Creating a Culture of Constant Assessment & Feedback

by Carolyn Kick | Dec 5, 2019 | Performance Management

Performance management and assessment are fundamental to running a successful business at any scale. When you know who is creating organizational gains and who is causing challenges, you can lead much more effectively.

Unfortunately, however, most organizations still assess performance on a yearly basis. That means formalized feedback for employees only comes at the end of long terms, and any discussions about performance in between are seen as scary or punitive.

If your organization is still using the traditional annual appraisal model, you’re missing out on the opportunity to have better, more productive conversations with your employees and create a more data-driven approach to performance and talent management.

Moving forward, we’ll explore:

• Why a continuous feedback system is better than yearly appraisals
• What a continuous feedback system actually looks like
• How to build buy-in for the transition toward constant assessment

Why Continuous Feedback is So Powerful

In general, continuous performance assessment is the best way to support your employees and keep your organization healthy. When you’re constantly deepening your understanding of not just what’s working but why it’s working and how you can extend that success to new arenas, you have the power to transform your organization into its best self.

Transform Managers into True Leaders, Not Just Bosses

Much of the strife surrounding performance assessment (and talent management in general) is rooted in the fact that the average worker and manager don’t have a strong, productive enough relationship to meaningfully discuss performance.

The yearly appraisal model simply perpetuates that disconnect, as team members rarely sit down with their immediate supervisors to discuss goals, performance, achievement, and so on. When those conversations are so spread out, it’s difficult for them to feel authentic – both for the assessor and the worker. Everybody grits their teeth to get through it; nobody actually gains anything.

When you encourage your supervisors to lead ongoing conversations about strengths, areas for improvement, and achievement with each of their team members, you’re creating an environment where assessment can be both less stressful and more useful.

Continuous performance assessment takes that nebulous role of “boss” and defines it in a way that fosters better, more productive relationships and the kind of mentorship and coaching that drives everyone to get better.

Become More Responsive to Talent Needs & Create Opportunity for Improvement

If you’re assessing employees on a yearly or even quarterly basis, you’re leaving yourself open to disaster. The wrong employee or team underachieving in the incorrect position for months at a time can lead to financial disaster. On the other hand, if your best talent is laboring for 11 months at a time without recognition, they’re probably looking for somewhere else to work.

By embracing continuous assessment, you create an agile culture in which it’s easier to:

• Recognize problems or challenges in their early stages
• Strategize adjustments or corrections
• Design actionable improvement plans much more quickly, creating opportunities for employee turnaround.

That responsiveness makes assessment feel more supportive and less punitive. In this way, you can set underperforming talent up to save themselves, rather than letting them go in December because they struggled for an entire year.

How to Design and Anchor a Constant Assessment System

It’s important to start by saying that any business’ performance management and assessment system should be custom-built to address the company’s specific organizational system, goals, and employee culture. With that said, there’s a few pillars that should inform any approach.

Identify Goals, Competencies, and KPIs for Each Position

For your continuous assessment system to be successful, it needs to be grounded in structure, objectivity, and a deep understanding of how you want to do business. That means working with HR and department-level leaders to create a profile of each individual role on your organizational depth chart.

For each position within the organization, you should have a clear sense of:

• What skills and knowledge someone needs to be highly successful in that role
• How their job success will be gauged or measured (projects completed, revenue generated, etc.)
• Which tools or applications will provide assessors with the data they need to assess that person
• What the professional journey might look like for someone in that position (i.e. “If this person is highly successful in this role for two years, what might be next?” or “How long can we afford for someone to underperform in this position?”)
• How that person’s direct supervisor or team leader can guide their professional development to build success for all

Allow Employees to Grow in Ways Most Relevant to Them & Their Work

That strong understanding of your depth chart is crucial to great performance management, but it’s only half the puzzle. Your team members are individuals, and that means you can’t manage them like numbers in a spreadsheet.

When a continuous assessment system accounts for employees’ individual needs, strengths, and quirks, it greatly increases buy-in and builds better business results.

A great continuous feedback loop isn’t just standardized for company use; it’s also personalized to maximize its value for each worker. Upon hire or the completion of each identified assessment term, employees should work with their direct supervisors, coaches, and other relevant professionals to discuss:

• Individual knowledge and skill goals (“What can you do in the next six months to become even more knowledgeable or talented in this role, and how can we support you in that?”)
• Workplace engagement and employee cultural goals (“What can you do over the next term to increase or maintain your participation in or maintenance of our great team, and how can we support that work?”)

