Overview
Your strategy team's market analysis has just hit your desk. π As strategic imperatives, competitive positioning, and value propositions are mapped out, project outlines and requirements are being dotted on the board. A question strikes your mind... "To whom do I assign leadership of this project?"
With Indigo's effective Performance Management and Analytics, you can begin answering questions like these more effectively and without bias.
By turning data from meticulously carried out performance reviews into actionable insights through tools such as the 9 Box Grid, you can better understand your team's capabilities and strategically allocate resources to maximise impact.
Significant Benefits of the 9 Box Grid
Significant Benefits of the 9 Box Grid
The 9 Box Grid is a visual tool used in talent management to assess and categorise employees based on their performance and potential for future growth within an organisation.
The 9 Box Grid evaluates employees based on performance (π¦-axis) and potential (π₯-axis), creating a 3Γ3 matrix with nine boxes ranging from [Low Performance, Low Potential] to [High Performance, High Potential]. Using appraisal data, the grid places each employee in the box that best matches their scores, highlighting your top innovators, most consistent achievers, and those who may need support to improve.
In essence, it's wise to assign innovative tasks to highly productive individuals who excel in research, aiming to expand your company's horizons or deepen its expertise. Meanwhile, others in your talent pool may thrive in consistently delivering results over time, even if they lack the innovative spark.
The 9 Box Grid helps identify these distinctions clearly, making decision-making more straightforward and effective.
Summary of benefits:
π Simple, easy, effective: The 9 Box Grid visually sorts employees by how well they perform and how much they could grow, making it easy for anyone to use, even those new to performance and talent management.
π¦ Spotlights valuable talent: The grid spots top performers who could do even better, giving data to help decide where to invest resources and who to promote internally.
π Holisitic overview approach: This tool evaluates employees based on multiple qualities to understand their current performance and future potential, helping identify suitable candidates for leadership roles or major projects.
Limitations of the 9 Box Grid
Limitations of the 9 Box Grid
The 9 Box Grid is not intended to be used as a 'rank and yank' system, where the grid's data is used to compare employees and those at the bottom get fired. This contradicts the grid's purpose.
It should instead be used to develop talent and create a competitive advantage for the organisation.
Using this tool is as much about the evaluation as it is about the discussions that follow. Allow the tool to shape your talent management strategies and support your decisions with factual evidence during discussions with employees, replacing bias with recorded facts.
The grid may also reveal situations where lower-ranking employees are being affected by restrictive working conditions or other legitimate factors, helping the company see which organisation or premises based improvements should be prioritised.
Keep in mind, the 9 Box Grid isn't about dropping employees into a permanent category. Just because someone is labelled as high productivity but low potential today doesn't mean they can't surprise you and show their true potential next quarter or next year.
As with all HR tools, they don't have the final say in your decisions. You and your team do.
Indigo's 9 Box Grid
The 9 Box Grid is one of the chart types offered in Analytics, a dedicated pillar of Indigo's Performance Management product, which is accessible through the product's menu on the left side.
Typical 9 Box Grids are graphs which measure two dimensions: Performance (π¦-axis) and Potential (π₯-axis). This results in nine categories, or boxes, where employees are placed based on assessments of their performance and potential over a certain span of time.
In the performance review process, these assessments are like 'scores' made up of 'points' gained by each employee when answering relevant appraisal questions in a certain way, and similar questions answered about the employee by their manager.
This allows Indigo to calculate a 'performance score' and a 'potential score' to place employees in the grid. For example, an employee with a 'high performance score' but 'low potential score' will appear in box 1, alongside similar scoring employees.
This overview helps identify employees best suited for specific tasks based on their grid placement, reflecting their contribution and talent.
This logic can be applied to measure any two qualities, such as engagement or leadership. This is useful when performance and potential aren't the qualities you're looking for, and you need to measure attributes like leadership or communication, for instance, when seeking candidates to promote to a managerial position.
The values on the π₯-axis and π¦-axis can also be flipped to suit personal preference. This will not change an employee's box or scoring, just that box's position in the overall grid. For example, an employee in Low potential, High performance (box 1) will stay in that box, but that box's position on the grid will change with the axis inversion (in this case, box 1 will swap places with box 9).
