It’s hard to believe that the first quarter of the year is over already! Didn’t we just ring in the New Year, make (and probably break) our new year’s resolutions, and set our annual goals? Although it may seem like we just finished setting goals, now is the time to revisit them for a few reasons.
In organizations, most of us begin our fiscal year with some form or another of goal setting. As people managers, we hold a meeting with each of our team members to discuss what their top priorities should be. Some of us request that each team member come prepared with their ideas of their goals. We come to some form of consensus and enter those goals into our performance management system.
So you've created great goals with pathways to achieve them for 2016 for all of your team members. You've also accounted for potential unexpected VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) events that your team members may or may not experience during the course of your company's fiscal year.
At some point in any Talent leader’s career it’s likely they will be tasked with making a major change to any one of their Talent Management processes and systems ranging from talent acquisition to on-boarding through to succession planning, and the idea of making such a major change can be a daunting one! One particular process that is under a lot of scrutiny right now at many organizations is the performance management process and the systems that support them.
These days, in the world of HR and Talent Management, "employee engagement" is a hot topic. Although the idea of engagement certainly isn’t new, the term is definitely being used and sometimes misused a lot! With growing trends around new approaches to performance management, the concept of keeping employees engaged is a big focus for many organizations. So what exactly is engagement, and why does it matter? If people are getting their work done each day, isn’t that enough? The short answer to that question is, nope! Simply put, employees who are not actively engaged impact the bottom line.
Ask most HR people why their company uses a performance rating scale and you will likely get a response such as, "Without ratings, how will people know where they stand?" or "How will we justify increases if there are no ratings?" or even, "It’s just the way it has always been done here." Labeling employees with a rating is a practice that has been in place for a long time at most companies and more times than not, performance ratings are linked to other processes such as salary increases,
The other day I received an email from a friend that stated, "Had my performance review today, apparently I ‘Meet Expectations’; I went home and started applying for new jobs." This may seem like a drastic reaction to being told that you meet expectations, but unfortunately, responses like this are not uncommon. Labeling people with a rating, whether good, bad or neutral, can cause a negative reaction and can actually have the opposite effective of what was intended.
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” There’s a reason why this adage has stood the test of time. By only meeting someone’s immediate need – food – you are disregarding the fact that they will need to continue to eat every single day. If they aren’t given the tools, training and support they need to catch their own fish when they get hungry, then they might as well be, well, a fish out of water.
In my last blog, I encouraged readers to visit their goal progress so far for the year and to evaluate where their time is being spent. Hopefully you have done this yourself, and have analyzed how you are using your time and have identified any barriers that may be getting in the way of your highest priorities. Perhaps you are one of the lucky few who are 100% on track with your goals and every day, you are able to spend the majority of your time in high payoff activities.
Everyone knows the problems with the current state of performance management. Performance reviews are dreaded by employee and manager alike, they happen far too infrequently and any feedback is soon forgotten, until the annual performance review cycle starts up again the next year. But rather than continuing the vicious cycle, companies can disrupt performance management by adopting the solutions that enable managers to deliver useful, targeted feedback year round.