November 2014

WELCOME!How have you lived our People Expectations in 2014 & the new My Performance Journal .An overview for leaders on how to plan for the end of year, the importance of successful performance management and the launch of My Performance for 2015.We’ll be joined by Philip Ormond , Leader Coach and Kayley Marchant, Storytellor, UK Communications

YourSay – The results are out.An overview of how to review your reports and how to make the most out of them for you and your teams.Jack Roper , UK Communications Partner

Shared Parental Leave An overview of the key legislative changes to the way we manage shared parental leave requests going forward.Sarah Higham, Leader Coach will share more with us

Launch of the 2014 Share Save & Share Build SchemesAn update on what’s changed this year and an overview on key dates and activities in preparation for enrolment.Jan Henry, Share Schemes Manager, GCC

HR News Round UpEllie will be back to run through some key dates with you

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HOW HAVE YOU LIVED OUR PEOPLE EXPECTATIONS IN 2014?Are you ready for End of Year conversations?Phil Ormond, HR Leader Coach

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN!

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• End of Year Reviews are due shortly.

• Pulse check actions agreed at Mid Year.

• Define performance ratings for your teams.

• Ensure you are clear on what ‘Good’ performance looks like.

• Identify what support you need in preparing for performance conversations.

Have you followed through on all agreed actions from Mid Year?

RECAP – PERFORMANCE RATINGS

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BELOW EXPECTATIONS

GOOD SUPERIOR OUTSTANDING

Awarded when an employee has failed to achieve their goals and/or has a reputation for behaviour that is counter to our Expectations which has a Negative impact on peers, their team and the working environment.

Awarded for a successful performance when an employee has successfully achieved their goals and regularly receives positive feedback on their behaviour against most of the Expectations. Generally has a positive impact on peers. Their team and the working environment.

To be awarded to employees who have exceeded their goals and made a tangible difference to the business and/or their team. They have consistently received positive feedback on their behaviour across all of the Expectations and have a positive impact on peers, their team and the working environment.

To be awarded for exceptional performance where an employee has delivered above and beyond their goals and made a significant impact across the business.They stand out as a strong role-model for the Expectations and have notably positive impact on peers, their team and the working environment.

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DIFFERENTIATING PERFORMANCE

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• At RSA, we use a distribution curve to compare our performance against high performing organisations.

• The curve is a good indicator of whether we are really differentiating between levels of performance.

• Your responsibility to differentiate performance across your team and explain your rating decisions to your team, members your peers and your leader (validation).

WHAT ABOUT UNDERPERFORMANCE?

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What is the root cause and how do we address this?

• Absence Capabilityo Absence Improvement Discussion

• Conducto Immediate improvement required and

should be sustainedo Deal with the matter quickly; nip it in the

budo Can lead to BE Rating through

Expectationso Manage through Informal > Formal

Disciplinary Process

• Performance Capabilityo Recovery timescales depend on

improvements required and level of support (can be weeks or months but rarely exceeds three months)

o Make clear that failure to improve could lead to disciplinary action

o Consider Expectations as Goals in a PIP where they do not fall into the conduct category

Identifying the root cause is the first step in addressing underperformance.

WHILST THE PIP DURATION IS AGREED UPFRONT, IF THE PROGRESS REVIEWS REVEAL

IMPROVEMENT HAS NOT BEEN IMMEDIATE / SUSTAINED THEN THE PERFORMANCE

MANAGEMENT PROCESS MAY BE ESCALATED BEFORE THE END OF THAT TIME

REMEMBER...

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PREPARING FOR PERFORMANCE CONVERSATIONS

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Our Top Tips:• SMART Goals help you assess success against them

• Open and honest conversations lead to a shared understanding that builds trust

• Have a clear understanding of how well each person is performing

• Consider how you’re going to communicate what you expect to be achieved and where there are any shortfalls

• Link your conversations to the agreed Goals and Expectations

• Encourage people to continually improve and stretch themselves to embed a High Performance Culture

• Link Goals to fit with our Customer Obsession and overall strategy

• Gather feedback from different sources about your team’s skill, knowledge and behaviour

• Identify potential problems that may be raised and anticipate challenges

Why should I bother preparing?

