A Players or Top Guns: Call Them What You Want, You Need More of Them

Can you afford to put up with mediocre employees?

Humetrics president, Mel Kleiman, posed this question in a recent TLNT.com post. Despite the obvious answer, Kleiman notes that employers and managers frequently keep mediocre workers around rather than replace them with top talent (whom he refers to as “A players”). He even offers 10 reasons they do so, including:

• They’re focused on low turnover rather than on retaining the right people.
• They don’t really know what constitutes an A player.
• They use a screening process designed to screen people out rather then let the right people in. 

Recruiting top talent isn’t easy by any stretch. But it’s worthwhile because, as Kleiman points out, “hundreds of research studies have quantified the difference between having an ‘A’ player versus a ‘C’ player in a job … (and) every one of them concludes the difference in productivity and the impact on the bottom line is anywhere from 20 percent to over 1,000 percent greater return when you compare the best, most productive employees to those who are average.”

Of course, to effectively recruit top talent, you need to know who your current A players are and precisely what sets them apart. Once you do, you’ll know which skills, behaviors and attributes to seek out as you recruit new talent and as you craft your employee learning and development programs. (You can read more on this topic in a previous post, “Do You Know Who Your ‘Top Guns’ Are?”)

If you’re interested in raising the bar on your recruitment of top talent, you might consider a recommendation from Jonah Berger, marketing professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School: “Stop selling, start storytelling.”

Rather than trying to sell A players on a specific job, Berger encourages employers to snag top talent through word of mouth from their own employees and storytelling related to their actual work experiences. In a recent article on Inc.com, “Howto Use Viral Marketing to Recruit Top-Notch Talent,” Berger notes that there’s an entire psychology behind the power of social sharing and word of mouth—and this same power should be applied to attracting new talent.

A players, top guns, high-performance workers—however you refer to them, one thing is certain: the best way to attract more of them consistently is to use this three-step process:

Step 1. Identify your current top performers and what makes them special.

Step 2. Use your findings as a “template” for recruiting and hiring new talent.

Step 3. Leverage your current top performers to tell your brand’s “story” in their own real and meaningful terms.

~

Connect with the individuals and sources highlighted in this post by clicking the links below:

@MelKleiman

@TLNT_com

@j1berger

@inc

Reskilling and Upskilling Our Workforce Are Essential as Talent Gaps Expand

More than a third of the world’s employers are struggling to find the right talent.

ManpowerGroup’s 2013 Talent Shortage Survey canvassed more than 38,000 employers worldwide, and 35% of them reported “difficulty filling jobs due to lack of available talent.” What’s more, their struggle has been worsening; the 2013 findings were the highest proportion of employers expressing concern about talent shortages since 2007.

Surprisingly, this news comes at a time when talent pools are virtually brimming with people, and when a recent Harris Interactive study shows that 74% of workers would consider taking a new job immediately. With all of this talent available, what’s causing our shortages? The debate around this question has been lively. An aging workforce, unexpected and rapid growth in specific sectors, the sudden need for entirely new types of jobs (in the technology and data niches, for example), poor training and knowledge sharing practices, and even inadequate compensation have all been blamed.

Whatever the cause, we all know the results of unfilled talent gaps: reduced productivity and innovation, greater burdens on the workers we have, lower satisfaction and engagement levels, increased turnover … the list goes on.

The obvious question is … how are employers responding to these talent shortages?

“Nearly eight out of 10 employers surveyed tell us they are taking steps to grow the talent pool and ensure access to the right skills that will help drive business results,” the ManpowerGroup report states. “Yet more than one out of five employers report that they are currently doing nothing to remedy the skills gaps indicating that they may not understand how the talent shortage is putting their business at risk or they simply don’t know how to effectively solve the issue.”

Doing nothing clearly isn’t a viable long-term strategy for most employers but growing talent pools certainly makes sense. However, it’s not the only option we have. We can also reskill and upskill the workers we currently have. But to do so, our vision of these individuals must be crystal clear. We need to know precisely the talents and skills they possess and those they lack—especially those we need to grow and remain competitive. Once we have this clear vision, we must put it to use and implement training and development programs that fill our gaps, disseminating the right knowledge in the right ways. For today’s workforces, this means more mobile and social learning, more interactive and independent learning technologies, more mentoring and peer-to-peer learning, and the like.

We also have to take steps to better understand the specific work our people are most interested in doing, where their natural capabilities and skills lie, and the types of projects they want to work on in the future. Frequent and effective performance reviews are an ideal tool for gathering all of this critical information.

If we want to fill our talent gaps and build workforces capable of successfully carrying us into the future, expanding our talent pools is a terrific idea. But it can’t be our only one.

The Importance of Discretionary Effort—and How To Inspire It

We sparked some interesting conversation when we mentioned Aubrey Daniels in a recent post about the need for more frequent performance reviews.

You might recall that Daniels was among the first individuals to champion the notion of applying behavioral science to the workplace. As a result, he’s widely known as “the father of performance management.” In discussing our post, some people told us that they’re fans of Daniels’ work. Others said that, while important, his ideas focus too heavily on performance optimization and the bottom line—i.e., wringing the maximum amount of hours and effort out of every single employee.

