Vesta Corporation offers the most advanced approach to delivering secure, guaranteed payments through an experience that increases acceptance, customer retention, and revenue. For two decades Vesta has developed the industry’s only end-to-end guaranteed payment and risk management solutions that eliminate fraud for merchants ranging from e-commerce companies to global enterprises. Vesta has a technical workforce that’s spread across multiple diverse locations and works in highly matrixed teams.

Our Process & Methodology

Camden Delta was retained to assess Vesta’s needs for a performance management process and to collaborate with project team members in designing and implementing a new solution. Vesta did not have a consistent corporate-wide performance planning and review process to support the growing global organization. Working with Vesta’s executive sponsor and a small project team, Camden Delta provided a very rigorous design process that incorporated robust data and input from employees, management, and executives to inform the future state design.

Camden Delta incorporated best practices into the design of the program starting with clear guiding principles to support Vesta’s strategy and culture, as well as to inform the process elements for performance management. Additionally, Camden Delta’s deep knowledge of cutting-edge technology and potential vendors who could meet Vesta’s unique needs and timing enabled us to recommend an innovative, custom performance feedback and coaching system.

Underlying all these recommendations is the deep research conducted by Camden Delta and feedback from numerous sources including an employee survey, manager focus groups and senior leadership interviews, which confirmed that a traditional performance management process would not add value to Vesta or help to drive employee engagement and development. The feedback also validated Camden Delta’s philosophy on performance management, which is to ensure that performance management programs actually deliver improved business performance while also driving higher employee engagement.

Camden Delta’s own research overwhelming questions the effectiveness of traditional performance management processes in light of constant business change and workforce demographics; however, we stop short at some of the more controversial recommendations making headlines these days including abandoning performance ratings altogether.

The following components became critical to the unique design of Vesta’s new performance management:

• Planned, regularly scheduled feedback meetings between the employee an his/her manager
• Equipping managers as coaches
• Peer-to-peer recognition (“kudos”)
• Reducing the significance and complexity of performance ratings
• Decoupling base compensation from performance reviews

Key to the design was effective, efficient technology to support the process. Working with Vesta HR, IT, and Procurement representatives, Camden Delta mapped out the new process and began looking for a technology partner.

Speed of design was a key success factor for Vesta. Camden Delta completed design, development, selection of technology partner as well as employee and manager training in 3-4 months.

Vesta identified internal leaders to act as “champions” of the new Performance Feedback and Coaching Process (PFCP). These champions were used to select the software vendor and performed user acceptance testing (UAT) to ensure that the designed process was mapped correctly to the selected technology platform.

Tangible Benefits

By designing the Performance Feedback and Coaching Process on guiding principles that originated from employee and management feedback the final process will have a high adoption rate and influence employee engagement. Concurrent to this initiative, Camden Delta also supported Vesta with launching their first employee engagement survey.

Camden Delta expects a higher level of employee engagement due to bi-weekly 1:1 Feedback sessions between employee and manager. Employees are the “drivers” of the entire process, which should result in a higher employee satisfaction with the Performance Feedback and Coaching Process.

The effective use of technology will make this process easy to use and collect performance data through out the year, allowing for better measurement for future improvements and tie back to business results.

Additionally, by leveraging technology it will take the anxiety and documentation burden away from mid year and final reviews and create a much more dynamic approach to feedback and performance documentation.

Why Camden Delta

Camden Delta was selected for this engagement because of our customized approach, careful and client centered planning and the ability to truly listen to understand Vesta’s unique needs. Additionally, from the very beginning of the relationship, Camden Delta was very flexible but also well-disciplined in meeting Vesta’s desired objectives.

Camden Delta’s thought leadership coupled with relationships forged by years of working with technology vendors proved to be a value add for a client that needed to move fast and have a direct impact on business results in a compressed amount of time.