Beyond Employee Surveys: How Sunrise Improves Performance Management with Honestly

We spoke to Julia Herrmann, Senior HR Specialist at Sunrise, about Sunrise’s integration of Honestly into their HR processes.

"Employees are a company’s most important asset. All other value-adding factors in a company can be copied but not employees."

Sunrise conducts recurring surveys with 14 questions per quarter. 12 of these questions "are heavily based on Honestly's knowledge", which is anchored in the survey templates that Honestly provides. As a highly agile company, it was important for Sunrise to conduct pulse surveys in regular intervals in order to track the development of their employee engagement in real time.

"At Sunrise, processes can change very quickly. Fortunately your solution is flexible enough to adapt to these changes!"

The surveys are very popular with the workforce. This can be seen, for example, in the "very high" participation rate of 83% in regard to pulse surveys.

Inspired by the survey results, Sunrise regularly uses the Honestly Initiatives feature to create measures and actively monitor their impact.

"Honestly gives us valuable tips regarding our approach to pain points within the company."

The empowerment of managers at Sunrise is particularly remarkable. They can use the insights gained through Honestly in an autonomous way, namely by creating and implementing initiatives themselves. This agile use of Honestly has resulted in the introduction of around 250 initiatives deriving from the past two pulse surveys alone. Many measures were launched particularly in the areas of communication, information flow and collaboration.

A good example for this is a measure created by high-level management, with the aim of eliminating silo thinking and promoting cross-team collaboration. The recognition of the need for action in this area had already been revealed by the first Honestly pulse survey and was instantly classified as a high company priority.

"Honestly was a big help in identifying the need for cross-team collaboration and initiating this additional measure."

Sunrise also attaches great importance to the fact that these - and all other measures - are introduced and implemented by the managers themselves. So far, this has had a positive effect for Sunrise: since the cross-team collaboration initiative was launched, the internal score has improved by 4 percentage points.

Sunrise sets annual performance goals that are closely linked to the payment of bonuses for all managers. Besides setting what Sunrise calls "What-Goals", which determine the goals themselves, they also set "How-Goals", which determine the methods used to achieve these goals.

The area of employee engagement is plays a part in defining these "How-Goals". For this, the Pulse Survey results are measured and evaluated under the following three criteria:

(1) Satisfaction with the employer (eNPS), (2) Satisfaction with management and (3) Satisfaction with the working environment.

The values measured with Honestly in these three areas then flow indicatively into the evaluation of the "How Goals" and make the performance of the managers at Sunrise in the area of employee satisfaction visible.

In the past, the evaluation of managers was closely linked to the eNPS. However, a cultural change has taken place which established that both management style and employee satisfaction are now indicatively included in the evaluation. Honestly supports this process by enabling a performance review which takes into account the complexity of employee engagement and ensures that it is reflected more fairly in performance reviews.

"Working with Honestly is highly relevant to our managers and an integral part of their work as leaders."

Honestly is highly appreciated by the management at Sunrise. This is especially due to the fact that the survey results are immediately uploaded for online assessment. This real time information flow enables Sunrise to track data precisely and act with agility. All managers have access to the software and can independently create, distribute as well as evaluate surveys in their area of responsibility.

"The idea is to move away from ‘HR Police’ towards ‘you as a manager are in control and responsible to define measures’."

This way, Sunrise makes high employee engagement an integral part of their management duties and at the same time motivates the effective use of Honestly’s solution. The result? All managers have the ability and responsibility to use surveys as well as initiatives wisely to achieve their goals.

Our solution facilitates and supports a cultural change at Sunrise, which allows managers to act more autonomously and involves employees more naturally in decision-making processes. With Honestly, Sunrise has been able to reliably identify potential for growth and act upon it. Moreover, Sunrise is now able to act much more agile and employee-oriented than before, giving them a competitive edge in a highly competitive job market.