To be fair, that’s not really true.

It is a fact that Daniels’ company focuses on enabling organizations to capture “discretionary effort” from employees. (Discretionary effort is that which goes above and beyond the minimum level required to a job.) But Daniels’ company doesn’t advise clients to extract greater effort at all costs. In fact, its approach to performance management advocates that employers manage their people with sensitivity and manage performance based on behavioral measurement and analysis, ongoing performance feedback to employees, and positive rewards.

Obviously, Daniels’ behavior analysis-focused approach to performance management will not work for or appeal to every organization. No approach does. In fact, Reviewsnap doesn’t agree with every precept or opinion Daniels and his company espouse. But we do agree with the basic concept that the true heart of great performance management is frequent and ongoing measurement, feedback and positive reinforcement. And we firmly believe that performance reviews can be the vehicle that supports and helps to deliver all of these elements—as long as reviews are conducted properly. We also believe that proper performance reviews are instrumental in capturing discretionary effort.

For those who want a fresh look at Daniels’ approach to performance management, check out an interesting post that appeared in Aubrey’s Blog in July, “Overworked? Could Reducing Workloads be the Key to Improved Results?”

At one point, the post states: “… oftentimes we find that people confuse discretionary effort with increasing the volume of work. Discretionary effort is about outcomes, not hours worked. It is about achieving business results through fluency in critical behaviors. It is about identifying and reducing the behaviors that don’t have business impact and focusing on the behaviors that do.”

Performance management isn’t about squeezing more and more from your employees. It’s about placing them in the right roles, aligning them closely to the company’s goals and mission, and giving them the direction and support they need to reach their full potential. That’s how we get sustained discretionary effort from our people.

One more note on this topic …

In his post, “What Exactly Is Discretionary Effort?”, consultant and speaker, Jason Lauritsen, points out that most of us assume discretionary effort and employee engagement are closely intertwined. After all, an unengaged employee isn’t going to be dishing out a lot of discretionary effort, right? However, Lauritsen suggests, “discretionary effort is less a matter of engagement than it is of performance.” He also calls into question management’s expectations where engagement and discretionary effort are concerned. Bottom line, Lauritsen believes the time has come to redefine our terms.

It’s intriguing stuff. Then again, isn’t everything in the world of performance management?

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.

Employee Recognition Should Be Pervasive

Sixty percent of best-in-class organizations consider employee recognition extremely valuable in driving individual performance. This statement comes from the Aberdeen Group’s recent report, “The Power of Employee Recognition.” Yet the report goes on to say that “only 14% of organizations provide managers with the necessary tools for rewards and recognition.”

This disconnect becomes more alarming when you consider research from Bersin by Deloitte showing “organizations with recognition programs that are highly effective at improving employee engagement had 31 percent lower voluntary turnover than those organizations with ineffective recognition programs.”

As decades of studies have shown, employee recognition is an integral component of effective performance management. In her blog post, “Recognition: A Secret Ingredient in Effective Talent Management,” Bersin by Deloitte analyst, Stacia Garr, noted that the other important elements of performance management include goal setting (and revising), coaching, and development planning. Garr writes: “These elements of performance management work together in concert to ensure employees receive the ongoing feedback and support they need to understand how they are performing and adjust their behavior in real-time.”

Those of us who haven’t given enough attention to employee recognition are missing out on an easy and effective means of letting our employees know—on a continual basis—exactly why they’re valued and appreciated. This means we’re also missing an opportunity to raise employee engagement

According to MIT’s HR function, employees are most satisfied when recognition comes from a blend of sources—with managers offering half of this recognition, peers offering 30 percent of it, and the organization itself offering 20 percent (via formal programs). MIT also offers some useful best practices for designing and maintaining employee recognition programs. These include:

·      Asking employees how they like to be recognized.

·      Using the criteria for recognition to tie the organization’s mission, goals and values to employees’ work and roles.

·      Creating a program that allows for participation at all levels (peer to peer, manager to employee, and employee to manager) and in all areas of the organization.

·      Sharing the decision-making process for developing your program with the entire organization.

·      Building employee feedback mechanisms into your program.

To fill our organizations with great talent—and then achieve and sustain superior engagement and performance levels—we need to make employee recognition a priority. And this recognition shouldn’t come from managers alone. It needs to come from every level and every member of our organizations.

Employee recognition should be pervasive.

Do You Know Who Your "Top Guns" Are?

Not long ago, the TLNT website posted an article titled, “Just What Really Is ‘Top Talent,’ Anyway?” As the author, Crystal Spraggins, noted, the answer to that question is somewhat subjective and depends on an organization’s particular needs, leadership and culture.

“To a larger degree, however, the answer isn’t subjective at all,” Spraggins wrote. “When top talent is in action, most of us have no trouble recognizing it.” She then went on to offer a list of characteristics shared by the top talent she has encountered. Her list includes commitment, creativity, curiosity and emotional maturity, among others.

