Articles tagged 'Performance reviews'

News, Rewards & Recognition, Talent Management

How Do You Evaluate Contributions to Your Workplace Team?

by on Dec 21, 2012, 7:00 AM  |  No comments yet
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This week, in his always excellent Three Star Leadership blog, management guru Wally Bock said this:

When you review performance you should review both team and team member performance. Pay attention to how team members work together and support each other. Be alert for situations where one person pulls the others down or lifts them up.”

Wally couldn’t be more correct in the importance of evaluating contribution to the team. The catch is this: how do you do that effectively? How do you go beyond the anecdotal or the few occasions you may have witnessed (both positive and negative) to accurately capture how well someone truly contributes to (or detracts from) the team’s success? Read more…

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HR Management, Talent Management

Performance Review Hooey, or 4 Ways to REALLY Build Business Success

by on Dec 18, 2012, 12:27 PM  |  No comments yet
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It’s that time again when organizations are abustle with performance grading, self reviews, rank ordering, goal setting, final performance evaluations, and merit pay raises all in the name of managing performance.

The amount of activity and anxiety the performance review process produces could make last minute Christmas shopping look like a seasonal stress reliever. So what’s all the fuss about?

They say that if managers don’t do end-of-year performance reviews, people won’t work hard enough at their jobs; it’s a last ditch effort to hold people accountable. Really? Is that what we believe about our so-called greatest assets? Read more…

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Classic TLNT

The Top 50 Problems With Performance Appraisals

by on Dec 14, 2012, 9:12 AM  |  No comments yet
Performance review

Editor’s note: Sometimes, readers ask about past TLNT articles that they have heard about but may have missed. That’s why every Friday we’re republishing a Classic TLNT post that some of you have asked about.

“(Some) 90 percent of performance appraisal processes are inadequate.” – Salary.com survey

In conversations with HR leaders and employees, the talent management process that suffers from the most disdain around the world is the performance appraisal. It’s one of the few processes that even the owners of the process dread.

If everyone hates it, but it still gets done nearly everywhere, you might assume some asinine government regulation requires it, but in this case there is no such regulation. The only legal justification pertains to showing just cause for termination and other disciplinary action. Read more…

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Talent Management

Frustrated With 360 Degree Surveys? This May be a Better Alternative

by on Oct 26, 2012, 10:30 AM  |  1 comment
360

The use of 360 degree surveys in business has been around since the 1980’s, and by the late 1990’s, was being used by approximately 90 percent of Fortune 1000 companies.

The prevalence of 360 degree surveys continues to this day. Its popularity can be attributed in part to two key assumptions:

  • Different perspectives and multiple people rating improves measurement accuracy compared to single source measurements.
  • An individual’s self -awareness and perceived need for change will be enhanced by a systematic process of introspection and the review and comparison of ratings from others.

However, the assumption of improved measurement quality can be challenged in some circumstances. Read more…

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Talent Management

In Praise of Performance Observations for Managers

by on Oct 23, 2012, 9:13 AM  |  No comments yet
performance

What do you do, as a manager if you spot an employee doing something well in your business?

What do you do if you spot them doing something badly?

I am sure the answers are:

  • Praise them.
  • Point this out to them and help them to do it more effectively.

What a perfectly correct outcome, which of course, hides the many impediments, related to: Read more…

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Global HR, Talent Management

Employees Make It Clear: Here’s What They Need to Really be Engaged

by on Oct 2, 2012, 7:00 AM  |  1 comment
employee-engagement

Thanks to a great article in HRZone.co.uk by Leslie Allen, I came across these interesting results of a recent  Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) study in the UK.

The CIPD in the United Kingdom is similar to SHRM in the United States. This 2012 research reflects the employee satisfaction and engagement attitudes of nearly 300,000 employees and managers across industries throughout the UK.

Key findings:

  • 39 percent are engaged (up 3 percentage points);
  • 3 percent are completely disengaged (constant from Winter 2011);
  • 58 percent are neutrally engaged (up 2 percentage points from Winter 2011). Read more…
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HR News & Trends

Weekly Wrap: Why Performance Improvement Plans Are a Big Cop-Out

by on Sep 7, 2012, 12:55 PM  |  No comments yet
PIP

I’ve written here before about performance improvement plans (PIPs) and how I generally think they’re a fraud, used largely to provide cover to management for firing people they simply want to get rid of.

In case you missed it, here’s what I wrote about PIPs in June:

Performance improvement plans are a program that you put an employee on so you can closely monitor their work because, well, somebody, somewhere has determined that they aren’t cutting it and need remedial help.

But in my experience, 99 percent of the time a performance improvement plan isn’t about helping a worker improve — it’s about gathering additional evidence and setting up the framework to boot them out the door.” Read more…

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Talent Management

The Top 5 Pain Points in Performance Reviews (And How To Solve Them)

by on Sep 5, 2012, 7:00 AM  |  3 Comments
Most everyone dreads dealing with performance appraisals.

Let’s be honest: performance reviews are a pain in the you-know-what.

Employees don’t like them and HR aren’t fans either — 45 percent of HR leaders didn’t think reviews were good gauges of a worker’s performance, compared to last year’s 39 percent, according to a poll by the Society of Human Resource Management and Globoforce. They simply aren’t the kind of feedback the modern worker needs to perform better, particularly in ever changing work environments.

More specifically though, performance reviews don’t do much to help an employee to stop and realize what they are doing right or wrong as they need it. Yes, performance reviews may focus on the “big picture” stuff, but that’s not what employees need in the moment. Read more…

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HR Insights, Talent Management

Continuous Feedback: It May Be a Better Approach Than the Annual Review

by on Aug 22, 2012, 7:00 AM  |  9 Comments
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I’ve done a lot of research and reading lately that really cemented my view that feedback delivered via the formalized annual performance review, is not very useful as a developmental tool.

To be useful (i.e. leveraged to drive development), feedback needs to be continuous. It needs to be baked into the day-to-day rhythm of work.

To help bring this point home, I am going to use two examples – athletes and software developers. What do athletes and software developers have in common? In terms of harnessing the power of continuous feedback — a lot. Read more…

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Talent Management

Why 360° Reviews Are No Better Than Regular Performance Appraisals

by on Aug 15, 2012, 7:02 AM  |  1 comment
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Regular readers will know that I am not a fan of the traditional annual performance appraisal, for many reasons, not least of which are:

  1. They’re annual, which is far too infrequent to change behaviors or redirect efforts for best results.
  2. They usually reflect the opinion, perception and feedback of just one person.
  3. They engender fear and trepidation among both the manager giving the appraisal and the employee receiving it. Read more…
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