by thepeopleplan | Jul 24, 2012 | Uncategorized
In my informal poll of employees and human resource professionals, most are not satisfied with the performance review process at their organization. The “annual review” is often the most dreaded event for employees and managers alike (hundreds of studies back up my personal polling results) go to this web-site. Don’t blame HR people—they have the best of intentions.
You see, employees crave performance feedback — really! (next week our blog post will focus on the value of feedback). The problem is that they are not getting enough between the “annual reviews” and that managers are not doing a very good job with the conversation during the annual review (or worse, the reviews are less frequent than annual or not at all).
Performance management is not just an annual event with a sit down conversation and simplifying an entire year of an employee’s conversation to a single number. The term performance management refers to all the efforts of peers, managers, measurement and systems that literally “manage” or guide an employee’s performance to do work that accomplishes an organization’s goals.
A terrific Aberdeen Group report found out what differentiated the “Best in Class” employers from the “Laggards” in the area of performance management. At Best in Class companies, 88% of managers reached agreement on performance goals between a manager and a worker (compared with 77% of others). Simple stuff that they should be doing, but how they did this was remarkable —83% of Best managers provided ongoing, informal feedback compared to 43% of the lowest performing companies.
Wait until you here the impact of having great managers that align and focus employee productivity—at Best in Class employers, these managers rated 71% of employees as exceeding expectations, compared to 20% of those employers with average performance to their industry and 13% of lower performing companies. (Also, 62% of employees at Best employers were engaged compared to 28% at laggards).
So this means that Best companies had 6 times are many Top Performers– no wonder they hit the ball out of the park compared to their competitors!
The study also found that there were reasons Best employers had more effective manager- employee conversations, as they provided tools and training for managers on how to engage workers and deliver effective performance reviews.
Compare this to an organization I recently worked with. The organization had no performance review process, so a new manager took the initiative to copy the one used by his wife’s employer. He then completed the reviews by himself, handed them to employees with the comment “let me know if you have any questions.” And yes, each employee was given a number, but no, the reviews never left his office (I do not believe the general manager or HR even knew about this). I definitely give him an “A” for effort—but put yourself in the mind of the employee—what must they be thinking?
Read the Aberdeen report, the Engagement Performance Equation
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Jun 21, 2012 | Uncategorized
Henry Ford said, “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”
When employees feel they are acquiring new skills, have development opportunities and a clear career path they are more likely to be engaged with their job and stay with the organization.
It is not enough to offer training programs, it is critical to communicate and provide appropriate and engaging learning and development opportunities to your employees (especially to Gen Y employees). If you identify high potential employees and systematically increase and broaden their skills, you will also do more to retain rising stars in your organization.
There are two types of development Job specific or in current knowledge area (depth) and new skills (breadth). Both are important but there are many reasons to expand the skill set of your employees to add new potential strengths:
- You don’t know what they might turn out to be great at, or interested in, beyond what their current role involves.
- You need to build a broader talent pool, a network of possible replacements that could be tapped as business needs change (or as key people leave the organization).
- You need to develop a strong learning culture, one where employees naturally seek out new skills and competencies with less explicit prodding from you or your HR partners.
- You want your people engaged and interested in the work and research shows that new, challenging assignments are one of the best ways to accomplish this.
(source: Taleo Research White Paper -Learning and Development: The New Business of Business Leaders)
Large employees are continuing to use training and career opportunities as part of their Total Rewards portfolio. A recent Aon Hewitt Total Rewards survey reports that over half of organizations focus on Career development (61%) and training/ learning (56%) to increase engagement and retention.
Image courtesy of PinkBlue at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Apr 19, 2012 | Uncategorized
Let us take a moment to describe what Human Resources Management really is.
Most people think of the administrative side of “HR,” that department that handles payroll and benefits and record keeping. While important, HR administrative does not make you any money (actually costs you money to maintain) and does not help you improve your business or profits.
The strategic side of Human Resources Management is defining and using processes to make sure you have the Right employees, doing the Right things, and that they do them Right. Then we need to keep these Right People engaged and reward them! This concept is really what Performance Management is all about (so much more than an “annual review”)- managing employee performance for organization goal achievement.
