Floorcovering provider Shaw Industries’ Performance Experience (PX) is a corporate-wide initiative that impacts every associate within the organization. The design, rollout, and ongoing reinforcement of PX incorporates innovative approaches to problem solving, change management, and training. The program aims to build capability through people, systems, processes, and design to meet Shaw’s business outcomes: double hard surface sales every 3 to 5 years, double modular carpet tile sales every 5 to 7 years, maximize profit and maintain share in broadloom carpet, and invest in supporting business to drive new revenue streams and profit.
Program Details
The Shaw Performance Experience (PX) aligns the individual’s talent and performance with real business needs. It enables higher levels of performance across the organization through an ongoing, intentional, and iterative experience between the associate and his or her manager. The key elements of PX include:
- Strategy for Highest Performance and Engagement: Leaders uncover their backstory and aspirations to create a plan for achieving the desired future state.
- Transparent Agile Goals: Business and individuals’ goals are cascaded through the organization to show how each department and individual fits into the bigger picture. Continuous maturity and adjustment of goals respond to a dynamic market.
- Coaching Conversations: Intentional conversations between the leader and the associate, anchored in a meeting at least once per month, leverage a three- to five-question framework to discuss progress against goals in connection with competencies. Team Performance Tools—such as huddles, accountability workshops, and peer feedback—also may be used to accelerate performance.
- Individual Growth and Development: Individuals develop a growth plan to enhance their performance and business results based on: individual strengths, interests, and growth potential.
All of these elements are based on the core concepts of trust, empowerment, and accountability, as well as taking a strategic and holistic approach to talent management.
Key to PX training was focusing on its core concepts, not just the programmatic elements, in order to support the shift away from a “command-and-control” style of leadership to an “inspire-and-influence” behavioral approach. The rollout stages include.
Program Design: More than 500 associates were involved in the program design. This includes crowdsourcing to build empathy around associate needs, best practice research, program design, and testing of ideas. By engaging key influences at project onset, Shaw established a core team to help support the organization through this shift in mindset and culture around performance management at the company.
Business Leader Test Sprints: Initial rollout of PX began at the executive/senior level in a series of “test sprints.” Going through the process hand-in-hand with a PX coach from the Talent Development team ensured their understanding and prepared them to effectively cascade the program through their organizations. These early adopters were able to prime the organization for the change by incorporating PX into their plans and discussions before the official launch.
Prepare PX Coaches in HR: In preparation for an enterprise-wide rollout, HR leaders were trained as PX coaches to support the business in integrating the PX process and concepts within their teams.
Enterprise Rollout:
- Management Meeting Launch: A management meeting rollout of PX introduced the program to the top 500 managers within the organization. Business leaders who already were implementing PX shared their experience to aid in understanding and buy-in, and HR coaches were positioned to support the broader rollout. The session focused on behaviors required to shift the performance experience, including a self-assessment and an individual growth and development plan to help leaders gain insight into their own behaviors that may be barriers to acceleration of team performance.
- Initial Lunch & Learns: As leadership began cascading PX through the organization, Talent Management offered ongoing Lunch & Learns to further explain the program. These also included business leader involvement to incorporate individual success stories that aided understanding and buy-in.
- HR Support: HR leaders worked with their business partners to encourage implementation, support the process, and connect leaders with additional tools as needed.
- Ongoing communications: A communication plan was developed and executed to support the rollout and continued reinforcement of the program.
HR coaches continue to support the organization through the PX process and help associates incorporate PX into their plans and discussions.
Core Pathway is a core leadership curriculum for Shaw associates that will be delivered at each new management level. PX training is foundational to the content in the first two Pathways that have launched: “Foundations” (new hire orientation) and “Leading for Results” (a program for first-time leaders).
ShawTalks are inspiring leadership presentations in the style of a TEDTalk delivered throughout the organization and shared on a regular basis. PX has been the topic of multiple ShawTalks, reinforcing the message with positive storytelling techniques.
Content and videos on MyShaw.com (the company intranet site) provide detailed information about PX, videos of leaders discussing the program and its benefits, and access to related tools and resources.
Technology supports and reinforces PX using Workday applications, including the ability to share goals throughout the organization, create one-on-one conversations and development plans, and provide real-time feedback.
Results
As part of the PX implementation plan, hundreds of associates used the design thinking methodology to embed PX within their teams—first designing the plan for PX with the team, testing the plan and assumptions, learning from the results, and iterating the approach to achieve desired results. Learning consolidation sessions were held to share insights/results from the design and testing. Here is one of many examples shared at a learning consolidation:
A Commercial Divisional Vice President (DVP) was struggling with his management team to effectively manage time and deliver results. He had the “perfect storm”: brand new managers (Regional Vice Presidents), plus a new sales team.
Partnering with the Talent Management team and HR, the DVP diagnosed the barriers to performance and came up with solutions to achieve performance acceleration within his team. These included:
- Evaluated performance and created a performance improvement plan for one team member, based on past results and coaching.
- Created a structure to engage the RVPs in coaching the sales team. The primary focus was to heighten the knowledge of each customer’s business and to ensure time was spent on adding value to the customer. The team set up a method to transparently track progress against goals, strategically prepare for calls, and remove distractions (orders not delivered, claims) that were not adding value to the customer.
- One-on-ones and team meetings centered around sharing goals/progress and business knowledge gained for each customer.
Prior to stepping back and taking a consultative approach to PX, the sales teams were struggling to meet double-digit goals within the hard surface business. Since the new approach, the hard surface sales growth increased by 22-plus percent for each associate.
