Tata Motors’ futuristic digital platform on Microsoft Teams drives performance management and more

Tata Motors has a comprehensive performance management process to manage talent, effectively engage and motivate employees, and ensure that they are aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives.

Tata Motors aspires and aims for continuous improvement of processes to drive business results. Performance management being one of the key processes contributing towards measuring business results, company decided to have a fresh look at existing process and co-create this with stakeholders involved. Cross functional team with representation from senior, middle and junior management reached out internally to employees, people managers and leaders to understand what we should start, stop or continue to enhance this process.  Team also reached out to experts externally and understood some of the good followed by organizations in various industries. Based on the feedback received, company decided to establish a system of continuous feedback management. This meant all-year-round feedback and transparent communication on goals, achievements, and improvement areas. It also meant deriving insights based on multiple data points from different systems. It wanted a flexible digital solution that integrates well with other IT applications.

Conventional feedback management

The older system followed the traditional process of annual reviews in which employees and managers would fill in goals, achievements, and feedback once a year and evaluate performance. Employees and managers needed a platform where they can seek and share feedback on performance and leadership behaviours to dial down the effects of recency bias and regular timely feedback for performance improvement.

Balance between dialogue & documentation

In performance management process at Tata Motors employee can set minimum 5 and maximum 8 goals at the start of the year. During mid-term review and final evaluation, employees need to update achievements against their specific set goals and also against 8 common leadership behaviours pervasive across the organization. Once employee inputs self-achievements, managers document their feedback on all goals and also leadership behaviours. Assuming mangers have teams of 10 employees, they are required to update 160 comment boxes, losing crucial time of dialogue with employee. The PHYGITAL aspect of sharing feedback was taking a backseat in performance management process.

Need for digital experience on the go and in the flow of work

While Tata Motors had a tool for performance management, as an organization it was looking for a holistic solution to enhance the performance management experience for both employees and managers. The objective being to promote a culture of continuous feedback sharing to drive business outcomes through performance development. Tata Motors was looking for a platform which could such an experience on the go and also enable managers and their team members to engage effectively and efficiently in performance related conversations throughout the year. The platform had to integrate with currently running applications real time such that the overall experience was seamless and in continuum with the existing core process.

Microsoft Teams enhances employee engagement experience #MorePoweredWithMSTeams

With the objective of launching a continuous feedback management mechanism offering a judicious mix of physical and digital (PHYGITAL) experience for both managers and employees, Tata Motors decided to extend their employee digital platform – Drishti - on MSTeams. 

Continuous feedback management

Continuous feedback management deployed on MSTeams enables employees to update milestones and achievements against goals or leadership behaviours. Managers can also share the feedback with employee initiating & driving real time performance conversation. The module also provides functionality through which employees, can also seek specific feedback on any of the KPIs or leadership behavior parameters.

The below image gives the view of the simplified feedback process on MS Teams

Steering the performance management with new experience

• The continuous feedback management process is more efficient as the new system has eliminated issues such as recency bias, loss of information, doubts of transparency, and tedious documentation.
• It has increased the phygital connect between employees and managers as the time spent on documenting and managing data is reduced, and there is increased time for purposeful interactions.
• The quality of documentation has improved significantly. The data and insights allow the management to take the right measures and improve performance-related dialogues with employees.

In addition to enabling feedback management on MSTeams, Tata Motors added several path breaking features – seamless work flow on MSTeams, and real time integration with multiple HR platforms. Following are the highlights of these features: 

Integrated self-service applications

While the employees had access to self-service functionalities on the Drishti app and portal, in order further simplify the experience for employee, Tata Motors introduced a chatbot – Drishti.EngageX on MSTeams. New chatbot which extends various self-service features to employee and managers. The chatbot runs on an in-house developed platform, and is capable of resolving employee queries across various topics from – Applying leave or approving leaves of employees for managers, reaching out to IT Service desk, Accessing payroll related documents and queries across all the employee benefits.

The conversation flow in the bot has been built in a manner that enables an intuitive use of the platform and removes complexities, a quick sample step-by-step application of leave is shown in the screenshots below:

Step 1

Employee engagement improvements

Drishti also includes functionalities that help employees, peers and managers to celebrate the special moments of the employee in the organization such as work anniversaries and birthdays. The digital celebrations include nudges to peers on the chatbot and certificates to employees who have completed long service tenures at Tata Motors. 

The below image gives a screenshot of the same:

Multi-platform and omnichannel experience

True to the objective of digitization, employees now have a multi-platform, omnichannel experience. All the services are available on Microsoft Teams, the dashboard, the Drishti portal, and the application. They are available across devices and operating systems, and employees can use one or more of these platforms. 

Employees widely use the Chatbot on Microsoft Teams due to its user-friendliness, especially for continuous feedback. Microsoft Teams is also accessible on multiple devices and platforms. The security is robust as MDM is implemented, making Teams accessible only on authorized devices. Moreover, Teams is perceived as an Enterprise tool that provides a fine balance with thus this ensures that conversations are held in a controlled environment ensuring proper engagement of employees & ease of conversations for managers, anytime & anywhere.

Better controls, access, and communication

The chatbot accesses the enterprise wide identity management service for the application, this ensures that all the queries are answered within the role and capacity of each employee. This also means that appropriate controls on data entry can be set up to ensure process discipline. Finally to ensure ease of communication, the company can share videos on policies and processes via the bot, making it extremely engaging for employees.

Steering the future with simplified digital processes

• Integrating other self-service applications has saved time and effort in approval and support processes. The number of self-service requests (including leave requests) that have been processed are more than to 6lakhs+ and the over-all productivity for both managers and employees has been increased by more than 3%
• By allowing users to access the solution from any platform and device, the company has created omni-channel capabilities to connect to the self-service portal from anywhere in the world and at any time.

Shripad Joshi, Head HR Digitization and People Analytics, Tata Motors, is satisfied with the solution and says, “The intuitive, user-friendly feedback management system has generated more trust in the review process and simplified conversations on performance. Overall, the application has resulted in better efficiency and productivity.”

The company wants to extend the solution to a digital platform, offering employee self-service, performance management, and engagement. In addition, it aims to make the platform intuitive, futuristic, and seamless. The plan is to implement an enhanced IT service desk for software deployment that will reduce maintenance costs and increase employee satisfaction as the process will be quick and smooth.

Gopinath C J, VP & CIO, Tata Motors, sums up – “The Employee digital platform Drishti is a great example of evolutionary architecture in practice at Tata Motors. The ubiquity, ease of use, omni-channel presence and in-built authentication and authorization embedded within Microsoft Teams, made it the ideal presentation layer for the state of the art Tata Motors Digital HR platform. The combined strength of the individual components has given unprecedented access to HR services at the finger tips of employees, while retaining the ability of the central HR team to design, define and deploy new employee experiences with never-before agility. A true win-win as a result of seamless digital collaboration”