What’s striking about Spraggins’ topic is how few employers actually bother to define what “top talent” means to them. You think it would be common practice, especially given the fact talent issues are among the most urgent for our nation’s employers. Last year, TLNT itself published research showing that HR professionals’ top three concerns are: 1) engaging and retaining employees, 2) developing leaders and managing skills gaps, and 3) recruiting the best employees.

A big part of solving all of these talent issues is knowing precisely who your top talent is and what sets them apart. Once you have clarity on these matters, you know what to look for when recruiting new talent and developing current employees.

Performance reviews are among the most effective tools we have for identifying our top performers—and for nurturing and reinforcing the qualities that make these individuals so valuable. But, as Spraggins points out in her article, there’s a certain dgree of subjectivity in identifying top performers. For instance, some managers will value particular behaviors and characteristics more highly than their peers. Employers who want to gain greater clarity regarding their top talent—and then hire more individuals like them—will want to strip away some of this subjectivity, perhaps by establishing companywide consensus on a handful of indispensable qualities that are consistent across the organization’s top talent.

Clearly, this isn’t a shoot-from-the-hip initiative. It takes the combined effort and active support of senior leadership, hiring mangers and front-line supervisors. And it requires HR to drive it—gaining buy-in from all of the stakeholders and then leading the process until it becomes engrained in the organization and its talent management practices.

But the work required to instill a process like this is a small price to pay, especially if it helps our organizations evolve from the outdated, shotgun approach of simply attracting job candidates to actually engaging and winning top talent.

A Case Study of Tasty Retention

Retention of your top talent can taste oh-so-sweet...but it requires determination.

This was the point of an article, “Keep Your Top Talent: The Return of Retention,” published recently on SHRM's website. It offers employers this piece of sage advice: “When it comes to sustaining star talent, think like a good coach: Once you land top performers, you must motivate them to stay—and continually raise their game.” The article then goes on to offer suggestions for doing so.

But the true gem of the piece was buried at its conclusion—a mini case study about a catering company that's achieving record retention levels. It opens with these words: "The 200 employees at Chicago's Tasty Catering meet quarterly with managers to answer two questions: What do you want to do differently, and what are your personal desires?"

There’s a mountain of wisdom packed into that single sentence.

Let's start with the fact that Tasty’s managers and employees meet quarterly to talk. They don’t wait for annual performance reviews to roll around to talk turkey. They do it every three months. Next, look at the issues they’re discussing: what to do differently, and what employees personally desire. These issues cut right to the heart of keeping employees engaged and retained for the long term. (Side note: These are also perfect performance review topics, although too many managers would never dream of broaching them.) Basically, Tasty Catering is holding five performance reviews a year with its employees, assuming it also holds separate formal annual reviews as well.

As we’ve long counseled our clients, holding multiple performance reviews, at regular intervals throughout the year, is an essential part of building and maximizing employee engagement. This approach is also invaluable in deploying and promoting employees into roles where they can excel.

Tasty Catering is an example of great performance management—and its results show it. Turnover at the company is less than one percent.

It doesn't get any sweeter than that.

One Bad Reason Good Employees Jump Ship

LinkedIn’s Talent Blog recently offered a highly educational infographic, Why More Employees Are Considering Leaving Their Companies.

The infographic contains a variety of useful insights and data—but one of the key story lines is this:

LinkedIn surveyed employed individuals worldwide, asking what would convince them to leave their employer; their top response was “better compensation and benefits.” LinkedIn also surveyed employees who had actually changed jobs recently, asking what convinced them to change employers; their top response was “greater opportunities for advancement.”

Given the reality of why people left their employers, LinkedIn wondered whether organizations have failed to create sufficient internal mobility programs—programs that would have kept people from jumping ship. But further research showed the existence of “well-defined internal mobility programs” throughout a large majority of companies in the U.S., Canada, India, Britain and Australia.

So what’s behind this discrepancy? The LinkedIn infographic states, “According to our Exit Survey, HR and talent acquisition professionals overestimate employee awareness of their internal mobility programs by more than 2X … Plus, 69% of British and Indian, 68% of American and Canadian and 60% of Australian Exit Survey respondents said it was easier to find an open position outside rather than inside their previous company.”

That’s utterly terrible news.

Yes, “preventable turnover” happens. But it shouldn’t happen because employees aren’t aware of internal mobility options. What makes this situation especially deplorable is that we have a mechanism in place to continually remind employees about internal mobility and job openings: our performance review process.

Sadly, too many performance reviews skip right past internal career pathing. Reviews focus on performance gaps and targets—and little else. This has to change.

The cost of employees jumping ship (especially good employees) is far too great. As the LinkedIn infographic shows, the annual savings from a mere 1% reduction in preventable turnover would be $7.5 million for an employer in the U.S.

Bottom line, our performance reviews should be one more tool we use to prevent good people from jumping ship needlessly.

The 4 Most Urgent Business Issues Are People Issues

Leadership. Retention and engagement. Reskilling HR. Talent acquisition and access.

Of all the critical issues faced by business and HR leaders today, those four are the most urgent, according to a recent survey by Deloitte Consulting LLP and Bersin by Deloitte. (You can read more about the survey in the report, “Global Human Capital Trends 2014.”)