To maintain two-way accountability, it’s important to always think about and discuss how work toward these goals will be measured, how success will be assessed, and what success or failure means in terms of next steps.

Foster Two-Way Communication and Reflection

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when it comes to performance management is making it an entirely one-way system where supervisors review their team members individually. That just perpetuates old fears about the workplace power dynamic and makes employees feel voiceless.

An excellent performance management system ensures each employee has a strong voice that’s heard and richly documented throughout their professional journey. Managers should encourage each worker to reflect on their own work and provide self-assessments to accompany supervisor feedback.

At the same time, each worker should have a voice in assessing the functionality of their teams or departments and the success of their manager or supervisor. That way, everybody is empowered with a voice and everybody is kept honest.

Focus on Data

Qualitative feedback about people’s impressions, personal experiences, and reactions is an important part of any assessment, but it can’t be the whole emphasis. In order to win buy-in with your discerning employees and stand up as fair and objective in court, your continuous feedback system must be data-centric.

Thanks to the incredible variety of tech tools and software applications we use on a daily basis, supervisors actually have access to more workflow data than ever – they just have to know how to get it and how to analyze it. With a little training from IT and assessment experts, your supervisors can guide conversations about performance by discussing data points like:

• Job or task completion rates
• Ticket turnaround times
• Campaign success
• Success of accounts managed
• Impact on team-based or departmental goals

When you build your assessment system around data, you’re creating something that’s actually gauging employee success, not just providing observations about work style or personality. That means you’re creating something more authentic, more useful, and more resistant to criticism.

Setting Your Employees Up to Embrace Change

Continuous performance assessment and management are best for business, but they can still be a tough sell at first. That’s because when people hear “continuous assessment,” they think that means more work and more awkward conversations.

In order to dispel those fears and build buy-in for your assessment system, you need to provide your workers and their supervisors/assessors with the support they need to see the value in the new approach and make a smooth transition.

Provide Clarity & Employee Education from Day One

From the day you make the decision to transition towards an ongoing feedback loop, you need to be transparent with your employees about what that means and what they system is going to look like.

You need to provide your ground-level workers with employee education that helps them understand the philosophy of the model as well as how it will affect what they do from day to day or week to week.

For managers, supervisors, and other assessors, you need to bring in talent and performance assessment experts to teach them how to be impactful coaches, use the system right, and get the most out of it.

If you drop ongoing performance assessment into your employees’ laps, you risk significant damage to morale and company culture. If you create a well-explained, well-scaffolded transition, however, you’ll gain the buy-in you need to make such a drastic change.

Make Strong Performance a Core Value Organization Wide

For any initiative to truly change a business and its culture of work, it has to be baked into daily life within the organization. If you want employees to reflect honestly, improve earnestly, and dedicate themselves to maximizing performance, it’s fundamental that you make great performance a highly visible organizational value.

That requires crafting messaging for display around the office, bringing in the right presenters to get your team motivated about performance, and even revisiting things like meeting protocols to make sure that discussions about performance are voiced in every context.

When performance and achievement are key daily values in your workplace, you greatly increase the chances that your employees will engage deeply in the process, strive for excellence, and work to better the environment on the whole.

Honor Your System Through Promotions & Raises

There needs to be an endgame anytime you’re assessing or judging something. If employees don’t understand how your continuous assessment system can be of benefit to them, it’s simply an externalized structure that they’ll engage with exactly as much as they need to in order to keep their jobs.

For people to really honor and value your assessment system in a way that leads to workforce maximization, you need to make it real for them. That means there must be real benefits and real rewards for those who exhibit high performance and take their role as part of the overall evaluation system seriously.

Raises and promotions are the most obvious and classic ways to make that happen.

At the same time, however, it’s important to honor the improvement aspects of your system. For example, if an under-performing employee exhibits a great turnaround, there should be some recognition that motivates them to continue growing.

Takeaways

When you have a strong, continuous feedback loop for every member of your team and each of those team members values and cares about the process, you have the power to maximize your workforce for business and cultural wins.

