Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

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.

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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.

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Research by David Norton and Robert Kaplan of the Balanced Scorecard Consortium shows that nine out of ten companies fail to execute their strategy. What’s more, this same study indicates that only 5 percent of the work force, on average, understands their company’s strategy and a mere 25 percent of managers have their incentives linked to the successful execution of the strategy.

Being able to “cascade” goals down the organization sounds like a solution to these woes. Unfortunately our research suggests that it isn’t.

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I was talking to a CEO yesterday about the difference, in the contribution to her top table discussions, between the CFO and the HR Director. She pulled no punches: “HR is not that good at summarising and predicting.”

She went on to explain how they had started benchmarking top line metrics in staff churn and absenteeism, which they would review in conjunction with staff survey results… but still none of it adequately described what was really happening amongst the people. Maybe absenteeism was up because of the flu, or maybe it was up because that popular manager left. In fact she felt that she learned more by “taking a walk around”.

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Talent is the new king asset, yet most established business disciplines are designed to manage capital, rather than human, assets. In this whitepaper Mike Carden discusses how a new decision science is rising up to help businesses make better decisions about their people. The Sonar6 term for it? Talent Science…

Talent Science Whitepaper 

Read more Talent Science articles from Sonar6.