Built the people and performance systems a South African renewable energy firm needed to scale

Our client is a renewable energy firm in South Africa. It began as a lean, high-agency start-up, where a small team owned whatever needed doing and got on with it.

Growth changed its shape. Functional teams formed and kept growing, roles became more specialised, and the firm turned into a more structured organisation. The habits that served it as a start-up could no longer carry it alone.

Scaling changed what the firm needed from its people systems. In a start-up, much of how work gets done lives in people's heads. Direction is set in conversation, everyone knows who is doing what, and new hires learn by sitting next to someone who has done it before.

That rarely survives the move to functional teams. As teams multiply, ownership tends to blur at the edges between functions. People work hard without seeing how their work connects to the strategy. Each hire is recruited and onboarded a little differently, and key documents drift into personal folders and inboxes. None of it is dramatic, but together it slows a growing business down.

To keep scaling, the firm needed:

• Clearer ownership, roles and performance expectations across functions
• A stronger link between company strategy and individual performance
• Repeatable recruitment, onboarding and management routines
• Structured ways of working, information governance and systems that could scale

Working with the CEO and leadership team, we designed and embedded a single people, performance and productivity system. Instead of fixing one gap at a time, we treated hiring, onboarding, performance and day-to-day work as parts of one whole.

We started with performance. We designed the firm's first formal performance framework, with reviews twice a year and 360° feedback, so each person hears from the colleagues they work with, not only from their manager.

Next, we tied that framework to strategy. We cascaded the company's strategy into quarterly, monthly and weekly priorities, so every team could see how its week moved the plan forward.

We ran recruitment end to end, from writing job descriptions to assessing candidates. Then we designed onboarding journeys with 30-day workplans, giving new joiners a clear plan for their first month.

Finally, we gave the business the structure to run day to day:

• An integrated digital workplace and information governance system, so documents live in one governed place
• Regular management huddles to keep leaders aligned
• Standard operating procedures (SOPs) that set down how work gets done
• Governance routines that keep the whole system running

The firm now runs its people, performance and productivity through one system, built for the organisation it has become. Ways of working have improved significantly across the business.

Everyone in a formal review cycle

Every employee is now covered by a formal performance and review cycle, with expectations linked to the company's strategy.

Feedback from all sides

The 360° feedback mechanism gives people a voice in each other's reviews and has lifted engagement across the team.

A clear first month for new joiners

Onboarding journeys with 30-day workplans give new joiners a defined plan for their first month in the business.

For a firm moving from start-up to structured organisation, the aim was never more process for its own sake. It was a system that lets the business keep growing while every person knows what they own, what is expected of them and how their work moves the strategy forward.