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Welcome to episode 10 of Claire Shares. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m going to be sharing with you high energy, bite size videos, about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. Make sure you’re subscribed to Claire Shares wherever you get your podcasts! Today’s talent retention topic is performance management. Having some sort of performance management process is key for retaining your top talent, but also a great opportunity to develop, move around, or exit employees if needed. I can’t wait to give you some good nuggets to think about if you’re looking to put a performance management process in place at your organization.
Before we get started with today’s talent topic, I want to share with you my recommendation of the week!
Recommendation of the week
My recommendation of the week is actually our HR consultant here at Lighthouse Technology Services, Lorry Goldhawk. Lorry helps us with compliance and employee relations. Compliance is ever changing – talk about COVID leave laws, NYS pay transparency, and so much more that has developed over the past few years. Lorry sends us timely updates and answers any questions we have about applying compliance changes to our employee population. It’s also great to have her as a sounding board and another set of HR ears if we do have a challenging situation come up and I want a second opinion.
You may be thinking… Claire, you’re an HR pro, why do you have an HR consultant? Well, the truth is, compliance, harassment training, investigations, and some of the other items Lorry helps us with aren’t my core strengths in HR! I live for talent attraction, acquisition and retention. A few HR people in my network have recently asked me about who I’d refer to help them with those compliance items. I sent them Lorry’s way, and they let me know afterwards that she was a huge help. It’s okay to have additional help and not do it all! So listen up small businesses and HR departments of one, don’t go it alone! Surround yourself with a great team that can help you do the right thing.
I love to curate resources and share recommendations, so please reach out to me if there’s something, or someone, you’re looking for! Let’s get into our talent topic of the day, performance management.
What is performance management?
The University of Kansas department of human resources gives us a great definition. Performance management is an ongoing, continuous process of communicating and clarifying job responsibilities, priorities, performance expectations, and development planning that optimize an individual’s performance and aligns with organizational strategic goals.
I could probably do a Claire Shares episode on each of those pieces, but for today I really want to give my business leader and HR department of one friends in small business some important foundational aspects to think about, and put in place, when it comes to performance management. Especially if you don’t have a performance management process now.
I also wanted to mention that the history of performance management can be traced back to the early 20th century, when the industrial revolution led to the growth of large organizations and the need for more effective ways to manage and motivate employees. The annual performance review as we know it only dates back to World War II. Inspired in part by how the US Army ranked its high-potential soldiers, corporate workplaces adopted structured appraisal systems to help managers make defensible decisions around pay.
The annual performance review is seen by some organizations is outdated and not effective anymore. You can define at your organization what the performance management and performance review process looks like for you. I do think some aspects of the annual performance review need a revamp, and I’m excited to share some new insights with you!
A few jobs ago, I was the first HR Manager for a new call center here in Buffalo and a ton of HR processes and procedures had to be created from the ground up. Which was a ton of fun and a great experience, but it was also challenging! I know what it’s like to be an HR department of one and having to build out HR processes when it comes to recruiting, onboarding, performance and more. I know it seems like a lot if you’re in a position where some structure needs to be created, but it’s doable. You got this!
The easiest way for us to go about this performance management overview today is to break it down into my 3 favorite chunks – people, process and technology.
The people, process and technology that go into performance management
People
Let’s start with people. As the first part of our performance management definition states, communicating and clarifying job responsibilities, priorities and expectations on an ongoing basis is crucial. This is the manager’s responsibility. I talked about this during episode 5 on positive new hire communication. Ongoing and frequent communication is key to get someone up and running successfully, but then continuing that during their employment journey helps them to be successful, meet their goals, and meet the organization’s goals.
When it comes to performance management, managers play a huge role. They’re managing their team day to day and providing that guidance on job responsibilities and performance expectations. It’s crucial for your organization to provide ongoing training and support for managers. One of the most important things I like to work with managers on, is that if they notice an issue they have to SAY SOMETHING. Saying nothing at all and waiting to see if it goes away has never been the best route to take in my experience. As a manager, if you notice a performance, behavior or attendance issue and you’re not sure how to address it, consult a senior leader or HR pro in your organization. (There’s an event coming up soon hosted by HR Chief on driving performance through 1:1 meetings!)
If you are comfortable addressing it in the moment, go for it! But be sure you’re coming from a lens of curiosity and kindness. We don’t want to jump to any conclusions. Starting with phrases like “I’ve noticed XYZ,” OR “can you tell me more about XYZ” are helpful to get the conversation started. Be sure to give constructive feedback and reset expectations if needed or give praise where it’s needed.
Say you’ve noticed that a work responsibility wasn’t completed correctly. Reach out to the employee to touch base with them and ask them about it. They may share some helpful feedback or information that signals to us that more training is needed or expectations need to be reset. Once you listen, respond with the needed information and reset expectations if needed. Resetting expectations can sound like – this task has to be logged and completed once a day by 4 PM ET every day. This is the performance expectation that needs to be met going forward. Do I have your commitment? Do you have any questions? Be sure to document the date/time the conversation took place in case you have to revisit again in the future.
As mentioned, managers play such a big role in performance management, which leaves a lot of room for manager bias come the annual or bi-annual review process. Each time of year when the performance review cycle is approaching, it’s important to give managers context and training, even if they’ve been doing it for years. For example, I’ve worked in large global organizations in the past where some managers gave a 3 or a “meets expectations” to everyone on their team, even when it was clear to other managers or to HR that some folks needed development and others needed to be promoted! Some managers may have a fear of giving someone a 1 or 2 rating, or a doesn’t meet expectations, because they fear it may reflect badly on them as a manager. Or they recognize that giving someone a 1 or 2 rating means extra work for them, like perhaps working with an employee on a performance improvement plan, providing them extra training, or transferring them to another department.