It will give you confidence in having a really meaningful conversation and help you explain your rating decisions

It will help you deal with challenges (or Grievances) from your people

It enables you to give both positive and developmental feedback with examples

KEY POINTS

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• Don’t settle for just OK – Good should be something to be proud of!

• Be honest, and be brave enough to have the difficult conversations.

• Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail. Your employees ratings reflect on the performance of your whole team. Invest in preparing to help them improve.

• If you Manage other Leaders, allow time to your leaders to prepare.

Preparation is the key to having effective performance conversations.

OUR PEOPLE EXPECTATIONS

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What do our customers like and want? Seek ideas from inside and outside of RSA. Customer insight is our gold dust and we value different perspectives and thinking from everyone. So be curious, dig deep, brainstorm and innovate – let’s hear your customer insight, and your ideas to help make things better.

What matters for our customers is action! Whatever your role or shout out, speak up, champion and test your improvement ideas. Make the changes in your immediate control right away. Be tenacious in making improvement happen. Be relentless until you’ve achieved something that makes a difference.

Collaboration is our greatest source of competitive advantage. To deliver for our customers none of us can afford to act alone. Let’s work together. Share with others, help others, solve with others, build with others and gladly take others’ ideas and help.

Doing what you say you will is at the heart of how you deliver for customers. It’s also how we need to contract with each other so we can drive improvements fast. So take your commitments seriously, update on progress, do things on time. Move mountains not to let people down.

Be big-hearted and bring your whole self to work. Show you care to customers and colleagues and treat them with warmth, empathy and respect. Look for the good in people and situations – come to work every day holding a mindset of positive intent. Act with decency and dignity, especially when having to make difficult decisions.

• The Expectations are five simple statements of the behaviours we expect from our people every day

• Use them to measure how people have achieved what they have achieved this year

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We always promised you the Performance Journal on the intranet would be temporary

We’re now taking steps to better link Performance Management with Learning

From January 2015 ‘My Performance’ will be on our Learning Zone

This is our brand new tool to record your goals, development plans and allow you to have some quality performance conversations

Don’t record your 2015 goals on the current Performance Journal. We know lots of you will be thinking about what you want to achieve next year, but jot these thoughts down and keep hold of them ready to record in My Performance

Watch this space…More information will come your way soon

MY PERFORMANCE

My Career

My 360 Feedback

My Goals

My Performance Review

My PDP

My Learning

LOOKING AHEAD

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Until 31st December

Hold a 1:1 performance review with your team members.

Early January Hold 1:1s with your team to set their 2015 objectives – but don't record them in your Performance Journal yet!

Mid-late February Make recommendations for salary and bonus awards for your team where appropriate (you’ll get more info on this nearer the time).

From early March Hold 1:1s with your team to let them know what salary and bonus awards have been made and why (again, you’ll get more info on this nearer the time).

SOME ADDITIONAL HELP

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YOURSAY The reports are out. So what’s next?

Jack Roper, UK Internal Communications Partner

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YOURSAY: THE RESULTS ARE OUT. SO WHAT’S NEXT?

YOURSAY reports were published on 10th November. The survey’s very different from what we did last year, and so is the approach we’re taking with the reports.

Here’s some information to bear in mind when you’re reading your report and planning what to do next.

What the reports are for:

Sharing. Make sure you share your report with your team once you’ve read it.

Talking. The aim of the game is for your team to have a great conversation about what’s going well and what we can get better at, and decide what actions to take in your team as a result.

A starting point. We’ll provide you with reports and some ideas for how to use them with your teams, but how you use them is up to you.

Already BRILL? Do you have training or skills in facilitation, action planning or process improvement? For example, maybe you’re one of our 80+ BRILL-accredited facilitators and you’d like to use those skills with your team or others? That’s fine! It’s up to you how you go about using your report insights to make things better.

