UK Government Investments (UKGI) is owned by HM Treasury. Independently managed, UKGI is the government’s centre of excellence for corporate governance and corporate finance, working on some of its most interesting and complex commercial tasks.

We spoke to UKGI’s Kiera Murphy, HR Manager, to find out how financial services companies can drive performance management with StaffCircle.

Renewed processes

StaffCircle transformed UKGI’s traditional, paper-based performance management processes. Previously, they relied on siloed Word documents and emails to gather performance information and feedback from line managers and the wider team.

Having joined the company just over a year ago, Kiera jumped straight into implementing StaffCircle across the business, engaging employees with the platform by encouraging them to use it to complete their reviews.

It’s a lot easier. Prior to StaffCircle we just used Word documents for everything — now everyone can see their objectives and reviews in one place.

Maintaining confidentiality

Like all financial services businesses, data security, confidentiality and adhering to regulatory compliance is a high priority for UKGI. Before StaffCircle, they had no central platform for performance data, so the process to gather feedback was convoluted and unsecure.

All companies need a platform of some description — if you’re going to manage people, you need a process and a platform to use. Setting objectives, being able to review them, and being fair and consistent is important. We were so admin and paper-based heavy before; we needed a platform that was going to be all in one place.

Feedback made easy

UKGI now use StaffCircle to perform employee reviews, gathering feedback from line managers and direct reports across departments using the 360 review tool. They perform three reviews a year — at the start, middle and end — and an accessible, evidence-based platform that automatically gathers feedback makes the process simple.

The nature of the work we do means we interact with people across different teams, so collating feedback with the 360 review tool was necessary — using Word made that difficult before. It’s made reviews less work for managers and direct reports, as they can set them up and add their own objectives themselves.