More than a quarter of Hyderabad’s population lives in informal settlements, yet the presence of nonprofits and public infrastructure in these areas remains minimal. At SAFA Society, we have worked on the socio-economic empowerment of women and youth in these communities since 2006. Starting with skill training, placements, and livelihoods, our training now also supports micro-entrepreneurship and self-help groups that bring women into the financial system. We also build community cadres who help their communities access social security entitlements, address civic issues, and ensure healthcare for all and that every child is in school.
SAFA’s work has grown steadily over the years. By 2022, we were running more than ten programmes, each of which had a manager who reported directly to the CEO, Rubina Nafees Fatima. While this flat organisational structure served us well when we were a smaller team, as SAFA grew, it presented its own challenges. When the team was smaller, responsibilities were shared and frequently shifted according to programme needs. However, when we grew to over 100 employees and expanded the number of departments and donors, this informal approach created inconsistencies in accountability, performance assessment, and career progression.
For example, when we received a new grant, people who were managing existing programmes would take on the responsibility of running the new initiative as well, and their existing work would suffer during the transition. At times, the HR manager took on programme implementation responsibilities, while communications and resource mobilisation responsibilities were assigned to team members who had the capacity for them.
Through this, we didn’t have a consistent system or approach to measure people’s performance. Promotions and increments depended on reputation and perceived commitment. As a result, there was no difference in compensation for those who performed well and for those who may have contributed less. This led to a sense of inequity and dissatisfaction among the top performers. Our team began to ask for a structured performance assessment, and our own internal review and a baseline assessment that we conducted with support from The GROW Fund anchored by EdelGive Foundation identified the same gap.
Bringing structure to performance management
We worked with an external consultant to develop a performance assessment framework that could bring more clarity to how we set performance expectations, assess our team’s contribution, and support their professional growth. We recognised that having clear KRAs (key result areas) and KPIs (key performance indicators) for each role would give us a consistent way to assess individual performance and identify team members who were demonstrating that they have the potential to take on more responsibility. This in turn would create a foundation for developing leadership internally. At SAFA, this is important for us, because people who have already worked in the organisation have a better understanding of what it takes to deliver programmes in the communities we work with. They understand local governance structures and how to engage and communicate with community members. This understanding is invaluable to our work.
One challenge was that the frameworks that consultants introduced had been designed for corporates and were resource-intensive. As a nonprofit, mobilising the additional resources that we needed to implement them was difficult. Instead, we adapted the frameworks to our own context of being a grassroots organisation that operates under different constraints.
Adapting performance frameworks to our context
A key adaptation was to move beyond a focus on quantitative outputs, and account for a reality in which achieving outcomes is not a linear process. For example, consider a team member whose KPI is to enroll 200 women in self-help groups. On paper, this can be seen as a straightforward target. However, in reality, achieving this goal depends on much more than the number of women enrolled. It involves building trust within the community and with the women, understanding the barriers that prevent women from enrolling, and adapting how one engages with women or communities based on their unique contexts. A team working in an area where women have already participated in community-based programmes may achieve its target more easily than a team that is working in a community where women have limited mobility or exposure to such programmes.
Therefore, we had to adapt the framework to assess quantitative targets as well as the process of achieving the defined targets. We had to account for the fact that if a team member only managed to enroll 100 women (or achieve 50 percent of their quantitative target), it did not necessarily mean that they had underperformed. We also needed to consider who was being reached and whether the process was inclusive, considering factors such as age, literacy, community background, and disability. Our aim was to create a system that holds people accountable for achieving results while also recognising the complex nature of the work that needs to be done to achieve meaningful outcomes.
We also had to make the framework manageable. When we first mapped roles and responsibilities, we identified more than 80 performance indicators, with each one seeming important in its own way. It quickly became clear that expecting people to track and perform against 80-plus indicators was neither practical nor useful. We then applied the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule and worked with our teams and consultants to identify the indicators that were most critical to each role, with a bias towards ensuring that key outputs are delivered at each step.
This meant that we rethought how certain indicators were measured. For instance, involving men is one way in which we can understand the extent to which we have community support, and their active participation was initially on our list of 80 indicators. However, most men are busy with their livelihoods, making direct participation difficult to track. Instead, we chose to take an indirect approach to measuring community support, by considering increased enrolment and attendance from women as a sign of family acceptance.
Taking this approach, we brought the list of 80 indicators down to six to eight key indicators per role, which helped us have focused performance conversations.
Making the system work for the team
As we adapted the framework to make it both relevant and manageable, we also had to build understanding and acceptance across the team.
Before this process, we did not have a way to review what was happening on the ground in a consistent manner, and ensure that those insights informed performance assessment. The new system brought greater accountability at every stage of work, with clearer expectations and checkpoints to validate quality. For example, in our skill development programme, mobilisers were now expected to validate candidates before passing them on to trainers, and managers could halt a candidate’s enrollment in the programme if the necessary checks had not been completed. For team members who were used to working with a lot of flexibility previously, this created some discomfort and initially, they resisted it.
We had anticipated that bringing in an entirely new system would create some friction and therefore chose to introduce it gradually. We began with our programme teams, held orientation sessions, and piloted it for three quarters, using each round to identify what was working and what needed to change. For instance, at first we placed responsibility for the quality of mobilisation largely on the mobiliser. Over the course of the pilot period, we revised this to distribute this responsibility across the mobiliser, the trainer, the MIS team, and the manager, each of whom had a defined role in reviewing, verifying, and approving a potential candidate for the skill development programme.
Over time, we have extended the system to the communications, resource mobilisation, HR, and MEL teams. We continue to refine it through regular reviews and training.
What we are still learning
The process of adapting these frameworks to our context continues today. We have become better at measuring outputs and holding teams accountable for achieving defined targets, but we are still figuring out how to assess performance on less tangible outcomes and on values that matter to us as an organisation.
At SAFA, we hold four values as an organisation: respect, teamwork, commitment, and quality. For us, achieving quantitative targets is only one part of the work; how we achieve them matters too. We have not yet found a way to measure performance against these values, because they are difficult to capture through quantitative indicators. We are continuing to explore how these qualitative dimensions can be incorporated into our performance assessment system without reducing them to numbers that do not necessarily capture the full picture.
For SAFA, strengthening organisational systems has been an ongoing process of learning and adapting approaches that work in the context of grassroots development. As we continue to invest in our organisational development, our focus remains on building our capabilities while staying responsive to the communities in which we work.
Disclaimer: SAFA’s capacity-building journey was supported by The GROW Fund, anchored by EdelGive Foundation.
—
Know more
- Learn more about what traditional outcome measurement misses about the reality of frontline work.
- Read more about why funders must invest in nonprofits’ people and processes.