What the reports aren’t for:

Box-ticking. You shouldn’t feel pressured to create action plans for the sake of it.

Creating more red tape. This year, we won’t be asking you to complete a separate Engagement Action Plan – and no-one will be checking up on this.

Falling into a black hole. Any actions you do plan with your team should be things you can influence, and that you’ll be able to track easily day-to-day, preferably through your SMART goals.

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READING YOUR REPORT: WHAT TO BEAR IN MINDStuck on where to get started? Download the “How to Read Your Report” guide from the YOURSAY portal.

Read your report but got questions? Here are some themes I’ve heard emerging so far:

• We’ve deliberately reproduced the comments that were made word-for-word in the reports. Sometimes the comments that have been made may feel overly negative, personal or unfair. Remember that the comments are there as suggestions for improvement and you should read them in that spirit.

• But equally, you don’t have to take all of them to heart or act on them all – sometimes there are comments you’ll find you can’t do anything with. That’s OK as long as you’ve taken time to read them and think about them.

• The same goes for comments that you can’t quite place or don’t understand. In your session you could check whether comments like these resonate with the team or if there’s something you’ve missed.

• Throughout this process, we’ve said that there would be much less emphasis on scores but there is still a Team NPS included in your report.

• It’s interesting information, but don’t worry about this too much. Lots of factors go into creating an NPS and it isn’t as straightforward as an engagement index or a “grand mean”.

• The real gold for you as a team leader is in the Sentiment and Shout Out sections.

• Some of the issues that are being flagged in the reports are things that leaders just can’t fix alone. How is it fair to expect them to fix these issues?

• It’s isn’t. We don’t. If you can’t fix it, don’t fixate on it. Just work with your teams to improve the things that’re in your power.

• Senior leaders across the business are getting to grips with the reports right now too. • On 1 December the UK Exec will be going through their report on their regular pulse call.

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YOUR TEAM SESSION: SOME IDEAS ON HOW TO DO ITBack when the survey closed, we sent out some materials to help leaders plan and run a team session on their results. You can find these on the Yammer YOURSAY group, or I can email them to you individually.

Here’s a reminder of the outline we suggested…. But it’s only a suggestion. What are you doing in your team?

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“I CAN’T DO IT. WHAT DO I DO?”

There’ll be lots in your report that you can’t do anything about. IS issues, anyone?

That’s why we’re asking teams to identify their SHOUT UPs…

What’s a SHOUT UP?• An issue that’s too big for us to fix on our own because:

• It runs across team/function boundaries• It is too complex• It is too costly

• An issue we’ve tried to fix before, maybe more than once, but never managed to crack• An issue that absolutely needs senior-level ownership or support to get fixed

How do we ‘Shout-up’? • Share the ‘Shout-up’ on the YOURSAY or the Big Conversation Yammer Group. • The Exec team will review and ask you about them in December’s Big Conversation

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As a team, we agreed actions (a),

(b) and (c)

Great! We might steal

idea (a) – and we can help

you with idea (b). Have you thought about

idea (d)?

As an Exec, we heard that x, y and

z were big issues for the UKWE team. Does that sound

right?

To our team, x and z are priorities. y

isn’t really an issue here

1. It starts with a team leader sharing her team’s action ideas

7. UK Exec members contribute their ideas

2. Members of teams across the business chip in

Thanks for your contributions and sharing your plans. We’ll keep you up to speed on what we decide to

focus on, and explain why we can’t change some things

3. UK Exec members have their say on team actions

I like idea (b) – would love to hear how you get on with it!

8. Team leaders and others respond to these

For us, y is an issue – but

the real focus should be on Shout Up #1

Team

actions

We need help with Shout Ups #1 and

#2

Interesting. We can look into

changing Shout Up #1, but #2 would be too

expensive to solve right now

Shame! But that

makes sense

In my team we could help with

#2, actually

4. Next, the leader or her team members “Shout Up” about the ideas they need Exec help with

5. Exec members reply to these “Shout Ups”

6. Other teams comment too, where appropriateShout U

psExec Ideas

WHAT WE’LL DO NEXT

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DECEMBER’S BIG CONVERSATION• 5th December 2014 at 10:00.

