Performance evaluation: Vinta's approach to team assessment
Performance evaluation and performance management are crucial tools for companies seeking evolution and growth. Understanding how a company like Vinta approaches performance evaluation is essential to ensure you are selecting the best professionals to drive your business's growth.
Imagining the business landscape without a performance evaluation is akin to navigating uncharted waters without a compass. Through this team assessment process, we capture a clear picture of each team member's performance, providing valuable guidance that shapes collective success. For those building a development team, understanding how a company addresses this aspect is vital for creating a cohesive culture aligned with business objectives.
Each company adopts a unique approach to evaluation, tailoring it to the specific needs of the business. Some focus strictly on numbers, delivery pace, and tangible results. Others, like Vinta, go beyond, fostering a feedback culture that considers not only what is delivered but also how those deliveries are achieved.
In this blog post, we'll delve into Vinta's method for measuring employee performance. Keep reading to discover how we ensure only the best talents drive your projects.
How performance evaluation works at Vinta
Here performance evaluation is a biannual process of great value. During this period, we reflect on our actions, attitudes, and results, seeking ways to contribute more effectively to the business and preserve our culture and work environment.
We value the perspective of all collaborating individuals. During the evaluation, everyone actively participates, whether in leadership roles, as direct peers, or as colleagues from other teams who collaborated in the previous months. Contributing to the evaluation of peers as part of our performance management approach and supporting their professional development is an integral part of our feedback culture of collaboration and feedback.
The evaluation process includes both individual and team assessments structured around two axes: behavior, assessed through our cultural pillars, and results, evaluated by individual deliveries during the period. The cultural pillars guide daily practices, regardless of the role, connecting our actions to the essence of being Vinta.
You may also like:
Effective Feedback Essentials: asking, giving and receiving input from others Pair Programming
Strategies for Building High-Performance Teams in a Thriving Corporate Culture
The results axis addresses what was achieved, evaluating individual deliveries aligned with the objectives set at the beginning of the period. We highly value individual deliveries, which are fundamental to sustaining the team's and the business's results and providing continuous value to clients.
We use a rating scale from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates performance below expectations and 5 indicates exceptional performance. The final classification results in Below Expectations, Consistent Performance, High Performance, or Outstanding Performance.
Leadership is assessed based on:
- Self-assessment;
- Leader assessment;
- The team's average assessment.
For individual contributors, we consider:
- Self-assessment;
- Leadership assessment.
This approach provides a holistic view of performance, reflecting our specialized startups performance evaluation methodology that promotes career development and ensures each team member aligns with Vinta Software's standards of excellence.
How individual performance evaluation contributes to collective results
At Vinta, we believe that individual performance evaluation plays a crucial role in achieving exceptional collective results. The more aligned people are with expectations regarding "how" and "what" is expected of them, the closer they get to their maximum potential. This ensures the creation of projects with high synergy, where individual goals converge toward shared objectives, resulting in confident and high-performing teams.
For us, effective performance management is intrinsically linked to remarkable results that add value to our clients' businesses. By keeping our clients satisfied and growing, we ensure our own evolution. This direct correlation drives constant improvement within our teams.
You may also like:
Remote-First Culture: Promoting autonomy and avoiding micromanagement
Modern Agile: Better people = better company on the long-term
The connection between individual growth and team success has been a cornerstone of Vinta's philosophy, a concept explored in depth by Vinta’s co-founder Filipe Ximenes in "The Software Engineer's Guidebook." In one of the main chapters, Ximenes discusses how truly successful engineers understand that their personal success is intertwined with their team's achievements. This principle guides the performance evaluation process here at Vinta, where we emphasize collaborative skills alongside technical delivery, recognizing that the strongest professionals are those who elevate both themselves and their colleagues.
This quest for exceptional results must be guided by a work environment characterized by high collaboration, effective communication, shared commitment, adaptability to changing scenarios, constant feedback, and trust. These elements strengthen our ability to achieve collective objectives, creating a virtuous cycle of high performance and continuous growth.
Maintaining performance daily: pre and post-evaluation
Before the formal evaluation, our feedback culture emphasizes constant feedback in the Vinta environment. Our approach to startups performance evaluation emphasizes short feedback cycles that provide opportunities to adjust behaviors and enhance skills swiftly. The biannual evaluation is seen as formalizing discussions already held in previous months, avoiding surprises, and enabling continuous improvements.
After the evaluation, we conclude the process with a formal conversation between the leader and the team member, jointly reviewing the evaluation. During this interaction, we highlight both perspectives, emphasizing the mentioned aspects and collaboratively defining areas to work on going forward.
Positive aspects are not only recognized but also encouraged, serving as anchors for the development of both leadership and the evaluated team member. Improvement points are addressed constructively, debated, and directed towards specific actions in the following months.
We allow room for differences and similarities, encouraging discussions of perceptions beyond evidence. This approach allows us to identify opportunities for attention or visibility in the future.
After this conversation, the evaluated team member prioritizes the areas to work on and develops their Individual Development Plan, defining actions to be implemented in the coming months. This integrated and collaborative approach ensures that performance maintenance is a continuous journey of improvement and professional growth.
Benefits of the IDP (Individual Development Plan) for professional growth
The IDP at Vinta is more than just a plan; it's the clear path to achieving specific goals, supported by tools that facilitate the journey. These goals are outlined based on the biannual performance evaluation, providing a robust framework for professional growth.
We offer a range of learning and development practices to support this journey. From mentorship programs to financial subsidies for courses, training, and lectures, we promote knowledge-sharing environments and sessions with C-level executives.
Day-to-day performance management is also vital, driving and maintaining performance evaluation through open dialogues, frank conversations between leadership and team members, transparency, and alignment with our clients.
Despite the biannual evaluation, team assessment and performance monitoring is constant. We conduct regular alignments, maintaining a strong feedback culture through sessions and follow-ups on IDPs throughout the year. The crucial role of the Business Partner is to direct the convergence between internal practices, performance expectations, and the company's culture, reinforcing good management practices and mediating any misalignments.
It's important to note that the Business Partner's role complements but does not replace the leadership's responsibility in developing their teams. Each stage of the startup performance evaluation we developed feeds into the next, creating a cycle of continuous improvement that positively impacts careers, the work environment, and the company's results.
If you're interested in learning more about how we build teams at Vinta and maintain an exceptional performance standard, check out our next post. Interested in joining a feedback-driven team? Check our open positions!
