How Wave increased performance review completion by 233% with Culture Amp

Wave is an award-winning national water retailer that helps more than 300,000 businesses navigate the open water market in England, offering water and wastewater services to small-and medium-sized businesses across the UK. Founded as a joint venture between two experienced water retailers in 2017, the company is committed to influencing change in the market.

Mandy Rutherford, the Learning & Development Manager at Wave, has been responsible for aligning the company’s employee training programs with its overarching goals, values, and vision since she joined in 2017. Drawing on her experience as a coach and mentor, she has always put a personal touch on employee development. But after years of paper-based feedback and inconsistent performance reviews, Mandy and her team realized it was time for a technology-forward approach that could enable a high degree of personalization. Wave turned to Culture Amp to achieve its business goals, facilitate employee feedback, and create a high-performance culture.

Challenge: Inconsistent feedback and limited performance visibility

Prior to implementing Culture Amp, Wave relied on paper feedback forms for annual performance reviews. Throughout the year, employees often misplaced their notes or couldn’t recall major milestones, leaving them with few insights to add. While managers and employees regularly exchanged praise, Wave didn’t have a systematic way to track it. As a result, managers struggled to conduct fully informed performance reviews that accurately reflected employee achievements.

"There was no easy way to audit an employee's performance or look at common themes. The manual process was slow and inconsistent, preventing us from comparing performances across functions in a timely fashion." – Mandy Rutherford, Learning & Development Manager, Wave

Upward feedback presented its own challenges: Only 30 to 50% of employees submitted feedback forms for their performance reviews. Despite a well-established culture of thoughtful and dedicated employees, the lack of communication was limiting meaningful opportunities to drive consistent performance and employee growth.

In short, Wave needed a new, seamless solution to make employee performance visible and actionable, with open lines of communication across the workforce.

Solution: Building a continuous, connected performance system

Wave understood that facilitating meaningful feedback was not only in sync with its core values, it was critical to creating a high-performance culture that would move the company forward. With a single, integrated system, employees could engage in meaningful conversations with managers, find purpose in how their work connected to company goals, and drive performance across the organization.

To get started, Wave used Culture Amp’s Goal Management feature to set objectives for the performance year and offer greater clarity to employees, managers, and leadership teams.

For simplified, technology-forward 1-on-1s, Mandy and her team turned to Culture Amp’s ​​performance management tools. Instead of collecting paper-based feedback once a year, managers used Culture Amp to:

• Schedule regular meetings with employees
• Track individual goals and key results
• Analyze employee wellbeing on a sliding scale
• Support continuous feedback from employees
• Engage team members in more personalized conversations

Culture Amp’s agenda-setting function enabled employees to set the framework for their 1-on-1 conversations with managers. Motivated by a strong sense of ownership, employees were now able to lead conversations that help them address their needs, align on expectations with their manager, and overcome challenges in real time.

"Culture Amp helps me ask the right questions, so our employees feel more comfortable. Now, a performance review feels less like a to-do list and more like a safe space.” – Mandy Rutherford, Learning & Development Manager, Wave

In turn, managers had actionable, data-informed processes in place to help drive employee performance and support their goals. Managers were now able to implement personalized development plans for each employee, reassess goals without waiting for a scheduled review, and participate in confidential conversations with agendas that equally supported both manager and employee needs.

To assess performance consistently and fairly, Wave also implemented Culture Amp’s Calibrations feature, allowing managers to:

• Customize a timeline for the company’s financial year from April to the end of March
• Measure how individual performance aligns with company values
• Analyze these values/results across the entire company
• Use the results to recommend employees for a performance-based bonus

"The Calibration feature has been amazing. I know my colleagues in HR and payroll have a much easier time making critical business decisions because they’re based on fairness and transparency.” – Mandy Rutherford, Learning & Development Manager, Wave

Results: A high-performance culture with a 100% employee feedback rate

With Culture Amp, Wave built a high-performance culture that empowers employees to speak up, define their own goals, and grow to be top performers.

The new culture marked an organizational change, but had significant impact on individual performance, as well. For instance, one employee, who had long demonstrated Wave’s values, struggled with confidence and anxiety, affecting their performance. Through thoughtful 1-on-1s that pinpointed areas of development and continuous, specific feedback, the employee made personal and professional breakthroughs and was ultimately promoted.

"We’ve set our performance goals in Culture Amp, so we know where we’re going. And we know the way to get there is by creating more open, transparent, and honest feedback. Culture Amp is helping us do that." – Mandy Rutherford, Learning & Development Manager, Wave

After implementing Culture Amp, Wave has come a long way from paper feedback forms, saving time with performance management tools that eliminate manual admin work and helping employees reach goals with actionable feedback.

The extent to which Wave employees have embraced the new culture is evident in the numbers:

• 75%+ of employees actively use Culture Amp on a weekly basis
• 100% of employees complete performance reviews – a 233% increase from the previous 30-50% completion rate
• 28 days are saved every performance cycle, with review completion times now taking two days rather than 30

Mandy and Wave’s leadership team still meet every two weeks to discuss the corporate goals they track through Culture Amp and determine whether the company is on track to achieve them. Employees, management, and company leaders all have a clear picture of the best next actions to take and how to get there. The culture of high performance and continuous feedback is now embedded across the organization.

"Now, everyone knows what the focus and direction is for the company. We can make sure that our corporate goals align with our employees’ goals, so they can understand that what they’re delivering works in tandem with what we’re doing at the leadership level.” – Mandy Rutherford, Learning & Development Manager, Wave

As the company continues to grow, the path forward is grounded in the goals, feedback, and transparency Mandy and her team have successfully built with Culture Amp.