1. Leadership

The need for strong leadership is, of course, a perennial challenge. But the report makes it clear—this challenge is accelerating “at all levels, in all geographies, and across all functional areas.” The reasons? The rapid pace at which today’s businesses move and change. Globalization. The speed and magnitude of technological change. The list goes on.

2. Employee Retention and Engagement

These issues have never been so prominent (among business leaders or in the media) as they are today. Unfortunately, as the Deloitte report points out, these issues have no clear owner in most organizations, neither within HR nor within the business at large. This creates a dangerous potential for inertia. “Companies should redefine their engagement strategy to move from keeping people to attracting them and creating a passionate compassionate place to work,” the report states.

3. Reskilling of HR

For many of us in HR, this is the issue that hits closest to home. After all, we’ve been working attentively for the past decade or so on transitioning from a largely administrative function to a more strategic one. And the Deloitte report acknowledges this to some degree: “… the HR and talent functions are in the midst of a transformation.” But then it goes on to say: “HR is not making the grade as companies move away from HR as people administration to a focus on people performance. An essential part of this change is the upskilling, reorganization, and transformation of HR and its relationship with business leaders and issues.”

Clearly our internal transformation isn’t complete. We must continue to strengthen our role as a strategic partner to senior and functional leaders. We can do this, in part, by advancing our methods of gathering, analyzing and sharing actionable people data. And we can improve our recruiting and hiring practices so they foster a better quality of candidates and new hires. And we can further develop our abilities to drive passion, engagement and innovation among our workers.

4. Talent Acquisition and Access

As a growing number of analysts have advised, many of our companies will not face a shortage of workers in the next several years. What we will face is a shortage of the right workers—people possess the skills, mindsets, behaviors and goals that truly are in line with our organizations’ needs. Our success depends upon our ability to find these people efficiently. “Tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and others are changing recruiting into a strategic function focused on marketing, branding, and new tools and technologies,” the Deloitte report declares. Of course, using the tools to find the right talent is just the beginning. Then we need to develop them and retain them for the long term. And these challenges bring us right back to the three urgent issues covered above.

It’s no coincidence that people issues are our four most urgent business issues—or that these issues are so deeply intertwined. After all, our businesses are built upon our people.

Unless we do a better job of recruiting, managing and developing them for the long term, our sense of urgency will quickly turn to desperation.

5 Must-Have Features for Your Performance Management Software

Talk about your troubling data …

Asked to describe their confidence levels regarding their own workforce management, employers surveyed by Ventana Research were nearly evenly split: while 51% expressed moderate or high levels of confidence, 49% are only somewhat or not at all confident.

That’s troubling enough but when asked about their workforce management systems:

·      Just 41% said they’re satisfied or very satisfied with their current system.

·      42% are only somewhat satisfied.

·      15% are flat-out unsatisfied.

·      And another 45% indicated they need new applications to improve their workforce productivity and results.

It’s no wonder that talent and performance management software are among today’s most sought after HR solutions. After all, these solutions deliver a powerful set of benefits including greater productivity, stronger employee engagement, better alignment between company strategy and employee performance, and a stronger capacity for conducting sound succession planning.

So, whether you’re in the market to buy new performance management software or you’re simply looking to upgrade your current solution, remember this important (and often overlooked) guideline: don’t compromise ease-of-use just to get the features you want.

Sure, the solution you choose has to offer the right features. No doubt about it. But if the software is difficult to use, your people will avoid it. No amount of training or clever “promotion” can overcome difficult software. In the end, you’ll not only waste your money but you’ll also let down your customers (i.e., your managers and employees at large) and your senior leadership. And you’ll have gone a long way toward losing their trust.

Fortunately, with the array of robust performance management solutions now available, you don’t have to compromise ease-of-use for features. Not if you do your homework properly and research your options online.

However, when it does come time to consider features, certain ones do top the lists of most organizations. In our experience, are five must-have features:

1.     Customizable Performance Review Forms—Cookie-cutter reviews are worthless and a waste of time. The same is true of cookie-cutter software. If a solution doesn’t allow you and your managers to tailor it your needs, move on to another option.

2.     Goal Management Tool—Having the ability to manage and track concrete performance goals is not only wise, it’s an imperative for any company that wants to become truly performance driven. A goal management tool that can be used/accessed throughout the entire year (or performance cycle) helps to maintain strong alignment between employee performance and the company’s goals and targets.

3.     Journal Entry/Notes Tool—This is an especially useful feature—not just for managers but also for their direct reports, as it helps to keep both parties informed and engaged in ongoing communication about goals, action items, areas for improvement, education and developmental matters, etc.

4.     Strong Reporting Function—This makes it easy for managers and HR to run performance reports, conduct proactive succession planning, and share this information efficiently among key personnel, department and functional heads, and senior leaders.

5.     eSignatures and Automated Notifications—These are features that enhance compliance, facilitate administrative actions and maximize convenience—all of which help to ensure that people actually enjoy and utilize your software.

