Performance Management Should Begin Before We Hire Someone

When most of us hear the term “performance management,” we think of performance appraisals, mentoring, employee learning and development—all of the things that happen well after we hire people into our organizations.

But savvy employers know that truly effective performance management starts before we hire someone. It starts with finding and recruiting the right people.

Who are the right people? Danny Gutknecht, co-founder and CEO of Pathways, offers this insightful definition: “individuals whose attitudes, behaviors, mindsets and goals are closely aligned with those of your organization.” Gutknecht also advises employers aiming to raise the bar on their performance management to get a clear picture of what makes their best people a great fit for the organization, then hire others like them.

The upshot of Gutknecht’s counsel is clear: hire individuals who are closely attuned to your organization and your best people, and their performance will be in sync with your needs, goals and mission. As a result, your performance management won’t require a lot of heavy lifting—i.e., you won’t need to do extensive behavioral and performance modification or costly replacement of these individuals. The performance management you provide will be largely positive and developmental rather than punitive and correctional.

So how do you go about finding people who are closely aligned to your organization and who match up to your best people? For many employers, talent assessment tools are the answer.

There are a multitude of assessment tools available to today’s employers. Gutknecht’s company, for example, conducts Essence MiningTM to uncover the intrinsic nature and key characteristics of an organization and its people. Harrison Assessments and Shadowmatch USA, among others, focus on behavioral tendencies and competencies to predict performance. Still other tools are personality-based.

Finding the right assessment solution for your organization is, of course, a matter of fit. It has to meet your needs and goals but it also has to suit your company culture.

A recent article on the SHRM website, “Testing for Talent: An HR Case Study,” presents an interesting case study of the Barnum Financial Group and its use of an assessment tool to guide its coaching, communications and teamwork initiatives. The article also offers four helpful tips (which we’ve paraphrased below) to anyone searching for the right assessment tool for their organization:

1.     Be precise about what you want to accomplish.

2.     Forge a rough consensus among management about the tool that best fits the culture of your organization.

3.     Complete the assessment yourself to gauge its accuracy.

4.     Keep budget in mind, as you’ll need to make both an initial investment and an ongoing one.

Without question, performance management encompasses all of the activities we engage in after hiring an individual—conducting performance reviews, providing coaching, delivering developmental opportunities, and all the rest. But if we’re wise, we’ll remember that the most effective performance management actually begins before any of these activities take place. It begins with making the right recruiting and hiring decisions.

~

To read more about our thoughts on performance management, click here to download our whitepaper, “From Dread to Moving Ahead — Take the Pain Out of Performance Management.”

The Case for More Frequent Performance Reviews

Aubrey Daniels, the clinical psychologist who is often called “the father of performance management,” believes the performance appraisal process is flawed and in need of radical change at many organizations today. The biggest problem, he believes, is that reviews happen too infrequently.

He’s right on both counts.

To drive results-oriented performance, we need to change how we conduct reviews, which we’ve written about previously. Please click the images below to read these posts.

We also need to make frequent, one-on-one meetings with employees the backbone of performance management. But this is exactly the challenge for many of the managers we speak with—they have no idea how to squeeze recurring meetings into their already hectic schedules.

In a Forbes article titled, “The Secret To Effective One-On-One Meetings With Direct Reports,” leadership coach and author Kristi Hedges summarizes some of the key roadblocks that keep managers from actually holding more frequent performance-related discussions with their direct reports. These roadblocks include managers’ uncertainty about how to structure such meetings … how to ensure these meetings are productive … and how to avoid turning them into one-way delegation sessions. Another concern is that these meetings will uncover “simmering conflicts or complaints” that will require significant time and effort to resolve.

All are legitimate concerns. However, Hedges offers managers helpful insights on how to implement and make the most of more frequent one-on-one meetings. Her tips include: create an actual schedule and a structure for these meetings; discuss the employee’s needs and issues as well as your own; and be sure to manage accountabilities.

One of the key aspects of frequent performance-oriented meetings is that they should not be heavy-duty critique sessions. Good people don’t need to be micromanaged. (A recent Business Insider article highlights the dangers of micromanagement, for those interested.) These get-togethers should be more about discussing employees’ needs and concerns—for instance, the things that may be getting in the way of carrying out their day-to-day responsibilities

Employees want and need our assistance to achieve their full potential, and this is precisely where more frequent performance-oriented discussions can help.