I’ve also seen gate keeping happen. When an employee deserved a 4 or a 5 and had the demonstrated results and documentation to prove it, but the manager gave them a lower rating because they wanted to keep that person on their team. Our roles as managers is to develop our people and help them reach new levels of potential. Of course, it can be challenging to “lose” A players when they move on to their next role or assignment, but that’s also so rewarding! There’s another employee that now has an opportunity for growth because of the seat that incumbent left open.
When you take on a manager role, you take on the responsibility of performance management – to continually communicate, manage performance, and develop your team. If that’s not the role for you, that’s okay! I’ve been an individual contributor and a manager at different points in my career and have gone back and forth. I know folks who took on a manager role and realized a few years in that they did not enjoy those managerial responsibilities, so they moved to another role.
Process
It’s hard to clarify job responsibilities and performance expectations if they were never set in the first place. Having clear and detailed job descriptions is a crucial foundation to a lot of HR aspects including recruiting, compliance, and performance management. When bringing in a new team member, ensure they have a clear and detailed job description. Set performance, behavior and attendance expectations based on those job duties. Provide training, feedback, and recognition according to those job duties. Once someone has completed their onboarding period, ensure to work with them to set goals. Following SMART goals is a good place to start – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound.
– Specific, clear and understandable.
– Measurable, verifiable and results-oriented.
– Attainable, yet sufficiently challenging.
– Relevant to the mission of the department or organization.
– Time-bound with a schedule and specific milestones.
Most employees have between 2-5 smart goals per year to work towards that encompass their role as well as supporting the organization’s strategic goals. These goals can be a variety of job description goals, project goals, behavioral or values goals, and stretch goals. Having a performance and salary review policy is also a helpful foundational element of the process. If you need a basic policy, reach out to me, I’m happy to help.
I encourage you to ensure you have job descriptions in place for all employees, you have some sort of goal setting and goal review process, and you have a policy or procedure for how performance management is done in your organization. These foundational pieces will be so helpful for both your managers administering the process, and for employee engagement and retention. A big piece of the performance management process is effective one on one meetings between the manager and employee, which I talked about at length during episode 7 of Claire Shares. That episode is one of my favorites, because that time between the manager and employee is so impactful, so I hope you’ll check it out if you missed it!
People love continuous, honest conversations about how they’re doing and what they could improve. In my experience, my team has been open to receiving feedback because they know I care and want them to do well, and I’m always down to help them improve by brainstorming ideas on a new way to do something or recommending additional learning and training.
Technology
Let’s wrap up with technology, and how technology can support your performance management process.
There are so many great performance management tools for small and medium sized businesses. If you have a payroll or HRIS system, such as Paylocity, you likely have access to a performance management module within the system as well. If you’re already paying for the system, it may be good investment to stand up that module too. Especially if employees and managers are already used to logging into it for employee self-service, it’ll be easier to adopt since it’s already accessible.
Here at Lighthouse, we do a lot of our performance management in Microsoft Planner, because you can create goal boards, assign tasks, and track progress. Remember paper is always okay too! At the prior organization that I mentioned I created the first performance management process, we used forms that managers and employees filled out, and then they were placed in the employee’s file. That was many years ago now, and it’s probably a good idea to scan any paper forms into online employee files in SharePoint for example, for easy search and access in the future.
I really wanted to introduce you to 2 small HR tech companies that are on the rise in the performance management space. The first is WorkStory. WorkStory automates the feedback process so that performance reviews are quick, easy, and painless. There’s a lot to dread about the annual performance review process, such as trying to find notes from throughout the year, trying to remember examples of how you met your goals, trying to find feedback in emails or files that you received from others, you get the idea. WorkStory helps to automate that collection of feedback throughout the year, so that come review period time, it easily compiles all the data into a beautiful dashboard or report. WorkStory integrates with email platforms, Slack and Microsoft Teams. They run free, 20-minute demos each week. I encourage you to check it out. And let the CEO Matt Meadows know I sent you!
I also wanted to introduce you to Confirm. Their tagline is, let’s end the performance review nightmare. I love what Confirm is doing. As I mentioned earlier, there can be a lot of manager bias in reviews due to that traditional hierarchical approach. A lot of managers don’t know how to give good reviews or predict future performance. According to Confirm, the annual performance review is 60% manager bias, 20% noise and 20% is actual performance data. To combat this, Confirm runs on Organizational network analysis or ONA, where everyone in the organization can review anyone else. Employees can nominate 3 people each based on 4 questions that help answer who top performers are, who has influence and who has knowledge that’s helpful to others.
In an experiment, Confirm found that 2 employees John and Jane, who went through the traditional performance review process conducted by their manager, both got a meetings expectation rating. Through confirm and organizational network analysis, John got below expectations and Jane got above. Maybe the manager is shielding John for whatever reason, or just isn’t someone who gives 4s or 5s, which really stinks for a deserving person like Jane. Confirm provides managers with data they can use to really identify top performers to retain at all costs and lower performers that need coaching and feedback ASAP. I’d love for you to learn about it for yourself. It’s easy to attend a demo and I promise it’ll be a good conversation and you’ll learn a lot.
Wrap-up
This week, think about your performance management process, and the people, process and technology involved to make it a success. Remember you want to develop, reward and retain your top talent, and having a performance management process helps make expectations clear for everyone involved.
Thank you for being here with me and joining me for these bite size videos all about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. These areas of HR and People Ops are my favorite and specialty, and I’m so excited to dive in with you. This work is what I do, if you need help with the tools, technology and process around how you attract, acquire and retain talent, reach out to me and let’s talk!
Claire is Coaching 