Performance reviews and management have been the biggest chores for HR professionals for decades, slowing down work and always seeming to create more clutter than they do results. But what if there was a way to approach performance management that actually supported employees, exposed growth opportunities, and built a business’s workforce rather than just stagnate it?
This is the same question HR leaders of AMC wanted to answer during their presentation at SPARK Talent 2026. Stephanie Garcia, Manager of theatre learning & development, and Adam Murphy, Director of people analytics and systems for AMC took the stage together to share how the movie-mogul company has been changing their approach to performance management, and how it’s shaped their workforce.
Here are the biggest takeaways from their discussion:
The Whole Person Philosophy
With work always piling up, it’s easy to forget about seeing beyond the office, but AMC’s success stems from seeing every employee, not as just their work, but as their whole personage; understanding their hobbies, their family, and their needs beyond the workplace.
Stephanie explains, “we created an ecosystem that truly is one that’s built around all of the things that can work together to ensure that we’re coming up with a solution that can be not only here today but be able to continue on after the event or the initial launch has happened. Our ecosystem really focuses on capabilities and that development at an individual level. “
Better Attention Means Less Turnover
It’s infinitely harder to build a personalized ecosystem for performance management if your employees are constantly rotating in and out the door. Retention allows HR leaders to actually take the time to understand their workforce, and prioritizing it is another key to success for AMC.
Adam stated, “We focused in on this position [with employees] and realized that’s where we need to redesign experience, we need to understand the employee journey. [So] we invested in both traditional total rewards, we invested in technology built around experience. We looked at some of the exercises for removing that friction and making a better work experience for them.”
“And as a result now, three years later, turnover has dropped to twenty-two percent.”
Cultivating an Exceptional Environment
For true success in developing performance management, employers need a solid foundation. AMC took time to look at what was causing the biggest disruption in their workforce, and what they found was that the environment of each theatre or office was the deciding factor for whether or not their HR leaders would succeed.
“Our environment is mainly our theaters, right? We needed to know what’s happening in that environment,” Stephanie explained.
“We wanted to know, were there physical barriers that were intruding if we wanted to put a new initiative out? Is there something with the workflow or the processes that they have already in place there about work scheduling, or perhaps that we have a lot of minors?”
Asking the right questions, and understanding who your employees are, the environment they’re in, and maintaining proper retention allow AMC, and can allow your HR leaders, to build a performance management system that actually works.