If you’re looking for added value, be sure to explore software that offers these additional features:

1.     360-Degree Feedback Module

2.     A Learning Management System and Learning Content Integration

3.     Compensation Management

4.     A Mobile App

These features are becoming increasingly attractive to organizations that value comprehensive solutions that can be accessed from a wide range of devices and technologies.

Bottom line, you no longer have to sacrifice ease-of-use to get the features you need in your performance management software. Research your options carefully and you’ll make the right choice. Even better—you’ll help your company become significantly more performance-driven.

Three Steps to Apply Your Talents to Goal Setting

As an employee, you can have a lot of power over what your goals look like for the next year. Many companies cascade goals down through the organization, linking individual goals with the overall strategy. Instead of waiting to hear what those goals are, though, you can pull together ways you best contribute to the business.

Here are three steps to follow when creating individual goals that you might bring to your manager:

1.     Tap Into Your Talents and Interests: People perform best when they’re working on what gets them energized and excited. While your job might include not-so-fun tasks (everyone has something administrative to do), make it clear to your manager where you do your best work and where your passions lie. For example, a retail store manager still has to set the schedule every week, but she could also be great at hiring and onboarding new associates. When she thinks about her goals, her talents in hiring and onboarding should be on the list.

2.     Make the Goal Measurable: Before bringing a new goal to a manager, make sure that you’ve thought through how you’re going to measure progress on that goal. Without these metrics, your own manager won’t know if you’ve accomplished that goal, made progress or are behind. When hiring and onboarding store associates, our manager can put some time metrics against her goals: Hire associates within two weeks of opening, associate proficient at point of sale system within two days, and so on.

3.     Bring It Back to the Business: Identifying your new goal isn’t complete until you’ve also included how it relates back to the business. Our store manager might get a lot of fulfillment by getting to focus on hiring and onboarding, but she also needs to say how that would be relevant for the store’s goals or even the company’s success. Her goal could include pulling together best practices for other store managers so all stores improve their hiring and onboarding processes.

Make sure you’re including your manager in the development of these goals, giving them plenty of notice that you want to work on these individual goals. If you surprise them too late, you might not get to focus on these areas. By being proactive, you’re working on things that help you perform better, but also help the performance of the business.

Fair, Square and on the Level

Five Tips for Using Calibration to Uncover the Truth of Your Company’s Talent

One of the chief complaints heard from employees working in a pay-for-performance culture centers on questions of fairness: “I’ll never receive the pay increase I deserve because my manager rates tougher than others.”

Sound familiar?

If only Human Resources had an Automatic Calibration Analyzer 3000. Tweak some knobs, flip some switches, and performance could be automatically measured and rewarded across the entire organization. Despite technology advances, such a concept is still a thing of futuristic talent-management fiction.

Human Resources is responsible for creating compensation and reward strategies that are fair, square and on the level in the minds of both business leaders and employees. Including calibration as part of your performance assessment process ensures that similar effort and success receive similar rewards. Follow these five tips for using calibration effectively in your organization:

1. Calibrate across units. Managers should come prepared for the calibration meeting with preliminary ratings and merit recommendations for each of their direct reports and be prepared to defend, or adjust, their decisions against the scrutiny of their peers.

2. Use a facilitator. An unbiased facilitator, such as an HR professional experienced in calibration techniques, keeps the discussions of performance objective, balanced and constructive to the overall process.

3. Dig deep. Insight gained from calibration should extend further than stamping a performance rating on each employee. Take this opportunity to discuss leadership readiness, developmental needs, and explore potential talent gaps or retention concerns.

4. Make it known. Don’t shroud the calibration process in secrecy; keeping the process a mystery only adds to a perception of unfairness or distrust. Make employees aware of the calibration process; yet assure them that any discussions regarding individual performance will remain confidential.

5. Own the results. Since the intent of the calibration discussion is to ensure a level playing field of performance assessment across the organization, adjustments to managers’ initial ratings or merit-pay recommendations may result. Establish ground rules early on asking that managers take full responsibility for communicating appropriately with their employees.

Forget fancy futuristic gizmos; instead, use proven performance calibration techniques to uncover the truth about your organization’s talent.

Narrowing Skill Gaps for Employees

The employee without skill gaps is somewhat unusual. Sure there are superstars with few, if any, performance issues, but those are few and far between. Performance management should include not only the recognition of the gaps, but a plan to help close them.

Achieving desired performance outcomes is at least partially achieved through accurate identification of performance gaps and the application of appropriate training and development to reduce or eliminate the gaps. Effective performance management processes include both of these important elements.

When effective mapping of learning content to competency gaps is part of the performance management "infrastructure" in an organization, performance gaps tend to close faster and more completely. This stems from the fact that there is a much higher level of matching training and development efforts to areas where employees are weakest and need the most attention. Without this level of mapping there is usually a shotgun approach to training and development efforts.

ASTD reports that "Organizations are linking learning to performance and the bottom line, and they understand the relationship between creating a skilled workforce and achieving enterprise-wide success." The linkage between performance, learning, and higher levels of profitability is difficult to deny. Intuitively we would expect there to be a higher level of success and much less waste in the training process if attention is focused on closing performance gaps rather than painting employees with a broad development brush.