Just remember:

• Continuous feedback is more powerful for everyone
  • Management gains a better understanding of talent company-wide
  • Struggling or under-performing workers gain the time, structure, and clarity they need to improve in a timely manner
  • All-star talent gains access to a system that helps them feel appreciated and build a documentation trail to support promotions, raises, and so on
• Any constant assessment system must be rooted in data
  • Qualitative observations are never enough
  • Embracing data analysis significantly reduces assessment workload for managers
  • Emphasis on data shows that everything is fair
• You need buy-in from employees at all levels for a continuous assessment system to work
  • Be sure you demonstrate the value of the system and clarify expectations across the board

How to Learn More

If you’re a business leader looking to build an impactful, forward-facing performance management strategy, be sure to join us on Wednesday, December 11th to learn about The Future of Performance Management! 

This free webinar from Launchways will be packed with actionable insights about emerging best practices for performance assessment including…

• How to assess the impact of your current performance management program and get started on building something even better
• How to recognize the common pitfalls of performance management
• How to replace an annual assessment system with a continuous feedback loop
• How to deliver actionable, powerful feedback, even when it’s difficult
• How to build a step-by-step procedure for handling employee underperformance

The hour-long learning experience will feature presentations and Q&A time with an all-star panel of veteran business leaders who know what it takes to build, manage, and continuously improve a great team. Presenters will include…

• Paul Pellman, CEO of Kazoo, who specializes in creating employee engagement and performance management strategies that build purpose and success in the workplace.
• Jodi Wellman, Co-Founder of Spectacular at Work, a leading executive coach who specializes in helping business leaders maximize their teams to build success and balance.
• Adam Radulovic, President at XL.net, an experienced entrepreneur and small business leader with a track record building and managing profit-driving teams at many different scales.
• Jon B. Howaniec, SHRM Certified Professional and VP at Clark Dietz, who oversees talent acquisition, staff development, and employee compensation at a multi-state engineering firm and specializes in strategic planning.

Any business leader, HR director, or manager hoping to improve their skills as a coach, mentor, or accountability partner should make time to check out The Future of Performance Management: How to Modernize Your Approach and start the process continuously improving their team this December!

Creating an Ongoing Feedback Loop for Employee Performance Management

by Gary Schafer | Nov 20, 2019 | Performance Management

Performance assessment and management should be two of any business leader’s top priorities. Unfortunately, discussions about specific employee performance often get lost in the shuffle until a serious issue arises.

That’s because the prevailing performance assessment model feels awkward and inauthentic to most of us – whether you’re the one being assessed or the one doing the assessing. Yearly or quarterly appraisals create “heck weeks” for managers during the review window and create anticipatory anxiety for workers that damages their buy-in and daily productivity.

The long-term performance management strategy we inherited from the 20^th century just doesn’t work well anymore. Given the pace of business and the capabilities of technology, we need performance management processes that are more agile, more responsive, and more immediate.

Moving forward, we’ll explore:

• The true value and potential of a constant feedback loop around employee performance
• How transitioning from a yearly or quarterly assessment system to an ongoing performance management process can be easier than it sounds
• Guiding principles organizations can use as they begin to build their new performance management system

Why Constant Evaluation is Best for Business

Instead of thinking about employee performance on a yearly or quarterly term, businesses of all sizes, industries, and developmental stages should begin to transition toward a culture of constant, on-going evaluation.

It’s easy for that statement to produce a knee-jerk reaction because, on its surface, it does sound like more work and more stress. The fact of the matter, however, is that ongoing assessment provides more value and more authenticity.

Let’s explore some of the ways an ongoing performance assessment feedback loop can be beneficial to a business:

Keep Leadership Aware of the Organization’s Pulse

Senior leaders frequently express frustration that they are unaware of individual employee performance issues until they become a business, legal, or HR problem. That’s because the prevailing yearly assessment system leaves them in the dark for months at a time.

When there’s a formal, ongoing, well-documented discussion about performance between each employee and their direct supervisor, it’s far easier for managers higher up in the chain of command to “take the temperature” of each team or department at a glance.

Be Proactive, Not Reactive

Performance management that operates on a quarterly or yearly term basically assumes that everything is going fine. Unfortunately, however, we live and work in the real world, and that means some things aren’t fine.

When you assess each of your employees regularly, you create a framework to proactively identify low-performing employees or teams and shorten the time that bad apples stay in the barrel. Your ground-level supervisors and team leaders gain a vocabulary, a structure, and a support system that they can use to help senior leadership prevent small problems from turning into big ones.

Maintain Open Lines of Communication About Performance

Yearly performance reviews are a tense time around the office because, when someone’s assessing an entire year of your life, it’s hard not to feel like the process is deeply personal, judgmental, and potentially punitive.

