Let Your People Create Your Performance Framework, Says Brendan O'Keefe

Now I'm going to be talking about the Happy principles and how we've used the Happy principles in helping us in our journey. We proposed to the council a business strategy that was based on us exiting the local authority completely to form an independent social enterprise and employee led mutual, which is Epic CIC.

I was fortunate to work in Kensington and Chelsea [Council]. I'm fortunate indeed to have a very open minded, innovative, and creative chief executive, Derek Myers. Anyway, having Derek sanctioned the project, opened the doors, and really once we had his buy in, it was inevitable what we'd do.

We've taken our organisation out [of the public sector]. We formed a community interest company. We're completely independent. We contract back with Kensington and Chelsea for 75% of our business, 25% of our business is with other public bodies and other local authorities.

I focused very much in the early days, quite rightly on the business model and convincing the council that we had a business strategy and a business case for a viable business. Didn't focus quite so much on the culture issue.

We now have a process where we're much more focused on recruiting for attitude and much less focused on skills experience. Our very first conference as Epic, I said to the staff, I'm going to ask you to go back to your offices today and take out the council's performance management system called the Real Framework, R E A L.

It stood for something, I can't remember what it was. And I want you to take it out and I want you to rip it up and [there was] cheers to the rafters. I said, OK, so we're going to rip it up. We're going to rip it up, we're going to get rid of it. Today we're going to design and our own performance appraisal. It's going to be the performance appraisal and recruitment tool that we are going to use as Epic, and you're going to do the work.

We asked them two questions. In the workplace, what do you expect of yourself, and what do you expect of your colleagues? By the middle of the day, we had 48 attributes that staff wanted in the performance framework. That's clearly unmanageable. So we said we had to narrow it down. So the rest of the day we spent trying to narrow that down.

We were aiming for about eight. But it got very heated and I liked that. I wanted people to be engaged in it.

Now we have staff who are designing their own performance and recruitment framework and arguing the hell out of it and getting very upset when their piece, their particular favourite, didn't get in. And that, and that's great, because that shows true engagement.

And it didn't cost us a penny, other than the cost of the conference for the day. And we have our own performance appraisal and recruitment tool. And we use that now in our recruitment processes. It's been incredibly successful, because what we're looking for is people who are enthusiastic. Who are committed to what we're doing. Who are hardworking. Who are really determined to make Epic a success.