• In the Big Conversation Yammer Group.

• The UK Executive Team will be online to share the insights they got from their report; talk to teams about the actions they’re going to take; and find out what’s happening across the business.

• As usual, they’ll be happy to take questions you have on any other topic, too…

• Can’t make it? Pop your ideas, Shout Ups, questions and thoughts in the YOURSAY or Big Conversation groups on Yammer.

• Problems with Yammer? By now, everyone should have had Google Chrome installed on their computer as a “second browser” – this’ll give you a much smoother Yammer experience.

See you on 5th December! In the meantime:

- Read your report if you haven’t already, and share it with your team;- Get some time in with your team to talk it through and get their ideas ;- Share what you’re up to, and any exciting ideas and shout outs for help, in the

YOURSAY Yammer group.

SHARED PARENTAL LEAVE

An overview of the key legislative changes to the wayWe will manage shared parental leave requests.

Sarah Higham, Leader Coach

What is Shared Parental Leave?Legislation coming into effect 1st December 2014 for babies expected to be born on or after 5th April 2015

Allows parents to share the 52 weeks statutory leave currently only available to women after the birth/adoption of a child

Maximum of 52* weeks’ leave (Mothers will still have to take 2 weeks of compulsory maternity leave after the child’s birth)

Maximum of 37 weeks statutory pay to be shared between the parents

Additional paternity leave will be abolished after 6th April 2015 but fathers will still be entitled to the 2 weeks Ordinary Paternity Leave at full pay

A mother has to end her maternity leave , or indicate a date she wishes to end her maternity leave earlier in the future, to enable any shared parental leave to be taken

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How does it work?

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Mother provides notice to end her maternity leave on a certain date (or partner provides notice that the mother has done this) along with ‘notice of entitlement ‘ to take shared parental leave

Notice of Entitlement has to be given by the employee and must contain a ‘declaration’ that the other parent shares main caring responsibilities

Notice of entitlement must state the dates of the intended leave, any leave already taken by either parent and how the leave will be split

The declaration is then signed by both parents confirming the eligibility criteria

The employee then gives a ‘booking notification’ confirming the dates of leave (can be done atthe same time as the notice of entitlement or later but booking notification must be at least 8 weeks prior to leave)

Where the correct notice is given and eligibility met RSA cannot refuse leave that is requested in one block i.e. 12 continuous weeks, but can refuse leave that is discontinuous i.e. 4 blocks of 3 weeks

Up to 3 notifications can be given and 8 weeks notice must be given for each notification

Varying a request for leave would use up one of these notifications

So what happens next?

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Launch of Shared Parental leave policy January 2015

Further communications and information January 2015 onwards

Employees able to submit Parental leave requests February 2015

2014 SHARESAVE ANDSHAREBUILD SCHEMES An overview for leaders on key dates and activities in preparation for enrolment

Jan Henry, Share Schemes Manager, GCC

2014 SHARESAVE AND SHAREBUILD SCHEMES

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Sharesave - what’s changed this year?• 3-year savings scheme only

Previously 3-year and 5-year savings contracts

Decline in number of people taking out 5-year contracts

Simplified by offering 3-year only

20% discount remains

2014 SHARESAVE AND SHAREBUILD SCHEMES

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Sharebuild - what’s changed this year?

Sharebuild – Change to the matching ratio Previously 1 Matching Share awarded

by RSA for every Partnership Share purchased.

First review since the Scheme was launched in 2009

5-year anniversary Dec 2014 Continued focus on costs in the current

trading environment Changed to 1 Matching Share for every

4 Partnership Shares purchased.

2014 SHARESAVE AND SHAREBUILD SCHEMES

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Sharebuild example For the Sharebuild the money comes from gross (pre tax and NIC) pay.

