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DTEKGroup is a diversified energy holding company. It includes 6 businesses and Academy DTEK, a corporate university that has been enhancing DTEK Group’s knowledge base on the latest innovations for over 10 years. The strategic goal of the Academy is to select and train future leaders of DTEK, who then land 80% of internal management positions.

Academy DTEK studies global developments in education and adapts and applies them in the Ukrainian market to benefit businesses, society, and the state. For this purpose, it cooperates with leading international business schools: INSEAD, IE Business School, and Stanford University.

In 2023, DTEK Group's team launched a project to fully abandon Russian software products and optimize the block of tasks to arrange annual performance appraisals for more than 21,000 employees. The IT-Enterprise team started upgrading DTEK’s HR processes as a digital partner, while the IT-Enterprise no-code/low-code platform was the project’s tech core.

"We did our research about more than 90 different solutions in Ukraine and abroad, and in the end we chose the IT-Enterprise platform. The first advantage was its flexibility: it allows you to use a customized interface, configure and program solutions for your business goals. Secondly, they have a convenient licensing scheme. Next, they offered reliable technologies for us to support more than 40,000 users. And finally, IT-Enterprise had the experience in implementing similar solutions for large companies in Ukraine and abroad,” Ksenia Nesterenko, HR manager at Academy DTEK, said about how her company selected a digital partner.

Project 

The first stage of the overall HR process digitalization covered the block of tasks for annual performance appraisal. The project consisted of implementing an enterprise solution, adapting and developing interfaces (front end), and optimizing the business processes (back end).

Project goal

Based on the annual performance appraisal, the company gets the results of the year compared to the planned KPIs, which help it motivate its staff and prioritize their development. Next, it can create development plans for the next year to continuously replenish and enhance its talent pool.

Annual performance appraisal

In general, the corporate solution for annual performance appraisal has to meet several objectives. This list includes employee self-evaluation, assessment of their competencies and performance by the manager, setting goals (KPIs), and creating a professional development plan.

• Competency assessment is based on a scoring model with examples of competencies. Each set of competencies is individual and depends on the employee’s position, level of management and responsibilities.
• Assessment of the individual development plan (IDP) (previous year) involves a traffic light assessment of the development of corporate competencies, professional growth, and training projects.
• Creating an individual development plan (next year) relies on flexible tools for choosing a growth area and formulating the development goal. It is also possible to choose a strategy that will be effective for this particular specialist. The list of available strategies includes self-development, training programs, regular feedback, project activities, etc. For each selected strategy, the user selects respective development activities (training, reading, etc.)
• Performance evaluation (previous year) is based on group, quantitative, and qualitative indicators.
• Setting goals (KPIs) (next year) is a complex process that combines:

> measurable indicators based on the principle of “minimum-target-maximum” values (UAH/%). Indicator types: group (EBITDA), cascaded (implementation of the energy sales plan) and quantitative (implementation of the energy generation plan).

> qualitative indicators based on the principle of significance weights (implementation of the Eco+ project).

Another process is Ranking. It finalizes the results of the competency assessment and performance evaluation. After that, specialists are divided into groups based on their skill level or potential. Each assessment is approved by a third party, whose task is to compare the assessment results.

The results of the annual performance appraisal can be presented in terms of competency assessment, performance evaluation and ranking. Also, they can be exported as a printable form.

The annual performance appraisal is a standalone project that runs automatically. IT-Enterprise works with primary HR data, using staff information, organizational structure, and historical KPI data for previous periods as a basis. This data is imported from SAP. To ensure data migration required for assessment processes, there is a cross-platform integration and a data exchange mechanism.

Corporate solution

The corporate solution interface was adapted and customized to meet DTEK’s business needs. Apart from a user-friendly front end, it has visual elements to match DTEK’s UI kit and brand standards. The UX-UI team developed several interface versions for each user role and adapted them for tablets, where users can also fill out forms.

The team created visualizations for processes, such as competency assessment, performance evaluation, creating development plans, and setting goals (KPIs). Extended functionality helps to complete the assessment steps in a gamified way. The assessment results and the final competency assessment are available in a very clear form: graphs, charts, and targeted comments. 

Implementing annual performance appraisal 

Notably, the annual performance appraisal project started with DTEK’s managers. According to the standard, this appraisal should be performed within 2 months. Managers are a complex and the most difficult group of specialists to evaluate; in particular, they are expected to have offline and online meetings with the CEO. At the same time, mass appraisals for over 21,000 DTEK Group employees were completed in 3 months.

Analytics

The corporate solution for appraisals works for two user roles: first, an employee who fills out personal competency assessment and performance evaluation forms; second, a manager with their own evaluation forms, who is also responsible for the evaluation and approval of their subordinates’ evaluation forms. 

Analytics of subordinates' evaluations are generated in a separate dashboard. Its settings allow users to see the percentage of forms filled out and processing stages, as well as analyze the status of each form type filled by an analyst.

"Our teams implemented this ambitious, large-scale project quickly and efficiently. In 6 months, together with the teams of DTEK, Academy DTEK, and Modus X, we went through many stages: we designed a corporate solution, implemented SAP integration, developed new functionality, and scaled the assessment processes for 21,000 staff members. Within 3 months after deployment, all groups of employees passed the 2023 assessment and set goals for 2024,” said Anna Shevchenko, Project Manager at IT-Enterprise.

Summary

Here are the key characteristics of the project for upgrading HR processes and implementing the annual performance appraisal functionality for DTEK Group:

• 21,000 specialists undergo annual appraisals according to individual plans and unified procedures
• 6-month project implementation period from the stage of process modeling to running appraisals for the top managers
• Corporate solution: a full-featured platform for annual performance evaluation with a customized UX-UI

Annual performance appraisal tasks are the first objectives to be covered in a series of projects aimed at the digitalization and enhancement of DTEK’s HR operations. In parallel with this project, the teams implemented a dedicated subproject for onboarding, and since then, a group of new employees has already undergone onboarding processes. The next steps will focus on the introduction of career management and recruitment tools.

Learn more about HR management solutions from IT-Enterprise here