More information on the Performance Management process
More information on the Performance Management process
In Indigo's Performance Management product, the 9 Box Grid is one of the available visual representations of employee data, gathered from previous appraisals conducted by you or your managers.
These appraisals will have been based on templates designed by you to assess various aspects of employee performance as needed, including skill level, achievements, and areas for improvement. These criteria are then used to populate the 9 Box Grid, providing a structured method to evaluate and display employees based on their performance and potential.
π‘ For more information on the process, check out our Introduction to Performance Management. π
Generating a 9 Box Grid
Generating the grid is as easy as pressing a single button! π
From Indigo, head on over to Performance Management.
Click Analytics on the left.
If the screen is blank, make sure to click the 9 Box Grid tab towards the top (also useful for when more graphs are made available π€«).
Following this, click β» Generate.
This method on its own will generate a grid using default settings. To customise the grid to your needs, follow the instructions in the collapsed section below.
While we recommend that you set the desired settings of the grid before you click β» Generate, you can still alter a generated grid by changing its settings and then clicking the Refresh Grid button when done.
Setting the Parameters for the 9 Box Grid
Setting the Parameters for the 9 Box Grid
Before generating the 9 Box Grid, you should determine the timeframe of appraisals, select the required companies, and pick two values from available question tags to measure and display on the grid's axes.
π Which Time Period: Click on each date pickers in the grid's toolbar to set the Date From and Date To. This establishes a time frame for your graph to consider when selecting appraisals for data.
β’ For example, if you want the grid to show data from appraisals held in the first and second quarters of 2024, select 01/01/2024 in the Date From and 30/06/2024 in the Date To.
πΌ Whose Appraisals: On the right end of the grid's toolbar, click the Grid Settings button to select which of your tenant's Companies, Departments and Cost Centres you wish the grid to include.
β’ Tick or untick the boxes as necessary in the resulting window, then close it by clicking the minimise button at the top right corner.
β’ You can refresh your choices or lock/unlock them by clicking the circular arrow ( β» ) or the padlock ( π ) buttons respectively, which are in the top left of the drawer.
π Measuring Attributes: Finally, select the key attributes you wish the grid to measure and display on its π₯- and π¦-axes by clicking on either field, typing in the required value, and selecting it from the resulting dropdown.
β’ By default, potential will be the variable displayed on the π₯-axis, and performance on the π¦-axis, which are the standard perimeters for 9 Box Grids.β’ Values for this step, besides potential and performance, must be chosen from a dropdown list.
β’ This list automatically includes all question tags used by you or your managers across all companies in the tenant when creating performance review templates.
Establishing a coherent and consistent standard of question tags for companies in your tenant is a necessary early step to ensure precise talent management analytics across all departments and time periods.
Analysing Grid Data
You've defined your parameters, generated the 9 Box Grid, and now have a graph π that maps each of your relevant employees into one of nine boxes based on their appraisal scores. It's time to analyse the data! π
Right off the bat, you can hover over an employee's picture in the grid and a text box will appear displaying their name, total score, and the individual scores for each axis, which, in the example provided, are the default Performance (π¦-axis) and Potential (π₯-axis).
The next step is clicking the Analyse Data button at the top right, which will open the Review Scores window.
This window provides a comprehensive view of the currently generated 9 Box Grid, a table that displays:
the employee;
the review's manager;
the box they are in, with each axis defined;
a column each for π₯, π¦ and total score. Note: the number of appraisals affecting these scores is shown in brackets.
A filter function is also available, and can be accessed by clicking on the Filter button highlighted below, which enables search bars beneath each column header.
Clicking an employee's name in the grid will trigger a sidebar to appear on the right, displaying the employee's name, code, company, and reporting manager, along with a list of all relevant appraisals related to the employee within this grid. Click any of the appraisals in the list to open them.
Finally, within the 9 Box Grid itself, clicking on the View All link in any of the boxes will bring up the same Review Scores window as before but filtered to show only the employees found in that particular box.
The filter will be displayed at the top of the window, and by clicking the red cross, you can remove it to revert to the standard view of the Review Scores screen.
