', those who are meeting the standard and are defined as ‘School Practitioners' and those who go well beyond what is required and called 'Lead Practitioners'. Different grids were created in MS Excel for School Administrators Teaching Assistants, Teachers, Middle Leaders, and Senior Leaders – each reflecting the important key competencies required for these roles. The grids have evolved and been refined over the past years – a process that will inevitably continue as priorities within the school and education change.

The Appraisal Process: 

The process starts with the appraisee completing a self-appraisal by selecting either ‘Requiring Improvement’, ‘School Practitioner’ or ‘Lead Practitioner’ for each of the key competencies. Their line-manager or appraiser then repeats the judgements for each competence from his/her perspective. They then have an appraisal meeting at which the appraisee and the line-manager discuss areas where they have made differing judgements and make agreed moderated judgments. At this meeting they also agree three key competency targets and one IT target on which the appraisee is going to focus during the coming year. 

Collecting Appraisal Data. 

The first versions of the appraisal process were completed on paper with the appraisee and appraiser highlighting the grids in different colours. In time this evolved into a process highlighting cells within Excel. This system has proved to be very effective at identifying personal strengths and weaknesses as well as areas to prioritise for INSET. However, like all previous methods, it fell short of expectations as it couldn’t help measure the scale of the training needs either for a particular department or for the school as a whole. This information is at the heart of school improvement. For example, we might discover that a large number of teachers across the school were not using ‘data to inform planning and evaluate the needs of students’, this then is not an issue for each individual teacher, rather, it is a School Training Issue. 

Hable and Review365. 

In March 2016 we at JESS, Dubai approached Hable, who had facilitated our move to Office365, to build an appraisal tool within SharePoint. However, after much trial and error, it became apparent that SharePoint was not sufficiently flexible to be provide the functionality which we need. Thus, in September 2017 Mark Reynolds, the founder of Hable, took the decision to invest in developing the web-based SharePoint App that is Review365, which launches at BETT this month. 

Review365 is a fast, efficient and flexible appraisal tool, which allows schools to take a more strategic approach to performance management and the identification of training needs.

This blog was written for the Hable Blog.

The importance of putting values at the heart of a global organisation.

Pharmaceutical giants probably don't spring to mind when thinking of values driven organisations, so it was great interest that I learned of the changes that are taking place in one of the world's largest drug companies.

I first visited Novartis five years ago. Then it was an organisation, like most others, driven by a culture of profit and individualism and where "work-life integration" had replaced any notion of "work-life" balance. The company boasted that its Campus had several restaurants, a supermarket and a post office so that domestic chores did not force employees to leave early and thus the firm could maximise the length of the working day. The performance management structure primarily rewarded results. The only hint of what was to come was that there was a recognition in their appraisal structure that an individual getting great results through poor 'attitudes and behaviours' was fundamentally bad business.

Novartis PRP Matrix up to 2014

Five years on and, after six months of company-wide consultation, Novartis have just launched their new values. The 23 values that were neither known nor understood by their employees have been distilled down to six core principles, two for each of the three areas:

1. Patient and Customer: innovation and quality;
2. Team: collaboration and performance; and
3. Self: courage and integrity.

The order of these values categories say much about the vision for the organisation for they put the needs of customer/patient first, and the needs of the team above those of the individual. The shift from a 'me' culture to an 'us' (team and society) culture is significant.

So how are these values worked out in the organisation? Well drugs companies do have a good story to tell. They do change lives. They do make the world a better place. Novartis invests billions in new drugs - of course they do it to make a profit, but without that profit there wouldn't be investment.

The organisation has shifted from valuing the individual to the team rather than the individual. Hence collaboration and team performance at the centre of the values structure. The clearest evidence of this shift is in the performance management matrix. The bonus structure use to reward results over attitudes and behaviours. From January 2015, that will not be the case. Results and values will have equal weight. 

Novartis PRP Matrix prior from 2015

The personal values of courage and integrity emphasise the need for individual employees to live up to their responsibilities and to operate within an agreed ethical framework.

Novartis is able to attract some of the world's greatest talent and they actively look to appoint high-fliers who have 'agility' i.e. who are able to apply their skills in different contexts as they around their global postings at two-year intervals. Interestingly, no one spoke of 'work-life integration', rather they had introduced more flexibility about working hours and locations (campus wide wireless VLAN).

The world needs ethical drugs companies.  
I shall follow Novartis' progress with great interest and wish them every success in this venture.

(I would like to thank the Talent Management team at Novartis Basel for their wonderful hospitality and for sharing their vision with a group of headteachers - priceless INSET.)

Teacher Appraisal and PRP - Part One: Background Thinking behind Berkhamsted School's approach

As a teacher I never found the appraisal process particularly satisfactory: the self-appraisal questionnaires were symptomatic of a broad-brush approach that, at one end of the spectrum, didn't set out to recognise excellence and staff who went the extra mile; and, at the other, allowed poor and even failing teachers to survive for yet another year (or three!):

• "What have you been teaching this year?"
• "What are the things that you have done well this year?"
• "What aspects of the job have you found most satisfying this year?
• "What areas have you found challenging?"
• "Are there any ways in which the school management could make it easier for you to do your job?"
• and so on . . . . . 

As a Head of Department, I was never even asked to feed back to the SMT on the performance of those in my department which meant that under-performance remained unaddressed - at least by the senior team. However, it is all too easy to be critical of Senior Leaders, as I realised as soon as I was catapulted to running my own school. As a young Headteacher I was just as bad as those who had gone before:  I was too busy keeping the school I was running afloat to be able to deviate from the bland platitude approach to appraisal. There had to be a better way . . . . . . 

