As AI continues its massive transformation of the workplace, performance management must evolve too. Sidonie Viala shares how 360Learning has moved beyond rigid metrics to embrace coaching, autonomy and real-time learning. By prioritising people over process, the company is building a culture where growth thrives, and performance becomes truly human-centred.
Data rules in the age of AI. We trust it for everything from growth targets, revenue forecasting and strategic decisions. Yet when it comes to performance management, our obsession with metrics is failing our most valuable asset: our people.
Early in my career, performance reviews felt like a formality: rigid forms full of abstract data, nervous conversations and little follow-up. Over the 20+ years I’ve been working in HR, at luxury brands and innovative tech companies, I’ve realised that performance only flourishes when people understand why they’re being evaluated, not just how. I now focus on going beyond the data and reimagine reviews as collaborative, forward-looking conversations, not backwards assessments.
Our “Convexity” culture is challenging traditional HR frameworks, instead providing people with the information, tools and objectives to perform and grow. Here’s how we changed our approach and built a modern HR strategy for the AI age.
Forget about managers: Be a coach
Managers have a bad reputation. Gen Z don’t want to be them, thinking it is too high stress and low reward, and online forums are filled with complaints about poor management. Our solution? The role of a leader is not to manage, but coach.
At 360Learning, coaches set the vision, strategy and objectives within their team. Every individual is then the owner of contributing to the objective through their individual scope. This radical level of ownership and autonomy isn’t for everyone, but for people who fit this culture, it’s often the best fit of their career. Research also shows that team members who receive coaching rather than traditional management report higher confidence levels, leading to improved satisfaction and retention rates.
Each team member has their own development plan, like a strategy plan a coach may develop for an athlete, and quarterly performance reviews are a chance to check in on this plan, see how someone is progressing and see how they can take it to the next level. The development plan may start with a conversation such as ‘What do you hope to achieve?’ and then build a strategy from them. Team members feel listened to and consulted, not dictated to.
Ditch the pressure and focus on support
Coaches are important for one-on-one learning. But we know that learning and training doesn’t happen in siloes. We ensure that our product, culture and HR practices all move in the same direction by creating an environment where everyone can learn, grow and thrive long term. Central to that is collaborative learning.
We want team members to feel like they can learn from one another and have a circle of people they can turn to for support, not feel pressured to reach a certain level or metric. We use our platform to enable every team member to share their expertise, learn from each other and do so on their own time – we don’t dictate people attend training on specific days or times, but enable them to drive their own learning. And often, learning from their peers is critical to enabling them to grow.
Feedback for personal growth
What keeps this rolling is our focus on transparency and accountability. We default to asynchronous work, not filling up the working week with multiple internal meetings. This means that when we do meet, we use that time very intentionally such as solving complex challenges in real time, brainstorming, or making a difficult decision.
We look to hire people who are naturally curious, ready to learn and adapt, and helping them to adopt a “growth mindset” within the business helps us all to become more productive and resilient.
This even includes giving team members the space to fail. Not everything goes right perfectly the first time, and mistakes happen, but this is where you learn. We encourage our team members to try, even if they don’t get it right, but with the right feedback and focus on growth and accountability, they gain real, concrete experience and the skills to move forward. This helps teams to feel more ownership of their careers and freedom to succeed, bringing better results that come from lived experience.
Taking a stand
For any business, its biggest investment is always its people. It can feel too easy to rigidly define how and when someone should be working. What we’ve found is that by enabling people with the right context, scope and objectives, they can have an exponential impact on the business.
In the race to adopt AI, HR has a critical role to play — not just in managing change, but in defining what kind of company we want to become. Do we want workplaces that monitor and optimise, or ones that trust and empower? We’ve made our choice: performance is human. And in the long run, that’s the best strategy we have.
Sidonie Viala is Chief People Officer at 360Learning