Training for the sake of training alone is a very bad idea and consumes valuable cash that can be applied more appropriately elsewhere. But when training is specifically linked to performance, training expenditures that are essentially thrown out the window are reduced dramatically.

Reviewsnap’s Latest White Paper Helps Your Company Move Ahead with Performance Management — Without Any Dread!

Reviewsnap, the leading cloud-based performance management software solution, today released its new white paper, “From Dread to Moving Ahead — Take the Pain Out of Performance Management.” Download a complimentary copy now.

Cue the shaking of heads, the rolling of eyes, and the murmurs of “not again” heard up and down the office corridors. How could a process so ingrained in organizational culture cause so much anxiety? Simple. By emphasizing form over function and process over performance acceleration. Too often, activities focus on compliance rather than creating lasting value for the organization and its people.

An effective performance management strategy can set the stage for a high-performance culture. Discover how to create a results-oriented performance management process that will advance your organization’s position in the market while also nurturing your best and brightest talent when you download your complimentary copy of Reviewsnap’s new white paper, “From Dread to Moving Ahead — Take the Pain Out of Performance Management.”.

“It’s time to take a deeper look into performance management,” said Chris Arringdale, Reviewsnap’s vice president of marketing. “Organizations that are serious about moving their businesses forward should stop thinking of performance management as an ‘annual event’ and instead create a process of continual improvement using ongoing goal setting, coaching and feedback. This agile model of performance management helps to keep everyone on track and moving in the right direction.”

When you download Reviewsnap’s new white paper, you’ll learn valuable tips and best practices that will help your company:

• Determine organizational readiness for performance management
• Establish a culture of performance
• Use goal-setting, coaching and feedback to drive engagement and results

Drop the dreadful process of once-a-year, paper-based performance appraisals and start using these best practices to help your organization move ahead. An effective performance management process is a proven solution for getting the highest possible return on the company’s greatest asset — its people.

I Was Sentenced to 5 Years at The Office! - Employee Morale

Employee morale is yet another issue that is talked about a lot, but rarely addressed effectively. Organizational culture plays into morale and engagement so deeply that the process of improving morale can be a long, tough road.

Here are just a handful of things that should be considered in trying to elevate morale:

- Create an environment that's fun and lively. If your work environment resembles a prison more than a theme park, employees probably aren't excited about their surroundings.
- Carefully evaluate your management style. Is it facilitating in nature or is it dictatorial or overly assertive and direct.
- Encourage employees to come forward with problems, suggestions and issues. Listen carefully and acknowledge their concerns. Follow up on them and communicate results of your findings back to them. Don't leave them hanging.
- Address compensation and benefits to make certain that you're at least competitive with the market.
- Be consistent in how you administer rules and policies.
- Be fair and reasonable with all employees.
- Set expectations for employees about team work and working cooperatively. Let it be known that you expect employees to get along while on the job. Morale can be impacted heavily by fellow employees who don't work and play well with others.
- Be clear in your expectations and follow up when they aren't met.
- Don't ignore low performers. If they can't become good employees, terminate them. Bad employees affect those around them.
- Don't allow double standards. What's good for one employee is good for all of them.
- Eliminate a punitive mentality. Don't make employees feel that they will be punished if they make mistakes. Accountable, yes. Punished in some manner, no.
- Encourage innovation and creativity.
- Show employees that you care about them. Taking an appropriate personal interest in employees lets them know you care about them as people and not just as worker bees.
- Communicate as much as possible to all employees. Keep them well informed about what's going on in the organization.
- Look at the work environment. Is it light and airy or is it dark, dreary and counterproductive? Does it seem lively or more like a morgue? Don't underestimate the impact of decor.

Can You Become a Better Strategic Thinker?

Thinking strategically doesn't always come easy for most of us. Or we get sidetracked by all of the operational stuff that comes up on a daily basis and we get away from looking at our businesses or work units from a strategic perspective.

So we offer a few things you can do to help ensure that some level of strategic thinking is in place on a consistent basis:

1.Remember that the foundation for a sound strategic plan is goals. They provide direction and focus and well as a basis for finding alternative ways of achieving them. Never lose sight of your goals.

2. Forget about "the way it's always been done". Think about how things could be and/or should be. Get outside your comfort zone!

3. Practice creative thinking. Tell yourself that no idea is too crazy. Generate as many ideas as possible. As an example, take one of your products or services and list all of the possible ways it could be marketed remembering that anything goes. Force yourself to be creative and think "outside the box".

4. Analyze and process data and information in an unbiased manner. Good long-term strategies are developed around good information and sound logical reasoning. Take the time to gather good data/information, but don't get caught up in over-analyzing things.

5. Look outside the operating environment. Learn to look at customers and markets available to you. Get externally focused. Understand your markets well and think about how new approaches might make sense.

6. Think in strategic terms rather than task-oriented terms. For example, suppose a goal is to grow revenues at an annual rate of 9%. This sets off all kinds of task-oriented thinking; staff needs, promotional materials, space planning, etc. Think more in terms of alternative strategies for growing the business....new ways to penetrate existing markets with a new product for example.