What your managers should be doing:
- Explain performance expectations to each employee (and how they can support organizational goals)
- Get employee commitment to meet expectations
- Measure performance and share with employees
- Give feedback and coach employees to improve performance
- Recognize and reward good performance
- Build a culture and a team that works together to achieve organizational goals
What your organization needs to define and communicate:
- Overall organizational strategy, values, culture
- Specific goals by department and job
- Performance expectations for each job (tied to organizational goals)
- Measurements of performance by individual, team, department, entire organization
- HR systems to assist with recruiting, selection, training, management for employee success
- Total Rewards strategy that attracts, retains and engages top performers
- Manager coaching and resources to do all of the above
The above elements are what all large organizations have – but small organizations can have these as well with the People Plan™ . This is a four-phase process to identify your custom People strategy and then implement People systems to allow your organization achieve its goals. Contact us to receive our free white paper on the 9 steps to build a People Plan.
Image courtesy of basketman at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Mar 4, 2012 | performance
Most managers have had this happen… a good employee seems to lose her enthusiasm. She tends to do just enough to “get by” – work is completely adequately and basically on time, but not to level she used to do.
Perhaps you consider there might be a personal reason causing this change, you hope this is just temporary, or you are just too busy to address right now. But then the employee’s performance starts to drop even more. You ask when a late task will be completed and get a curt response.
The employee starts to avoid you and you begin to treat her with impatience and frustration. You “walk on eggshells” around the employee and don’t know what you can say or do to make a change in this worsening dynamic.
Without addressing this issue directly with the employee – you have been there— it is unlikely things will get better. Often the relationship between you two deteriorates even more.
But how should you approach this now delicate situation? The solution—you know this, too—is that you must have a personal meeting with this employee.
We just had a client that had a very similar situation.
His manager careful considered the key performance issues and made a short list of clear desired behavior changes. After a one hour meeting, this employee is back on track. His response to the manager was “just tell me what I need to do and I will do it.”
Did it work? YES! For the two months since this meeting, he has improved his attitude, focused on results, and reached the agreed upon targets every week!
Here are a few tips to have this meeting to clear the air and re-engage the employee, if this is possible:
- Prepare what you want to say and write it down (and keep it brief)
- Don’t blame, make judgments or assume motivation
- Focus on a few key incidents (one or two issues)
- Explain the impact of the employee’s behavior on job performance and others
- Wait for employee’s explanation and response– spend 75% of the meeting listening and ask open ended questions
- Empathize with their situation
- Describe the changes required by the employee
- Get agreement from the employee to make the expected changes (with a time)
- End on a positive message, express confidence in the employee’s ability to make the changes
- Remember the military leadership guideline (4p’s)- Praise in public, pound in private
- Follow up with employee at agreed upon time—praise efforts to improve and/or reinforce need for required changes (if employee has not corrected performance issues)
Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Mar 30, 2011 | action plans, culture, performance
When I was in college, I was a member of the novice crew team, in a long skinny boat with 7 other women rowing on the Charles River.
The reason that inspirational posters feature a crew boat is that all the “oarsmen” need to row together at the same time towards the same goal. If you do not row with your teammates you either crash your oars or you can actually be thrown out of the boat!
Of course, this is an ideal analogy for employees in a work team, department and company. Your employees need to know where they are rowing and need to row together.
If you ask your employees, do they know how they can contribute to the monthly goal for the company (you do have them, right)?
How clearly do they know what to focus on every day when they report to work?
The solution is three –fold:
1) clearly outline what the organization wants to achieve,
2) break these down to individual responsibilities (and ideally measurable ones), and
3) communicate individual, team, department goals and results to employees on a regular basis
Hopefully your organization has long term goals (3-5 years from now), but these need to be broken down into annual goals, and quarterly action plans.
Quarterly action plans are essential because they list in detail what steps need to be achieved by whom and by when. Then the person accountable has tasks that drive their daily and weekly performance.
For example, your organization has a goal to get 50 new subscribers to sign up for your email newsletter by May 1. The head of marketing might have tasks that include a postcard mailing to current customers by 4/1 and training customer service representatives to ask every customer to subscribe to receive this newsletter. Customer service reps will be accountable (and measured) to achieve newsletter signups for 10% of their phone contacts per month.
Read more from local coach Rick Wallace (Next Level Coaching newsletter): Does your company execute well?
Employees like to feel that what they do contributes to a “greater” whole.
Spend some time and effort explaining the direction of the boat, how they contribute, and be sure to share successes and misses.
Image courtesy of hinnamsaisuy at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
