CASE STUDY
How Transylvania College
Uses Mirro to Modernize Performance Management
Industry: Education
Company Size: 170
About: Transylvania College is a student-centred school, offering a complete educational path.
Transylvania College is a student-centered school offering a complete educational path from nursery to high school. The international school is accredited by the Romanian Ministry of Education and an Accredited Member of the Council of British International Schools (COBIS). Transylvania College is a community centered around teaching, caring, and connecting.
Transylvania College’s culture
Catrinel Grigorovici, Head of Human Resources, describes Transylvania College as a learning community, always trying to adopt innovative solutions. As a result, the school ended up using Mirro, which is now embedded into their culture.
The business challenge
Before using Mirro, Transylvania College's HR and management teams managed feedback and writing performance reviews through Excel files, Google Docs, and even physical documents that they had to scan afterward. Gathering all the information that was scattered in various places was highly
time-consuming.
Transylvania College's main challenge was not having all the information centralized in a single digital system, resulting in a lack of transparency and alignment.
Another pain point was the need for more visibility over the interactions between teachers and students, lesson feedback, and performance evaluations. The school also sought innovative ways to integrate its values and competencies into its culture.
Transylvania College had straightforward objectives:
- Have all the HR processes in a single software solution;
- Have transparent and traceable lesson observations and feedback;
- Have easy access to evaluations through a modern performance management process;
- Encourage and give more structure to the interactions between members of staff members, teachers, and support staff.
The solution: Mirro
After working for several years in the corporate world,
Catrinel Grigorovici was well aware of the benefits of performance management software. She was committed to finding the right solution to satisfy an international school’s needs, which are very different from the ones of a company. They wanted a flexible and customizable HR software system that could adjust the performance management process to the academic environment.
Mirro was the obvious choice for Transylvania College because of its easy-to-use and customizable features. Additionally, our friendly and responsive customer success team greatly influenced their decision to adopt Mirro.
After a smooth onboarding process that took less than one month, 100% of Transylvania College members started using Mirro.
Mihaela
Teacher of English at Transylvania College
Mirro caught my interest right from the start, after the first login. The app gave us an extra sense of belonging to the community. We finally had a place where all colleagues could be grateful to each other and give feedback after classes or after working on a project together. Mirro helped us solidify our relationships.
Catrinel Grigorovici
Head of Human Resources
The adoption decision weighed heavily on the quick responses and friendly interaction with the customer success team. Moreover, we are constantly working with the team to see how we can integrate a tool like Mirro into an international school and what are the best ways to develop a culture of feedback and value added to the community. Step by step, we are building a scalable process that other schools can adopt too.
Transylvania College’s
values chart
Based on public recognition
provided in Mirro
The culture outcome
When Transylvania College implemented Mirro, the focus was on performance management and community building. Mirro's social component encourages open communication and makes team members feel part of a community. Our platform did not only create a desire to give feedback freely and show gratitude but also to "be more playful with each other in terms of interactions," as Catrinel shared with us.
Due to clear evaluation criteria and detailed feedback from peers, supervisors can now make informed decisions and provide insightful recommendations. Moreover, the evaluations are now correlated with objectives, which gives the team more structure and clarity.
In an international school, observing each other's lessons and giving feedback afterward is a key process for evaluating teachers' performance. Before Mirro, these observations were kept in Word files or physical documents. In one school year, over 500 lesson observations were registered in Mirro, an excellent system for improving teaching and learning.
Mirro has also helped Transylvania College grow a culture of recognition. The team was pleased to see that the auxiliary staff, such as front-desk receptionists, were also receiving a lot of appreciation, which made them feel included and more engaged. Now, 26% of Transylvania College’s members are kudos drivers.
On average, each team member received at least one public recognition per month, placing Transylvania College way above market average, where less than 35% of employees receive praise at least once per quarter. Through Mirro, the organization constantly encourages public recognition, with supervisors modeling this behavior and utilizing various
gamification methods.
Ioana
Teacher of Maths at Transylvania College
The points accumulated through Mirro greatly impacted us as they allowed us to act immediately and validate our colleagues’ work or interventions. The Mirro points are awarded based on the school’s 10 competencies, encouraging us to solidify those skills. It was a good way for new colleagues to learn about these competencies. With the help of Mirro, we received appreciation from both superiors and peers, so our self-confidence had only to gain.
In a nutshell, Mirro helped Transylvania College with the following:
- Bring all the HR processes into a single software solution;
- Save massive amounts of time on collecting feedback, leave requests, and performance reviews;
- Implement a successful performance management process adjusted to an international school’s needs;
- Improve lesson observations through easy feedback sharing;
- Have complete visibility over objectives, progress, and evaluations;
- Create a strong sense of community and belonging.
What’s next for Transylvania College
After Mirro's successful implementation and adoption, Transylvania College plans to refine the performance management process, make custom evaluation forms based on teachers' competencies, and adjust the OKR framework to a school's needs. The team also looks forward to implementing the Leave & Attendance module, saving them massive amounts of time worth of HR administration work.
Mirro has helped Transylvania College modernize and streamline HR processes that are still done the old-fashioned way in most of today’s schools. This partnership has laid the groundwork for the possible adoption of our product even in public schools. Transylvania College aims to bring Mirro to the whole group of schools under their umbrella: Spark School and Școala Încrederii.
About Mirro
Mirro.io enables high-growth SMEs to build transparent and thriving workplace cultures that foster employee well-being and improve talent retention. Our performance management platform helps organizations overcome hybrid workplace disengagement by encouraging a sense of purpose and stimulating social sharing and community belonging around the globe. Teams and individuals that use Mirro are happier, highly engaged, and more productive.
As a user-friendly and highly social platform, Mirro drives more than 5k monthly interactions between team members through recognition, OKRs, continuous feedback, and meaningful performance conversations.
Innovative companies like eMAG, Tazz, Hochland, E Co., and noissue. use Mirro to empower their teams and nurture healthy, solid work relationships.
Just like Transylvania
College, you too can build
meaningful experiences
for your people
