Picnic Technologies

Amsterdam based online supermarket, Picnic, has experienced rapid growth since being founded in 2015. The company has raised a total of €350 million (approx. $380 million USD) and was named the fastest-growing company in the Netherlands in 2019.
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The Challenge

As the company grew into the hundreds of employees at the head office, they began to outgrow some of the existing performance management processes that had been in place. These legacy processes put a strain on the People Operations department and were impacting the employee experience.

Elise Baeriswyl, People Partner at Picnic, and Amber Rozenberg, People Analyst, were feeling the strains of these processes.

“We were using Excel files to collect feedback for employees in their performance reviews. In the beginning, this was ok but as a growing company it just wasn’t scalable for us and the workload that the process created was getting too much to handle. It also wasn’t a very professional process. As an employee, it’s not a great experience to receive your feedback in an Excel file.”

Knowing that a process held together by Excel files and lots of manual work was not sustainable long-term, Elise and Amber went in search of a platform that could tackle the problem of scalability.

Their requirements for the platform included a holistic performance review software so that they can gather a complete overview of each person’s performance and provide insightful 360° feedback. They also knew that they were looking for a platform that would reduce the burden of running the process. For example, they knew that the platform should offer the ability for employees to select their peers from whom they would like to receive feedback. And most importantly, the platform should automatically follow up on incomplete tasks. This alone would be a huge time saver for the People Operations team at Picnic.

Lastly, they were set on finding a platform that would support the processes that they had defined rather than having to mold their internal processes to fit the platform.

With these requirements in mind as the basis for their search, Amber and Elise began testing platforms.
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The Solution

Before long, Amber and Elise realized that they were running into an issue with the platforms that they were testing.

“When evaluating platforms, we found many of them to be very inflexible. We didn’t want to adjust our processes to fit a platform. We wanted to be able to create (and change) our own ideal process and needed a platform flexible enough to support this.”

Fortunately, Amber and Elise discovered Leapsome and were delighted to find that the platform had the features they were looking for.

Armed with the new process in Leapsome, they rolled out their revised performance review process for employees in their central office in Amsterdam as well as their Düsseldorf office.
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The Result

The improved structure of the actual reviews made the process of giving a review much easier for everyone involved. This revised structure has also led to more productive conversations between team leads and their reports once all of the feedback has been collected.

“The quality of feedback conversations has improved.  People find it hard to give feedback but due to the way the reports are now structured within Leapsome, it is easier to have a meaningful conversation.”

Furthermore, the experience for employees has improved as a result of the review process in Leapsome.

“For our employees at Picnic, it’s so much nicer to receive review feedback within Leapsome. It’s much more structured and the report looks more professional.”

As part of the move to managing the process within Leapsome, Amber and Elise also needed to lighten their own workload and ensure that the process is entirely scalable moving forward. To do this, they made use of Leapsome’s Reviews templates functionality to create a reusable template that can be used again and again. Starting a review is now as simple as activating the template each time which also has the added benefit of removing the stress of potential errors in the setup phase.

Amber and Elise now no longer need to chase employees throughout the review cycle. The platform takes care of notifying all participants and following-up when necessary via email notifications and Slack integration. Having these administrative tasks handled by the platform has saved Elise significant time since roll-out. Elise estimated that the new review process might be up to 50% more efficient than the previous process with Excel. That’s time that Elise is now able to use on other strategic initiatives that she was previously unable to make time for.

Aside from 360° performance reviews, Picnic has also started to utilize other parts of the Leapsome platform. Given the challenges that Coronavirus has caused, Picnic used Leapsome’s Employee Engagement Survey software to run their first company-wide survey. They used the best-practice questionnaire provided within the platform to check-in with their employees while they are working remotely. This allowed them to gain a deeper understanding of how the company is coping and to collect anonymous feedback on how they could improve in the way that they are supporting employees throughout this period.

Next up, Amber and Elise intend on exploring Leapsome’s Learning and Onboarding features for distributing internal courses as well as potentially rolling out a more structured process for 1-on-1 meetings across the company.

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