7. Become a thinker. Take time to sit back and clear your mind of details and just think. Think less about details and more about your goals and how to achieve them. Step back and think big picture on a regular basis. Find quiet time to do it. Thought can be the most productive form of work.

8. Generate as many ideas as possible. Quantity will often breed quality. Also, some ideas can come together to form very effective strategies.

Manager's Review vs. Self-Review - Where's the Disconnect?

We've all dealt with employees who believe their performance is well above the level of performance as represented by the performance review that we completed for them. Their self-review comes in with extremely high ratings and glowing comments about their performance. Ours shows ratings well below theirs and our comments are less than glowing.

How can there be such a disconnect? Let me count the ways:

The Manager

• The manager subscribes to the notion that no employee should be given high ratings because they need something to strive for or the infamous "no employee is truly outstanding on a consistent basis".
• The manager doesn't have a good handle on the employee's work and level of performance and hasn't been diligent about journaling (documenting) performance "events" during the review period
• The manager is a victim of "central tendency bias" whereby they are hesitant to select ratings on either end of the rating scale.
• The manager, for whatever reason, doesn't like the employee and lacks the maturity and professionalism to rate the employee based on work behavior and performance.
• The manager hurriedly completed his employee reviews and didn't put enough thought into any of the employees' reviews.
• The manager is measuring performance against poorly constructed goals and expectations for the employee.
• The manager has a great handle on the employee's performance and work behavior, has done an excellent job of documenting performance "events" during the review period, is very objective and thorough and carefully thought through the review and rated the employee according to sound logic and reasoning .

The Employee

• The employee is a narcissistic egomaniac.
• The employee is completely out of touch with reality.
• The employee has a bad attitude and is out to make some sort of odd point.
• The employee lacks a sense of self-awareness.
• The employee has an entitlement mentality.
• The employee is measuring his/her performance against goals and expectations that differ from those used by the manager.
• The employee is making mental comparisons to co-workers who are known underperformers.
• The employee knows his/her performance falls below the ratings placed on the self-review, but he/she is hoping to place seeds of doubt in the manager's mind thinking it could sway a change in the manager's ratings.
• The employee is truly performing at levels well above those perceived by the manager and is, for the most part, accurately reflecting his/her performance.

Okay, so this probably isn't a complete list for either the manager or the employee, but you get the point. In a perfect world, the manager and the employee are very objective, very professional and have a great handle on the actual performance of the employee leading to a lot of agreement on the performance review for the employee. But we all know this isn't a perfect world.

The good news is that most employees and most managers try to be as objective and honest as possible when doing reviews. It isn't all that common that a wide gap exists between the two. But it does happen.

To minimize the impact of a disparity of any significance between the self-review and the manager's review, it is important that the manager do, at a minimum, these five things:

Document all positive and negative performance events hat are of any significance for each employee over each review period. Discipline yourself to take time to make performance journal entries as the event of significance occur. This documentation will prove invaluable in preparing the review and in supporting your ratings.

When goals and expectations are being established, meet with the employee and make certain you are both on the same page in terms of what each really means. The employee should have a crystal clear understanding of what is expected of them over the upcoming review period or longer.

Carefully complete the performance review and be able to substantiate ratings with sound and logical comments.

Forget as best you can any unfair biases you might have about the employee. Rate them based on their work behavior/performance for each competency and not on things that are irrelevant to the review itself.

Based on the review as it was prepared, anticipate questions or arguments the employee might raise during the review session and be ready to respond logically and rationally to those questions.

Obviously performance reviews are a valuable component in measuring and elevating perfomance in any organization. Make sure you've done your homework so that on those rare occasions when there is a wide gulf between your ratings and the employee's ratings you can skillfully present a strong case to support.

The "We Care" Factor

We hear a lot of positive things about our performance management solution and it is interesting to hear some of the things that employees say about having our system in place within their organizations. One of the most interesting and frequent comments we hear is the notion that having a system such as ReviewSNAP in place shows employees that their employer truly cares about them and their development.

This isn't necessarily a prophetic theory, but is does serve to reinforce the need to pay close attention to employee feedback, coaching, development and goal achievement. Employers that have clumsy and inefficient manual systems or no formal review or feedback process at all in place send a not so subtle message to employees that reviewing their performance or creating a formal feedback mechanism just isn't that important. Employees often judge the employer's level of caring about employees on a number of factors and this seems to be one of them.

When an organization puts a system such as ReviewSNAP in place, the employees tend to feel that their employer cares enough about them and their colleagues to spend the time and money to put in place a tool to create a robust feedback and review environment. In their minds, they believe the organization is committed to its employees and their development. When the use of the system is driven into the culture and managers and supervisors do a good job with regular feedback and performance evaluation, a boost in employee morale and productivity often follows.

Employees don't want to feel ignored and not having a user-friendly, automated performance management solution in place can limit the ability of managers and supervisors to do a good enough job of interfacing with employees on a routine basis as it relates to their performance. This may lead to a feeling of being ignored which we all know can have detrimental results.

