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:
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.
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.
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.