It has taken us (this has been a real team effort) three years to put a better way in place.  

The starting point:  Learn from the Best

The starting point was in November 2010 when I had the opportunity to visit the Human Resources team at the Basel headquarters of Novartis, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It has the value and turn-over the size of a small country and its continued profitability depends on developing new drugs and medicines each year to replace those that are going out of patent. Novartis' success relies on attracting and developing the best talent in the world. There the rewards for high performance and the cost of of poor performance are measured in tens of millions (£s). 

Novartis use a 3 x 3 grid developed by The Harvard Business School to evaluate performance:

This performance management tool combines two aspects: 'performance outcomes or results' on the y axis; and 'attitudes and behaviours' on the x axis. The 'attitudes and behaviours' dimension is particularly important for Novartis, because the success of Novartis isn't just about individual's meeting personal objectives, it is about working as a team and collaborating with others. The company can suffer if I as an individual meet or even exceed my objectives, but that the rest of the team that I lead decide to leave the company (probably taking experience and insight to work for a rival) and our (£multi-million) project goes down the pan.

'Results' v 'Attitudes and Behaviours' in Teaching

The attractive aspect of this approach to appraisal  is that gives scope to evaluate how they do their job -by looking at how teachers conduct themselves on a daily basis.  

An appraisal structure that looks at the key teaching competences, such as lesson preparation, classroom control, subject knowledge, the range of pedagogy, assessment etc., allows appraisal to focus on teacher improvement and development and not just on results. 

Such a structure provides scope to recognise those who are team-players, those who are excellent practitioners and those who go the extra mile for their pupils. It also provides a mechanism to highlight areas of relative strength, which might be harnessed by the school in spreading 'best-practice'; or of relative weakness, which will be areas which will be a focus for improvement over the coming year. 

Managing Poor Performance in Teaching: 

In my experience, everyone knows who are the 'good teachers' and who are the 'bad' ones: the pupils can tell you, colleagues know, Heads of Department know, the parents know, and (because of that) Headteachers certainly know. The problem is that often 'bad teachers' can perform when they need to, and are able to pull out a 'satisfactory' lesson when required. Furthermore analysis of examination results often demonstrate that 'bad teachers' in independent schools tend to perform as well as good ones.  There are many reasons for this: pupils devote a disproportionate amount of time to their subject or paper, other teachers in the Department put on revision classes, and in some cases parents pay for private tutors or attend crammers in the Easter vacation. Ultimately pupils and parents will "back-fill" because the price of a child failing is just too great. The consequence of this is that exam results (raw, comparative or value-added) alone are too crude and instrument to manage poor performance.  By looking at day-to-day teaching practices, the Novartis grid provides a management tool, where teachers who do not prepare lessons or do their marking can be held to account.

Next Post in Series

LLinks to related posts on Teacher Appraisal and PRP:

• Part One: Background Thinking behind Berkhamsted School's approach
• Part Two: The Berkhamsted School HoD Appraisal PRP Consultation
• Part Three: The Self Appraisal Stage
• Part Four: The Review and Moderation Stage
• Part Five: The Feedback Meeting, Target Setting and CPD
• Part Six:  PRP for HoDs and Teachers

Careers - what it takes to be the best of the best.

I recently was given the opportunity to spend a day with the top executives responsible for Talent Management at Novartis at their Campus of Innovation, Knowledge and Encounter in Basel. I was part of a group of educationalists who are concerned about the growing dislocation of education and the world of work. Our aim was to gain a better understanding of the needs of business , industry and the professions so that we can prepare young people better for their future careers.

Novartis is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and has the value and turn-over the size of a small country. Their continued profitability depends on developing new drugs and medicines each year to replace those that are going out of patent. Novartis' success relies on attracting and developing the best talent in the world - how they do that is a lesson to us all . . . . .

A few thoughts on what it takes to be the best of the best:

1. A degree is not the end of a young person's education.
   A BA or BSc is just the starting point, every sixth former should expect to go on to study for a higher degree [MA or MSc], an MBA or for a professional qualification [Law - LLB, Banking - CFA, Accountancy - ACA, Teaching PGCE, etc.]. Novartis recruit the majority of their top 400 executives from the premier MBA programmes around the world.
2. Young people are competing in a world employment market.
   Being the best in the UK is not necessarily going to take you to the top - there are many extremely talented people out there who are hungry for success. Novartis actively set out to attract a diversity of talent from around the world.
3. Leading firms remunerate extremely well, but don't expect a work-life balance if you want to get to the top
   Novartis openly talk about a "work-life integration", rather than a "work-life balance." They provide restaurants, a supermarket and a post-office onsite so that you don't have to leave early.
4. Top firms are not just concerned with results, but also on how one treats other people.
   Top firms are not just concerned that individuals meet their targets, but they are also concerned that they develop their teams and treat people well. This makes business sense because a poor manager is often the cause for talent to leave the firm. Novartis pay their bonuses according to the following matrix:

So what skills are firms like Novartis looking for?

1. Agility - the ability to apply what you have learned to a new situation - be that in a different division of the firm or in a different culture or part of the world.
2. Ability to collaborate - an attitude of tolerance and the ability to draw out the best in others. This requires a significant degree of self-awareness.
3. Ability to manage horizontally - Novartis recognise that the new generation doesn't like hierarchy and key leaders will need to manage on a "more flat matrix"
4. Soft Skills - particularly good communication skills and languages