ReviewSNAP President Featured in Talent Management Technology Article

Take a look at the Talent Management Technology article featuring ReviewSNAP President, Dave Arringdale.

The Major Drawback To Checking References

Let's suppose you're hiring for a key mid-level management position. You've gone through an extensive search and interview process and you are ready to extend an offer to one of the candidates. Before extending the offer, three references are checked. One reference gives a glowing recommendation, the second gives a positive, but more subdued thumbs up and the third provides a somewhat useless report simply confirming hire and termination dates along with position held.

Based on these recommendations, what kind of opinion should you form? The answer is; it's hard to say. But why?

We all know that checking references can provide a mixed bag of results. This can often lead to confusion about the potential of the employee. Some hiring experts point to the fact that most employers are afraid to say anything negative about a former employee out of fear of litigation. This is certainly an issue that needs to be considered in evaluating reference checks. However, we think there is a bigger issue to address when evaluating reference results.

Every organization takes on a culture in terms of performance and accountability. A few have a high performance, high accountability culture. Some have a low performance, low accountability culure. And the rest fall somewhere in between. Given this fact, how can you effectively evaluate a candidate's past performance without knowing what kind of culture they operated within?

Let's go back and look at the first reference you called. They gave a glowing recommendation of the candidate. But we have to ask ourselves a very significant question. How does our culture compare with the culture of that organization? If ours is a high performance, high accountability culture, but they operate within a low performance, low accountability culture the candidate's glowing recommendation is based on "jumping over a lower bar" than he/she will have to jump over in our culture. Unfortunately this leaves us wondering in terms of whether that candidate can get over our "bar".

To compound matters further, it is not acceptable to ask questions of the person providing the reference about his/her company's culture. Even asking questions such as "When Mary was faced with high expectations, how well did she meet those expectations?" are clearly not going to yield reliable answers since the frame of reference is different than your frame of reference. In other words, what the other person considers to be high expectations is very likely going to be different than your organization's definition of high expectations.

There are numerous examples of employees who received strong recommendations from former employers only to fail with their new employer. There can be a multitude of reasons for failure, but the point here is that reference checking will only rarely provide good information. Unless the companies providing references are somewhat similar to yours as far as accountability and performance are concerned don't expect to have a strong base of information to work with.

Given this potential problem, how should you deal with it? First of all, during the interviewing process make sure that the candidate is asked to respond to questions that relate to job-oriented behavior. For example, suppose you are hiring for a managerial position and the candidate has a management background. You might ask the candidate to "briefly explain how you establish accountability among those who report to you". This will provide some insight into how well the candidate understands the notion of accountability, but perhaps more importantly will reveal something about the culture(s) he/she has operated in previously. If the candidate stumbles with the response and doesn't have a good handle on this concept, it could mean that he/she has come from environments where accountability and high performance were foreign terms. Or it could mean that the candidate doesn't understand the important concept of accountability. Either way, a red flag is being waved.

Or try this, "in your past positions, did you find it easy to meet the expectations established for you or did you feel you had to stretch to meet them?" Understand that the response "I found them easy to meet" could mean:
1) the candidate is bright and meets expectations as a result,
2) the expectations haven't been all that high and it wasn't difficult to meet them.
And a response of "I had to stretch to meet them" could mean:
1) the candidate is not all that bright and it isn't easy for him/her to meet expectations or
2) the expectations have been very demanding and it caused them to stretch to meet them.
Knowing that, now try something like this; "you indicated it was (easy/difficult) for you to meet expectations in the past. Can you explain that a little more for me?" By probing, the candidate could reveal some tidbit that you will find useful in evaluating what kind of environment he/she is accustomed to operating in. These are only examples and you should take the time to come up with your own line of questioning to get at this very important issue.

In terms of references, asking questions such as "when (candidate name) was faced with meeting demanding expectations, how well did he/she meet them?" or "of all of your employees past or present, how would you compare (candidate name) with them in terms of overall job performance? Would you say he/she would fall in the top third, middle third or bottom third?" This question often goes unanswered for a variety of reasons. But it is an excellent one since it gives a relative ranking even if the culture is somewhat weak as far as accountability and performance are concerned. Obviously if the respondent says anything other than "top third" another red flag is potentially waived. These are only examples and you should take the time to develop standardized questions for reference checking and interviewing.

If properly constructed and carried out, references can add some value to the hiring process. But evaluate the responses carefully. There are too many unknowns in the hiring process as it is. References are only as good as the questions asked, the person responding and the quality of the organization(s) represented by the respondents. Sometimes an outstanding candidate is given a poor reference when, in fact, they are an excellent choice for the job. This can be due to some sort of bias on the part of the respondent or an environment where the candidate couldn't show what he/she was capable of. Many times an organization impedes the ability of an employee to perform and the employee is perceived as the problem because they are trying to perform at levels higher than the culture will allow.

In short, be very cautious in carrying out and evaluating reference checks. Bear in mind that perspective and frame of reference are important. We suggest that you not weight references too heavily in the final decision. Take them into account and if there is some consistency in responses among the various former employers, you can feel somewhat more comfortable in your assessment of the results.