Joe DeVito had a problem with the way employee evaluations were conducted at Baldwin & Lyons Inc., because the level of depth provided in these performance appraisals varied quite a bit from one department to the next.
“It was really dependent on the management team’s style and approach,” DeVito says. “It ranged from a very formalized review process with very objective and measurable goals to those who simply gave folks a short, one-paragraph verbal evaluation based upon, in many cases, subjective analysis.”
That wasn’t good enough for DeVito, who had spent more than two decades with the company before becoming president and chief operating officer in February 2007. The disparity in performance evaluation protocol didn’t give upper management a good sense of who the high performers were in the company and made it hard for the weak performers to improve.
DeVito wanted to make sure each employee was getting a good, thorough appraisal of his or her job performance, no matter what part of the company the person worked in.
It would be a challenge to shake things up, because the company’s annual revenue had been consistently greater than $200 million in recent years. After hitting $213 million in 2006, it was going to be tough to make the case to some people that change was necessary.
But DeVito was confident that if this issue was not addressed soon, it would eventually create trouble for the company and financial performance would be affected.
“It took awhile to prove to all of them that this vertical integration was the best way for us to embark on a pattern of growth,” DeVito says.
