Managing people at Microsoft
...is different to managing people anywhere else I've ever worked. In some ways it's frustrating, with all of the processes, forms, meetings, templates and review forms to fill out. In other ways, this structure means that your career history, performance, reviews, skills and talent follows you around the company so that wherever you work, your manager has access to all of the evidence about your training, performance salary and review. I was interested to find that we've released documentation to IT showcase explaining exactly how we've built the infrastructure to manage all of these reviews.
When Lisa Brummel moved to lead the HR team, she implemented something called Performance@Microsoft. This has evolved into an application which is used to follow the commitment setting process. This process uses quite a few technologies and discusses how we managed the migration to a paperless commitment setting and review process. Here's the information about how we did it...
Facilitating Effective Employee Reviews at Microsoft
With roughly 180,000 semi-annual reviews to complete each year Microsoft sought to automate more steps in the process in 2006. Using Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Microsoft developed a clean commitment setting tool. With this new, 100 percent electronic solution, employees are able to create and manage their commitments and align them to their managers' commitments. Employees and managers are also able to make updates throughout the year. The solution provides all of these features while still addressing all security and legal issues. Through this exploration of how Microsoft Does IT we hope you’ll benefit from our experience and be able to evaluate if a similar solution might work for your organisation.
Products & Technologies Discussed in this white paper:
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005, including Reporting Services
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003
• Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
• Microsoft Windows Clustering
• Network Load Balancing
This is so much easier to manage than at a couple of large organisations (+35,000 people) I've worked at in the past, and certainly something I'd try to implement in a smaller organisation too. it's so much simpler to manage - once you've built it :-)