Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

It seems everyone is talking about the down economy and its impact on HR lately, but who has the time to read it all? We’ve polled major industry analysts and clients, and boiled their wisdom down to three must-read pieces of advice for managing performance in tough times.

Read the rest of this entry »

What a killer week! An unparalleled opportunity to talk to literally hundreds of clients, prospects, competitors, industry analysts and other luminaries. Here are the three big recurring themes from these conversations:

Read the rest of this entry »

Samuel Culbert wrote a wonderfully provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks back titled “Get Rid of the Performance Review - It destroys morale, kills teamwork and hurts the bottom line. And that’s just for starters.”

Read it here. It’s over-the-top but it sure highlights the things wrong with traditional approaches to performance reviews, including a common thread of managers, subordinates and HR working cross purposes.

Our answer to this at Sonar6 has always been engagement. Performance management has to be useful. Useful for the manager wanting to build performance in their team, useful to the employee wanting support to improve and progress, and most importantly useful to help the organization make better people decisions.

The sentiment is mirrored by Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion in his equally provocative piece “We Are Doing Performance Management All Wrong” where he advocates performance management should not be about automating the performance review process, but rather about equiping everyone to make better decisions. Also definitely worth a read.

With four New Zealand Post business units – Datamail, Express Couriers, Kiwibank and Converga – already using Sonar6 for talent and performance management, Sonar6 is now cementing a long term business relationship across the New Zealand Post Group.

Read the rest of this entry »

To paraphrase every second client conversation I have: “The pressure cooker of the war for talent means I have to rapidly solve this enormously complex problem of attracting, retaining and getting the best out of people. WHERE DO I START?”

In this brief article Mike Carden explains why performance management is the most critical piece of any talent management strategy, as well as offering 4 tips to accelerating performance management in your organization.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was lucky enough to recently meet with Debbie McGrath, founder and Chief Instigator of HR.com – a very cool web portal for the HR community with over 175,000 members!

In Australasia I constantly hear that the HR profession is starved of good local flows of information and commentary around talent management. It immediately occurred to me that HR.com should be a great resource for many of our Australasian customers and fans also. So… if you have not already, check out HR.com, AND membership is free !

Read the rest of this entry »

The biggest mistake of early online performance management systems has been an unrelenting focus on compliance.  Ask HR people with a paper-based system what their biggest issue is and they say, “Compliance. Only 30% of the reviews come back on time.” So, by putting the process online it becomes much easier to track and drive compliance, and crack the whip. Problem solved. NOT.

Unfortunately better compliance tracking does nothing to fix the underlying problem…that users probably weren’t complying because the performance review process was either too hard, considered irrelevant, useless or unnecessary.

In this article Mike Carden discusses the difference between building software to sell to HR departments, versus building software that end users find… useful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nice reminder from Jim Holincheck around the key to successful talent management –
http://blogerp.typepad.com/hcm_research/2007/03/who_owns_talent.html

As with most of these things, it is a fiendishly simple concept and yet one which many companies still spend millions on trying to “enable” through software and consulting.

If your culture doesn’t actively support line managers owning talent management you are wasting your money.

Interesting few days with prospective clients in Australia. The focus on workforce planning and talent management in general is very clear, with several of the initiatives we are involved in having CEO and or Board sponsorship and involvement.

There is also more interest from traditionally “talent averse” sectors of the market such as manufacturing, where cost reduction and revenue growth have been the dominant elements of business / value creation strategies.

Definitely a market we will spend more time in during 07.

Thanks to those of you subscribed to Gartner for the heads up – we were pretty chuffed to be one of the four “Cool Vendors” in their recent Finance and HCM research:

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=502272&ref=g_fromdoc

Apologies to those who don’t subscribe to Gartner – we will have a release out shortly once it has been approved.

It’s also interesting to see that the others listed all have some potential synergy with the talent management field, especially when you take into account the Talent Science approach we have been proposing (Talent_Science.pdf )