The company is working with Vaado Software, a provider of online HR and performance management software.
Tragus Group also has smaller brands within airports and Centre Parcs premises. The company has just under 300 restaurants throughout England, Scotland and Wales and employs more than 7,000 members of staff.
Prior to the implementation of Vaado Performance, Tragus Group was using a manual, standalone spreadsheet system for performance management, that was stored and only accessible at the individual restaurant site, making overall visibility of all managers' performance inconvenient and causing the process to be prone to inconsistencies.
The HR department realised a web-based performance management system with a central database was essential to provide the geographically disparate organisation with wider visibility and access to the records of its managers And the manual approach to management development did not support the business need to grow talent from within, as central monitoring of progress was restricted.
The new system has the ability to integrate performance management and employee progression and planning all into one system, whilst streamlining all relevant processes and providing improved visibility of employees' advancement and training needs.
The information collated can then be referred to the in-house coaching team to achieve the primary objectives of improved performance, performance-based reward and promotion and ultimately, improve management retention.
Paul Willis, management coach at Tragus Group, said: "Introducing a centralised performance management system was very important to us because we want our employees to have the best opportunity to move up through the business, either by promotion or by moving to bigger restaurants. We recognised however that in order to enable this, it was essential that we had some way of capturing the person's performance history and their capabilities and then providing the suitable training. Previously, we were relying on an in-house system, which required time-consuming manual data input and did not automatically import staff records. It was also not centralised, making it very hard for us to monitor the managers' progress. In contrast, the new system allows us to create detailed profiles for each of our general managers, providing a historic, centrally-accessible record with which to track their progress through the business, along with their training needs - a vital component of delivering opportunities to progress.
"The tool didn't feel simply like a piece of IT."