Of course, this doesn’t mean your people don’t want to speak with you or hear your feedback on a regular basis. In fact, they do. Research has long shown that employees want clear communication from their managers regarding what’s expected of them (responsibilities), what they’re doing right (recognition), what they’re doing wrong (constructive criticism), and what they need to do to advance their careers (development and career guidance).

When you think about it, the “I don’t have time” argument against more frequent performance meetings doesn’t really hold water. The truth is we can’t afford to not make the time.

~

To read more about the power and potential of sound performance management, click here to download our whitepaper, “Bridge the Gap Between Your Performance Reviews and Employee Development—or Both Are Primed To Fail.”

Meeting Employees’ Needs: Culture Management, Engagement, and Preventable Turnover

One of the primary objectives of performance reviews is to ensure that needs are being met—departmental needs, functional needs, organizational needs, and employees’ needs. And there’s the rub. Too often, employees’ needs are overlooked during performance reviews.

Managers focus on other aspects of performance when conducting reviews: whether goals were achieved or not, an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, skill gaps that must be filled, and the like. However, as a recent Harvard Business Review blog post illustrates, it’s a mistake to overlook whether employees’ needs are being met.

In “The Power of Meeting Your Employees’ Needs,” authors Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath reveal the bottom-line benefits of meeting employees’ basic needs, which fall into four categories: 1) renewal (physical); 2) value (emotional); 3) focus (mental); and 4) purpose (spiritual).

Schwartz and Porath write that when any one of these basic needs is being met employees “report a 30% higher capacity to focus, a nearly 50% higher level of engagement, and a 63% greater likelihood to stay at the company.”

(no surprise that #TalentManagement, #EmployeeEngagement, & #Retention are perennial trending topics in HR social media space)

And this positive impact is cumulative, rising with each additional need that gets satisfied. “When all four needs are met, the effect on engagement rises from 50% for one need to 125%.”

The authors conclude: “Rather than trying to forever get more out of their people, companies are far better served by systematically investing in meeting as many of their employees’ core needs as possible, so they’re freed and fueled to bring the best of themselves to work.”

But how do you know what your employees’ needs are? There’s really only one way to be sure. You have to ask them—and the performance review is the perfect time to do so. But this requires managers to engage in a true two-way dialogue with each of their direct reports, not just a one-way discourse on how they’re rating employees. It means being attentive and discussing employees’ needs with respect. It also means managers must be willing to do two key things: first, to give real thought and consideration to what employees are saying; and second, to follow up on these discussions, taking action in a timely manner to get employees’ needs met when appropriate.

Discussing employees’ needs—and what you can do to meet them—not only helps you reap the benefits cited by the authors of the HBR post but it also shows employees that you value them and care about helping them achieve their goals. If you want to create and sustain a high-performance work environment, this kind of open commitment to employees is crucial.

Oh My God! They Killed the Performance Appraisal!

Move over Kenny of South Park. The humble performance appraisal is being killed off more frequently than you ever imagined. At least, that’s what some pundits and bloggers would have us believe.

One recent example—a post on the HRbartender blog, “Here’s What Happens When You Kill the Performance Appraisal.” Despite its misleading headline, the post actually explains how the popular restaurant chain, Texas Roadhouse, transformed its performance review process. Repeat—transformed its performance review process. Not killed.

Texas Roadhouse calls its new performance appraisal process GPS, which stands for Growth, Plan and Support. The purpose of the new process, according to the HRbartender post, “is to be forward-looking instead of backward.” Performance appraisals now take place 30 days before or after an employee’s anniversary date and they focus on three issues: 1) Career opportunities employees would like in the future. 2) How they will prepare for those future opportunities. 3) The resources they need to be successful. Texas Roadhouse also de-coupled the review process from merit increases.

We have one word for Texas Roadhouse: bravo! This is a company that understands one of the fundamental precepts of performance appraisals—that they must be done in a way that best fits their corporate culture.