A basic rate taxpayer would receive:

£50 of Partnership Shares

£12.50 of Matching Shares

Additional shares for any dividend declared

i.e. Shares worth £62.50 for a £34 reduction in take-home pay*

* The Matching Shares worth £12.50 have service conditions attached.

Basic Rate Taxpayer Higher Rate Taxpayer

Monthly deduction £50 £50

Income tax and NIC saved

£16 £21

Money used to purchase shares

£50 £50

Reduction in take-home pay

£34 £29

2014 SHARESAVE AND SHAREBUILD SCHEMES

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Sharesave Sharebuild3 year saving plan which allows purchase of RSA shares at end of period

Ongoing RSA share purchase plan with RSA giving you 1 matching share for every 4 Partnership Shares purchased and you receive dividends on all shares held

Savings from post-tax salary Deductions from pre-tax salary

Monthly savings are fixed Can increase, stop or change deductions at any time

Shares purchased at 20% discount to the share price on 17 November 2014

Shares purchased each month at market value, held in a Trust (withdrawal may affect tax and Matching Shares)

A simple savings plan which allows you to buy RSA shares at a discount

Risks and benefits of share ownership immediately

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2014 SHARESAVE AND SHAREBUILD SCHEMES

Key DatesOption price is set Monday 17 November

Email invitation to join Sharesave and/or Sharebuild sent by UBS

Tuesday 18 November

Closing date for applications to join the schemes

5.00pm GMT on Friday 5 December

Grant of Share Options Wednesday 17 December

First deduction from pay January 2015

Start of savings contract for Sharesave 1 February 2015

First purchase of shares for new joiners to Sharebuild

9 February 2015

Maturity date for Sharesave 2014 1 February 2018

2014 SHARESAVE AND SHAREBUILD SCHEMES

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Further information:• Intranet – People Zone/Reward &

Benefits/Share Plans• EquatePlus document library (

www.equateplus.com)• UBS helpline: 0800 141 2955

Option 1 for Sharebuild Option 2 for Sharesave Option 4 for EquatePlus access,

password queries • Email: RSASAYE@rsashareplans.com

HR NEWS ROUND UP

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What’s New?

Just a Reminder......

• We have been live with the HR Help service for a couple of months now and we are really keen to hear people's feedback. To help you provide timely feedback we have two channels which you can use –

• Yammer Group - 'HR Help' where leaders and employees can post their feedback. • Lynsey Unsworth is our Supplier Relationship & Service Delivery Manager for the Infosys contract. Contact

details on Infotel..

Dates to Remember – December

Your Benefits closes

Friday 5th December

Your Next People Hr is Thursday 18th December

2pm

Payroll Cut OffFriday 5th December

5pm

• The People Hr mailbox is not regularly checked and is for People Hr correspondence only.

• For any general HR queries or requests please contact hr.services@uk.rsagroup.com. • 360 Feedback tool updated in line with the People Expectations and available on the intranet under the

Performance and Expectations Toolkit page – remember to use it as part of employee’s personal development plan and to gain a valuable feedback perspecive.

Share Save closesFriday 5th December

UK LSS Cut offFriday 12th

December 5pm

Following on from Dr Simon Sheard’s session last month on Mental Health & Wellbeing we received a really powerful personal story from a Leader within RSA which we thought you would find beneficial and supportive if you are dealing with issues such as this within your team. The article will be published shortly on the Health, Safety & Wellbeing Intranet site and also on Yammer Health & Wellbeing Group. Check it out.

Just a Reminder……

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We’d love to hear your questions and comments after today’s call

Speak to your Leader Coach, or join the conversation on

using #peoplehr or accessing the People Hr group

If you need to get in touch with anyone specifically please contact:

Your HR Leader Coach. Your Regional Leader Coaches: Ellie Kreft, Lisa

Ferguson & Debbie NesbittSarah Higham and Philip Ormond, Leader

CoachesJack Roper & Kayley Marchant : Communications

Business PartnersJan Henry, GCC Share Scheme Manager

Thank you for joining us; speak to you in December!

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