Floor Havermans on “Moving People and Growing Talent” at Travix
We’re excited to introduce you to some of the incredible people working behind the scenes at Travix. Each Travix employee, in every position, plays a key role in getting traveling customers to where they need to go! We inspire and guide our customers through their entire travel journey offering the best travel deals possible and smooth booking through our user-friendly platforms. Travix is the company behind the internationally recognized brands: CheapTickets, Vliegwinkel, Vayama, BudgetAir and Flugladen. Travix has more than 500 employees representing about 50 different nationalities. Travix’s own operations spans 39 different countries.
Learn more about working at Travix in Floor Havermans’s blog.
'Non-Stop Growth’ - Moving people and growing talent
Performance management within a company or organization is not new, but at Travix we’ve just introduced a new way of doing it in order to grow strong talent and accelerate people’s development. We call this new performance management system: Non-Stop Growth.
In our dynamic world, and particularly in our fast-moving industry of online travel, business goals and, like them, one’s professional and personal goals can also change quickly. To keep up with the speed of the business and to make sure people’s goals are not irrelevant by mid-year as a result of the quick pace, we needed to implement a more agile performance management system.
Living and breathing our motto
Since we value listening to our employees at Travix, we designed the Non-Stop Growth program based upon the input of our employees and managers, as well as the latest insights in performance management research. The Non-Stop Growth program has also been designed to facilitate our large young talent workforce who want to learn fast, and have a challenge every day.
As the People Grow Manager here, I have been responsible for leading the transition to this new process. We had great help from Learning & Development expert Annika in designing and innovating the program. We have been collaborating with the entire People team to anchor the program in the organization, so we can live and breathe our people motto: We Grow Talent!
Checking in
The review process is based around a manager and employee having a series of short ‘check-in’ meetings multiple times throughout the year, not just at the beginning and end of the year as before. Check-ins take around 25-30 minutes and involves asking and answering questions—they trigger you to think differently than a standard review process. Managers and employees are asked to prepare 3 questions beforehand around three different areas. Part 1 is about connecting on a personal level, Part 2 is about expectations and feedback and Part 3 is future-focused. Within this process is also a chance to receive 360-feedback from one’s peers about how one is performing.
We launched the program in July, so we’re just receiving the first feedback from people’s check-ins with their managers. My own experience was positive and both my manager and I believe the process is more transparent and is an easier way to connect with one another. We have some small kinks to work out, but the implementation of the new program is going smoothly so far.
We always aim to move people and this process improves the possibilities to do that. With the more regular lightweight and ongoing ‘check-in’ conversations in the Non-Stop Growth program, we support and accelerate people in their development, and the shorter-term goal setting drives us to always look for the next challenge. Employees can be more agile and move to a different set of responsibilities and challenges, and move outside of one’s comfort zone, which promotes continuous learning. We’ve developed a toolkit and launched the Travix College to support employees on their development and learning journeys too.
Tips & Tricks in the Non-Stop Growth toolkit
The Non-Stop Growth Toolkit is an interactive presentation that contains everything that our managers and employees need to know about the Non-Stop Growth program. It is the first place to go to for all information on the process, tips & tricks and more fun facts about the program, so everyone is aware of what they can expect and what is expected from them. The Non-Stop Growth Toolkit has been distributed to all employees and is also available in our virtual platform, the Travix College.
Continuous learning through Travix College
Next to launching the new performance management process, we’ve launched the Travix College as the place to go for everything related to growth and learning. Next to helpful information about check-ins, goals and objective setting, etc., employees can find information about learning trails and their career paths, so people can see where they are right now and how to get to where they want to go. The Travix College Learning Library contains a lot of learning content about specific topics, and we are continuing to develop the resources available through the College.
As a manager of growing people, I’m thrilled to be a part of this big change in the way we evaluate performance and stimulate employees’ development and growth. It’s rewarding and inspiring for me to know how everyone can benefit from this program—including myself, since I’m an employee too!
Kind regards,
Floor
People Grow Manager