One of the things we like most about the company’s approach is that it put together a team of managers to develop the new process rather than simply following the lead of an executive or HR director. Involving employees (in this case, managers) in major decisions and organizational change of this kind helps create better, more meaningful results—and it does wonders for engagement levels.

For Texas Roadhouse, it also helped them better address employee development, which is one of the main objectives of any performance appraisal process worth its salt. Clearly, Texas Roadhouse understands the importance of truly sound performance management and how appraisals and employee development are tied to it. Their new appraisal process isn’t the only way to accomplish this but it’s one way to do it, and it’s obviously better suited to its organization’s culture.

Yes, forward-looking performance appraisals like those instituted by Texas Roadhouse are an invaluable component of excellent performance management. But for many employers, a “review” component (in which a manager summarizes what was good and not-so-good about an employee’s performance over the last several months) is equally valuable. Similarly, separating reviews from merit increases makes sense for some employers but not for others. It’s about doing what’s right in the context of your culture.

Once again, bravo to Texas Roadhouse. But we have to give the sensationalistic headline writers at HRbartender a “thumbs down.” They got the story wrong. Like Texas Roadhouse, most employers are not killing performance reviews. They’re transforming them. That’s the real story.

User Experience—the “New Battleground” for HR Solution Providers

When we launched Reviewsnap one of our main objectives was to deliver one of the easiest-to-use performance management solutions in the entire industry. A June 24 article on TLNT.com reminded

us just how important—and how difficult—this objective can be.

In “Tech Insights: The Trick in Making Easy-to-Use User Interfaces,” author David Creelman asks HR professionals the question: If a 5-year-old can master an iPad, why can’t a 45-year-old Director of Operations figure out the performance management software? The answer, he writes, is that “designers of iPad software have been a lot more concerned with the user experience than have the designers of HR tools.”

Sadly, Creelman’s criticism of the state of HR tools isn’t unjustified. Some HR solutions are downright user-unfriendly. The good news is providers know there’s a problem—and they’re doing something about it.

Last October, HR industry analyst, Josh Bersin, wrote an article for Forbes titled, “The 9 Hottest Trends In HR Technology ... And Many Are Disruptive.” In it, he states that vendors “are focused on building ‘systems of engagement’ rather than ‘systems of record.’ This is not only focused on making software easier to learn: it’s focused on making it possible for employees to use these systems themselves, effectively freeing up hundreds of HR staffers who do administrative work.”

This article shows that providers are indeed working to raise the bar on the user experience. It also shows that companies are shifting to cloud-based HR solutions, in large part, to gain an improved user experience; according to Bersin, 40 percent of companies that want to replace or revamp their HR infrastructure want cloud-based systems. We’ve even seen evidence in the marketplace that non-cloud solutions are being redesigned to mimic the simplicity and intuitiveness of SaaS alternatives.

As Bersin notes, user experience is the “new battleground.” It’s where designers of HR tools are now waging their competitive wars. At Reviewsnap, we know firsthand how challenging it can be to create a user interface that actually is easy-to-use. Every organization has a unique set of needs and goals, along with a different definition of “easy to use.” This is precisely why we built our solution with the simplest possible interface—and why we made it so flexible and easy to tailor. If you read our case studies and testimonials, you’ll see that nearly every one of our clients describe our solution with terms such as “user-friendly,” “easy to understand” and “easy to navigate.” We’re proud of these endorsements. But we know we have to earn them again and again, day in and day out.

User experience isn’t a one-and-done deal—and this is where we believe many solutions providers stumble.

Easy-to-use interfaces are only part of the total user experience. Implementation, customization, ongoing support and a host of other elements make up the user experience. Prior to and during implementation, for example, providers must conduct ample due diligence, making certain their solutions will function exactly the way clients need them to. And after the solution is up and running, the due diligence should continue. Weeks or even months down the road, the client’s definition of “ease of use” may have shifted slightly or morphed into something else entirely based on changing needs or market conditions. In other words, ease-of-use can become a moving target.

Creating a simple user interface and a great user experience is tricky stuff. But it’s absolutely essential for business tools, especially those designed to serve today’s busy, often overburdened HR departments. In our experience, we’ve found that communication and collaboration with clients—both before and after a purchase has been made—are the secrets to delivering on the ease-of-use promise.