The challenge

The driving force of Aston Villa Football Club is to always win the next game. A key part of optimising the performance of the 200 strong workforce is considering the people behind the scenes that make the club tick.

Mel Millner was appointed as HR Director and tasked with bringing clarity, accountability, and clearer expectations to people’s roles and performance, where there was a general lack of understanding on how each individual contributed to the
bigger picture. 

In kicking off this project, it was quickly apparent that there was no real history of performance management in the club and certainly no formal framework, so introducing a modern continuous performance management approach felt somewhat risky. Some people had previous experience of outdated appraisal models, and others had no experience of performance management whatsoever. Another consideration was the wide variety of people and roles. The make-up of the football club meant there was an unusual mix of skillsets and levels of seniority.

There was also a requirement for both HR and the wider leadership team to have more insight into performance engagement metrics across the club. With no existing framework in place for performance management, there was an inconsistency around whether performance conversations were taking place, what the quality of those discussions were and, how objectives were being set, if at all.

Why OneAdvanced’s Performance & Talent; the solution

After an initial but extensive research phase, the HR team decided upon a nontraditional continuous performance approach, with three must-haves:

• Effective ongoing quality conversations
• Real-time feedback
• Near-term SMART objectives

This decision was made after a few months of Mel being appointed, once she had developed a better understanding of the culture of working at Villa and what would be most beneficial for the club. Having settled on this approach, the HR team set about finding a technology partner with an aligned methodology and who would enable this new cultural shift to really take off, which is when they found OneAdvanced.

“It was love at first sight when we saw the OneAdvanced’s Performance & Talent software. Immediately, I felt comfortable with the user-friendly look and feel of it! It was also very cost effective, which was an important factor for us as well.”

The extremely intuitive and straightforward user experience meant the HR team were able to focus on the human elements of making the shift to continuous performance management, such as objective setting, development support, and how to conduct meaningful check-in meetings, rather than spending an unnecessary amount of time on showing people how to use a clunky system. All of this contributed to the successful adoption of the new performance model.

The simplicity of the technology from a user administration perspective was also key to a quick and effective implementation and in Mel’s own words; 

“The system set up was extremely simple. Before we knew it, we pressed a button and we were away!”

As this was a bold new step for the club, HR needed a technology provider who they could partner with over time to help them evolve their approach and understand best-practice from other customers. The usual reactive ‘contact us
if you have a problem’ approach was not going to cut it.

“The team was very knowledgeable and helpful during the initial sales process, and have continued that post-launch. They are hugely attentive and have even implemented many of our improvement feedback requests into their platform. Their online customer community has also been really helpful for us.”