What’s better than a performance review? If you said a poke in the eye, you’d be right there with the vast majority of workers. Kris McGuigan says 4 out of 5 workers say their performance evaluations aren’t working. She didn’t…
Performance & Personality
How to Use Data to Improve Customer Service Performance
The relationship between increased employee engagement and a company’s revenues are strong. Multiple studies, including research from Gallup, have found that the odds of success were nearly double for those workers in the “engaged” group versus the “disengaged” and the…
Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect. Deliberate Practice Does
“Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” – Malcolm Gladwell, Canadian writer and journalist. Per the classic joke, we all know how to get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, practice. More recently, Malcolm Gladwell has distilled the concept of…
6 Steps to a More Effective Performance Management Program
Traditional methods of managing performance aren’t working anymore. Companies are moving away from traditional performance management tools, like annual reviews, to new techniques that emphasize real-time feedback. You know the drill: managers and employees sit down once a year to…
4 Ways to Manage People You Don’t Like
Sooner or later, you’re going to be put in charge of a project, team, or department where you’ll discover that you’re working with someone who “rubs you the wrong way.” Sometimes you know why. Often you don’t. When explaining that…
Get Better Ideas, Higher Engagement and Even Improve Your Managers By Encouraging 2-Way Feedback
Every successful relationship works via a careful process of give and take. We need to learn how to express ourselves, our ideas, and our interests. Equally, though, we need to really listen. Proactive listening can prevent a lot of issues…
Here’s Your Guide to Holding Effective One-on-Ones
One of the most under-appreciated tools of any manager’s toolkit is the one-on-one meeting. It’s a regular time for you to connect with each person reporting to you, get a sense of what they’re working on, where their priorities are,…
HR Roundtable: Bad Behavior and What to Do About It
To kick off a new year, the (Cincinnati) HR Roundtable ventured into an area that is often mumbled about in hallways, but is rarely discussed in the open. Bad behavior. It’s amazing that all of the recent “discoveries” of people…
If Those Performance Reviews All Sound Alike, It Could Be ‘Decision Fatigue’
Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions as one is forced to engage in more and more decision-making. If you’ve ever planned an event, re-designed a home or purchased a new car, you probably remember the exhaustion and…
What You Need to Know About Self-Confidence
Our level of confidence – or our lack of it – lurks at the heart of every business decision we make and action we take. It stifles us or encourages us to move forward, and is something most of us…
Give ‘Thank You’ and ‘I Know’ a Rest
I did a piece a while back on how “thank you” can wear out its welcome in the workplace, and come off as insincere if overused. The law of diminishing returns says that the longer you rely on something for results, the…
This Headline Isn’t Perfect, But It Will Do
I confess to being a perfectionist in a state of constant rehabilitation. I love things done right. And I mean “my” kind of right. The kind of right that is so insanely satisfying to me that the absence of it…
5 Workforce Issues You Need to Focus On This Year
The HR department will need to innovate in 2018. With unemployment at a 17 year low, employers are struggling to find — and retain — top-tier talent with the right skills. Meanwhile, as the turnover rates suggest, workers are more…
7 Keys to Building a World Class Onboarding Experience.
Your CEO probably doesn’t wake up in a cold sweat thinking about your organization’s onboarding program, but maybe (s)he should. It shocks me that onboarding doesn’t have a more elevated importance in many organizations and isn’t more carefully created to…
3 Damaging Myths About Top Performers
Those of us in HR and management spend a lot of time discussing employees — particularly those employees who appear to be struggling. We look for ways to support and encourage them, to boost their performance, and to incentivize them…
Are You Bike-Shedding Your Feedback?
Bike-shedding refers to the act of spending lots of time on unimportant details while leaving crucial matters unattended. The term traces back to 1955 article in The Economist by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian and author. “Parkinson’s Law…
Happy Employees Are Good For Business
It’s highly beneficial for companies to create a happy, healthy work environment for their employees because, let’s face it, losing employees can be costly. Turnover is a huge loss of time in a variety of respects. Wasted/lost time having trained…
Hiring Insights From a CEO Who Places Non-Traditional Workers
Parallel Travel is a rapidly-growing San Francisco Bay Area startup that works with talented local artists across the U.S. to design unique experiences at vacation rentals. It’s an exciting place to work, with the frenzied nature of startup life and…
Reduce Stress By Focusing On the Basics
Stress has the ability to destroy even the best company culture. No matter how hard you’ve worked to foster a positive workplace environment, when employees are overwhelmed, they soon burn out. Then the inevitable happens — productivity slows and the…
Four ‘Red Flags’ to Watch For When You Try to Predict High Potential
The ability to accurately predict potential is the Holy Grail of human resources – long rumored, never found. So it’s curious that human resource consulting firms have recently put their sales and marketing teams in overdrive to convince you that…