by thepeopleplan | Jan 5, 2013 | coaching, performance
Most small business/ small organization managers interact regularly with their staff members—assigning and coordinating work, answering questions and approving decisions, coaching on skills or techniques, “putting out fires,” and inquiring about progress and status of tasks you assigned.
This is an effective management technique, once dubbed “Management by Wandering Around” by Tom Peters and even given its own acronym MBWA.
The benefits:
Employees appreciate the wandering manager for her accessibility and just in time responses, and managers keep busy and deploy people and resources quickly.
How to improve:
However, MBWA tends to focus a manager’s time and staff’s attention on the daily tasks that consume the day—reacting and getting the job done. This often prevents managers from “getting to my list of projects”—our wish list of projects to improve our operations, customer care, revenue, and costs.
The solution:
In addition to ongoing feedback and coordination, also take time to debrief last year and plan for this one with each employee. Reviewing successes and planning for the coming year involves employees involves employees in creating a challenging and rewarding work plan that will increase their commitment and engagement.
There are several benefits of an annual review meeting with employees:
- Employees expect some type of “formal” review (in a sit down meeting, with written document to review)
- Builds trust and rapport with employees
- Allows employees an outlet to discuss accomplishments and concerns (last year) and job/ career goals (this year)
- Provides opportunity to recognize (and therefore reward with praise) an employee’s accomplishments
- Allows manager to find out what additional responsibilities and work would be challenging and interesting for an employee
- Discuss future department goals and how an employee’s job fits in
- Identify individual action plan items — items from manager’s project list that can be delegated and mutually decide a timeline and plan to accomplish
What should you discuss at this meeting? — here is a short list:
- What are the important achievements of the past year?
- What can be improved in your job to help you be more effective?
- How can I as your supervisor assist you?
- What skills or knowledge do you want to develop in the next year? How can this be accomplished?
So go ahead and schedule a sit down with everyone this month—
it can be lunch in your office, or off site for coffee, or what works with your style.
Your employees will appreciate your time and attention.
As an added benefit- you can delegate some of your “to do’s” to finally get to that wish list this year.
If you finished half your wish list — what could you celebrate at next year’s meeting?
Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Sep 21, 2012 | performance
95 days until Christmas…
If you are like most small business owners and managers, you started out 2012 with awesome plans:
We want to grow our business, install that new computer program that will save us time, survey our customers and improve the service they get, (insert your goals here)!
How did these work out? Did your company move those “rocks” to improve your revenue, profits, customer satisfaction? Or did you and your staff get bogged down in the day to day of the business?
First, don’t despair—you still have a bit more than 90 DAYS left this year to work on one TOP ROCK before the holidays.
Secondly, don’t blame yourself, blame your People systems. (Most) employees do not miraculously take your good idea, find a solution to best achieve the goal, and the run with the ball until the touchdown is scored. (If you have someone that does this, congratulations!)
The solution:
Change your Culture to one where your People focus on doing more than just their daily “job”:
How:
You need more than a one day strategic planning retreat or manager training, you need to implement the People systems that:
- focus the entire organization on priority goals
- identify the ROCKS it will take to achieve those goals (one per quarter)
- assign specific action steps to individual employees (delegate!)
- coordinate and monitor everyone’s efforts and deliverables to achieve those important ROCKS
- hold people accountable to complete their assigned responsibilities
- learn and improve the process
Most employees (and managers and owners) find themselves on the hamster wheel each day, taking care of customers and having meetings and putting out fires. Then each quarter passes while we wistfully think about all those projects on our “wish list.”
You have to expect every employee to contribute to implementing projects and solutions for process improvement. You need a management process and rhythm to let people know “what else” they can do and get them doing it.
How do you start?
Step One- Define your Strategy and Goals- Mastering the Rockefeller Habits is a good resource to identify your 5 year strategy and one year goals.
Step Two- Design, Define and Implement the 6 steps above that will change your organization’s habits to align everyone with achieving your goals
If you are in the Buffalo area, we are offering a three night workshop (Oct 3, Oct 17, Nov 14) to develop your People Plan™ that will put People systems in place to achieve your ROCKS.
Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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 | 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
