Hubtown (A): Designing a Bottom-Up Approach to Performance Management

In 2014, Hubtown Limited (Hubtown), an Indian real estate development company, was attempting to implement a process to differentiate between its employees in order to enhance performance, identify employees who could be groomed for future growth, and distribute rewards. Hubtown was consolidating to concentrate on a few large, complex projects in residential and commercial spaces in urban centres. Like other companies in the industry, it competed for talent and faced challenges when attempting to retain, reward, and promote valuable employees.

Earlier efforts to implement a results-based performance management system had failed, so the organization decided to design and adopt a behaviour-based approach and to implement it from the bottom up to bypass resistance from senior management. Case A describes the challenges the human resources head faced in creating an institutionalized performance culture and designing the implementation plan for this system. Case B describes the implementation process and presents the initiatives taken by the human resources team to implement the process, train the stakeholders, and address challenges along the way.