How HHI Rebuilt Performance Reviews from the Ground Up with Miter Performance

HHI Corporation is a federal-focused construction and manufacturing firm delivering specialized infrastructure, fabrication, and engineered solutions for defense and industrial clients nationwide. The company has been in business for 55 years. Regina Hokanson, CEO, and Rachel Roper, CFO, decided to redesign their review from the ground up in Miter Performance, bringing in an HR consultant, Naomi Jackson, Founder of Plumb HR, to help lead it.

Key Takeaways:

• HHI’s performance reviews had become long, wordy, and disengaging. The process became ineffective for employees, managers, and HR alike.
• Working with Plumb HR, HHI rebuilt its review process from the ground up in Miter Performance, built around HHI’s own roles, culture, and what the company wanted to measure.
• The new review splits into two sections: values and KPIs, each on its own rating scale, so intangible culture measures are tracked separately from job performance.
• Questions are tailored by level: individual contributors, single-team managers, and multi-team managers each get a lens built for their role.
• Managers are guided to complete each rating in about 90 seconds rather than write paragraph-long answers, so the new review moves at a pace people can keep up with.
• HHI is building toward four review touchpoints a year to accurately capture employee performance.
• HHI’s rebuilt review process went from concept to launch in about two weeks.

The challenge: A time-consuming review process 

Before Miter, HHI ran long performance reviews with around 15 questions, most of them open-ended and expecting paragraph answers. Completing a single review took employees a long time, and getting managers to engage with it was harder still. The lengthy review process resulted in a breakdown in effectiveness in using them to help employees plan their next step.

Company culture is central to how HHI operates, but the old review gave the company no real way to measure it. Values are harder to put a number on than whether a task got finished, and the open-ended format made them difficult to measure in a way people could easily engage with.

The solution: Rebuilding performance from the ground up

HHI had been moving pieces of its operations onto Miter, starting with expense management, then HR, then payroll. But performance was different. Simply moving the old review into a new system wasn’t going to fix what wasn’t working. Because HHI didn’t have a review process that worked for them, Miter’s team recommended an HR consultant to help build one suited to HHI’s needs.

Naomi worked alongside Regina and Rachel to reset the scope of the review, moving it away from trying to measure everything toward measuring what mattered most to HHI, then helped build the new process in Miter Performance. The turnaround was fast, going from concept to launch in about two weeks.

Outcome #1: A review built around HHI’s own values

HHI split its review cycle into two distinct sections: values and KPIs, one on a five-point scale and the other on a four-point scale. The values section measures who someone is on the job, while the KPI section measures how well they do it. Keeping them on separate scales means a strong values score can’t offset weak job performance, or the other way around. The questions also change based on where someone sits in the organization, with a different lens built for individual contributors, single-team managers, and multi-team managers, so the review reflects what success looks like at each level.

For Regina, that focus on values reflects what she sees as the core of the business.

Outcome #2: A review pace people can keep up with

By the time performance reviews launched, employees already trusted Miter. They’d seen meaningful gains from the expense management, HR, and payroll rollouts that came before it, and expected another successful launch. The faster pace showed almost immediately. Employees appreciated it, and so did managers.

To keep reviews fast, HHI also rebuilt the questions themselves. Open-ended prompts that once left people staring at a blank box were replaced with short, guided ones to help them get started. Managers got a clear standard to work from:

The review also runs the same way for everyone. Every one of HHI’s roughly 200 employees answers the same core questions, whether they work in finance, the field, or the shop. “It wasn’t just finance-based, it wasn’t just field-based or shop-based,” Rachel says. “It was literally the same questions, and we were doing it ourselves too, so we knew what each employee was going through.”

Outcome #3: One record employees and managers can build on

HHI already runs its annual review each April, timed to inform raises that follow in June. Beyond that, the goal is to build out enough touchpoints across the year to get a fuller, ongoing picture of how things are going, not just one snapshot.

As that data builds up, Regina wants it to become an aggregate dashboard, something that shows at a glance who’s at a level one, two, or three across the company, something a manager can open before a new team member ever shows up on a job, and something that can support real decisions about bonuses and raises. Rachel already sees where the new data is headed for compensation. “If you set a goal that you’re going to turn in your month-ends on time for 10 out of 12 months and you don’t, that’s part of your bonus structure,” she says. “You’ve controlled your own bonus. It’s not on me.”

The impact: A foundation to grow on

The shift from a laborious form difficult to read to one built around HHI’s own roles and values has already changed how the company talks about performance. Part of that shift comes down to trust. Rachel has worked through four different HR and payroll systems in her 18 years at HHI, including one the company abandoned mid-implementation, and she isn’t shy about which one has earned the company’s confidence.

As for their honest feedback on Miter, Regina doesn’t hesitate. “Miter’s a great partner to work with,” Regina says. “They listen, they’re responsive, they’re creative, and I get the feeling that ‘no’ is not an acceptable answer in their vocabulary.” Part of their trust in Miter comes from how responsive Miter has been when HHI needed changes, from reopening review cycles to adjusting deadlines mid-launch. 

With Miter, HHI has a performance process built for how a 200-person federal contractor works: fast enough for managers to keep up with and detailed enough to help the team build the next chapter of HHI’s culture.