Xebia

We met with Véronique Reijinga. Véronique works as a people advisor at Xebia, and started her career there approximately four years ago. Starting as an intern, she conducted research on performance management and investigated the state of affairs but also the needs at that time in regards to the subject. Based on the outcomes of her research, the decision was made to invest in a tool that would facilitate personal development; TruQu. Véronique: “Besides TruQu, we had a look at various other tools. They really did not seem to fit Xebia and our vision. But TruQu really appealed to us.”

TruQu gives you ownership of your own data. You decide who you share your data with, and how you use the tool. Particularly because of this, the fit between TruQu and Xebia is so prevalent. Because of the unit structure within Xebia it would not have been practical to come up with one solution or way of working for the entire organisation. So, corresponding to this structure, the rollout of the tool was organised per unit, with their own custom strategies. Véronique: “All units are autonomous and are free to decide for themselves how they conduct their business. Therefore, we anticipated greater success in rolling out the tool per unit and testing per separate team, rather than implementing organisation-wide and in one go. By means of phased implementation we would create wider support for the initiative.” Thus, a starting point for implementation was created by assembling a pilot group to get started with TruQu and to see if there was a match between TruQu and Xebia. Really experiencing this match seemed extremely important. In particular because at Xebia people try to stay far away from things that are considered ‘corporate’, such as rules and regulations. So the employees at Xebia needed to embrace the tool themselves. Véronique: “Colleagues that participated in the pilot were talking to other employees about their experiences, that’s how it all started to take off. Employees seemed to have a very good experience working with TruQu. One of the unit managers was extremely enthusiastic and made sure other managers got on board. At one point, my colleagues were approaching me, asking me when their TruQu account would be set up. I didn’t even have to approach teams myself. Definitely a great experience.”

At TruQu we’re always developing our tool. We love to check-in and see how we could grow to support your needs even better than we already do. After the pilot we held a feedback session to see what type of development of the TruQu-tool would support the development of the employees of Xebia. During this meeting we discussed our goal module, it seemed that the module was not quite how Xebia had expected it to be. Véronique: “Since our feedback session, a lot has changed! I’m super impressed with the way the tool has developed since. I mean it!”. The core value ‘development’ is one that we share, Véronique states. “Personal development is actually very important to us. Our most important core value is ‘People first’. We accomplish this by facilitating our people and their professional and personal development as much and as well as we can. In addition, we really value knowledge sharing. So, personal development is always an important subject and really is part of our dna. Prior to using TruQu, every unit made it work for themselves. Facilitation of development was not always top notch. To minimise the differences between units, we chose to offer TruQu to all units as a helping hand. A big advantage of TruQu is that employees can take their own responsibility and organise their own development – this suits our way of working quite perfectly.”

The development cycle that you can set within the tool, serves as a nudge for a minimum amount of actions and creates a rhythm in which you work on your personal development. Within Xebia, a quarterly cycle has been installed. It serves as the rhythm in which managers conduct their development conversations. Véronique: “In principle, it would only be better if everyone would evaluate even more. But, we agreed, once a month is the standard. Because we don’t really want to impose anything on anyone, everyone is free to organise their development and prepare their conversations exactly how they want to. Still we see that TruQu has given us a framework for our development conversations. People do seem to prefer to use the tool to map their development and their progress in regard to their goals, as opposed to organising it and gathering information in another way. Now even more so, since the reflection module allows you to add your feedback and goals to reflection reports. You always have your development history on hand. Without TruQu you really would not know what you did last quarter. You just would not be able to recall! With TruQu it’s really easy to look back.”.