Scoir's journey to clarity: Achieving consistency with Pando in two months

Since its founding in 2013, Scoir has been on a mission to help all students understand, appreciate, and leverage their unique talents. Given these values, it makes sense that the cloud-based college admissions network wanted to ensure their employees had access to growth opportunities as well. Scoir partnered with Pando to bring these opportunities to their employees in a tangible, trackable way.

Challenge: A lack of transparency on role expectations was causing significant misalignment between managers and employees.  

Prior to partnering with Pando, Scoir employees would receive feedback in their one-on-ones and get evaluated on the tasks at hand. There wasn’t a central place for documentation and the feedback wasn’t tied to specific skills or competencies.

Because expectations weren’t clearly outlined, there was misalignment between managers and employees throughout the company. Without the behaviors or tasks to measure against, there was no way of demonstrating or comparing what different levels looked like across functions.

The majority of employees regarded themselves as performing better or higher than their managers felt they were performing, indicating a clear need for transparent, competency-based conversations.

Solution: Create holistic career frameworks, establish clear expectations, and a centralized platform for documentation.

Scoir started by rolling out core competencies that everyone within the organization would be expected to execute. The platform provides a clear rubric on what behaviors and tasks looked like for each competency at each level. Using this, Scoir broke down ambiguity around expectations and conducted straightforward assessments based on these clearly outlined skills.

Scoir’s Director of People Operations, Kelly O’Brien, noted that clarity and ease was a major factor in her search for a performance management solution.

“Honestly the simplicity of Pando really stood out. Leveling always seems so daunting with so many steps involved, and everyone does it differently. I loved the way Pando makes it easy to customize for your organization, and provides the appropriate tools like the competency framework consulting and competency library, to allow you to create a holistic career framework.”

After having a very challenging experience switching a different HR system, Kelly said Scoir was hesitant to roll out a new HR tech product, especially since their onboarding fell close to end of year. But she pointed out that they had a completely different experience with Pando.

“The implementation process was amazing. Our CGO actually mirrored a similar training mode because we thought the initial admin training was so well done. The pre-work painted a good picture and helped prepare the folks involved and the training was succinct and efficient.”

Result: A continuous, stable foundation for development and performance creates consistent value for the business and its employees.

Continuous, documented feedback is now the norm at Scoir. “We felt as a company we were good at giving feedback but we realized very quickly into using Pando that we were missing the actual behaviors to measure against”, said Kelly.  Managers and employees leverage it as a reliable, consistent resource to track growth and performance.

Since the platform fills a key need within the organization, it’s no surprise that adoption of Pando has been strong. For the first time, every Scoir employee completed their self and manager assessments  on-time. Kelly said managers feel less bogged down comparing their previous performance review process thanks to the lightweight and intuitive platform, core competencies, and continuous feedback conversations to refer back to while completing the assessments for reports.  

With reduced recency bias and improved clarity, managers are able to assess employees in a more straightforward manner that’s rooted in specific competencies, rather than whatever task is at hand. While Pando made an immediate impact, Michael Sullivan, Engineering Manager at Scoir noted how valuable its long-term effect will be for the business.

“Kelly's initiative to bring Pando to Scoir feels like a major win as it sets us up to bring consistency and continuous value to our feedback and development of employees. Every year (and at times, mid year) reviews have taken a different format, making it challenging to build upon previous reviews. Having a stable base to build upon is going to pay employee development dividends.”  said Michael Sullivan, Engineering Manager

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