An ongoing performance management strategy makes professional feedback and conversations about improvement part of daily or weekly life within each team or department. That means there’s less of that long-term stress the yearly model creates, and the entire conversation seems more casual, with everybody having a voice and staying plugged in.

Engage Your High Achievers

It’s easy to think of “performance management” as “identifying and eliminating underperformers,” but too often, we forget about the importance of recognizing the great work that high achievers are doing on a daily basis.

Many of your employees who quietly, consistently do well are yearning for a grateful, reassuring pat on the back, and an ongoing conversation about performance with specific feedback is a great way to do that. When great talent feels valued and seen in the workplace, they’re much more likely to stick around or develop into leaders themselves.

Implementing Ongoing Performance Management Isn’t as Difficult as it Sounds

Anytime you say something is going to shift from a yearly practice to a weekly, daily, or ongoing practice, employees understandably get concerned that you’re about to create a lot of additional work for them.

Thankfully, however, transitioning toward an ongoing performance assessment and management model isn’t actually as daunting as it seems because a lot of the system you need to create already exists on an informal level.

Let’s explore some of the reasons adjusting your assessment timetable isn’t as disruptive as you might expect!

Much of the Tech Support Framework is Already in Place

Unlike the supervisors and performance assessors who created the annual appraisal system, you have access to modern HRIS, HCM, document sharing platforms, project management software interfaces, and so on.

That means your supervisors have many ways to measure how their team members are doing that don’t involve looking over their shoulders or having unnecessary, distracting conversations. Our tech-enabled work environment is constantly capturing insights about how individual employees work and achieve differently – it’s just about using that data to its full potential.

By the same token, technology platforms make it easy to house performance management or assessment information in an easily accessible way, so visibility is maximized for supervisors and employees alike.

Team- and Department-Level Leaders are Just Formalizing What They Already Do

Many supervisors, managers, and team leaders in your organization are already making constant performance assessments about everybody they work with. When you transition toward a formal ongoing assessment model, you’re just empowering those leaders to turn those insights into action in the workplace.

When you change models, you’re not creating new anxieties for your managers, you’re providing them with a framework to document their concerns and use them as a basis for authentic discussion about what needs to happen in order for organizational performance to improve.

Employees Want to Know How They’re Doing

Contrary to popular belief, most employees are hungry for feedback. Feedback makes people feel more secure – even constructive feedback – because there’s nothing worse than not knowing how you’re doing.

For many employees, timely feedback can be the difference between feeling underappreciated or feeling entirely bought-into the organization’s mission and vision.

Many business leaders assume buy-in and morale are major hurdles to having more serious conversations about employee performance, but if employees know they have an authentic voice in the system, they will engage.

How to Transition Toward an Ongoing Performance Evaluation Model

So now that we’ve obliterated the myth that ongoing performance management is challenging, creates more work, and harms morale, let’s take a look at what each business needs to do to create a successful, powerful assessment system.

Provide Training to Turn Your Managers into Professional Assessors

For your ongoing performance evaluation system to work well, your supervisors, team leaders, managers, and other assessors need to be really good at giving targeted, thoughtful feedback, brainstorming solutions or improvement plans, and talking to employees in a way that feels supportive and positive yet firm.

Not everybody naturally knows how to do all those things. While some of your supervisors might have gone to school for business management, others have probably risen through the ranks or achieved their position by demonstrating other key skills.

Getting performance management right requires ensuring that each assessor is well-versed in best practices for performance assessment, feedback creation, and so on. That will most likely require some professional training from an outside consultant, but great coaching is the fuel that powers strong performance.

Create a Data-Driven Assessment Process

In order for any assessment system to truly work, it must be fair and based in a shared, objective understanding of the facts. That means your approach to performance management needs to avoid over-reliance on qualitative, observation-based manager feedback and focus on the data.

Thanks to the backend data from those HCM systems, project management applications, and other tech-enabled work platforms we discussed earlier, it’s easier than ever to gather data about work completion times, project success, and other relevant measures of performance. If you bring in a performance management consultant or similar professional, they can also help you identify other easy-to-access data points that can tell powerful stories.

Build in Both Accountability and Mutual Protection

A bad or incomplete performance management system can potentially get your business into a lot of trouble.

On one level, poor performance assessment leaves you vulnerable to sagging business or employee disengagement. On the other hand, bad performance management practices can also lead to wrongful termination claims and other legal issues.

As you design your ongoing performance management system, it’s crucial that you back up your new practices with appropriate, legally compliant policies and provide employee training to guarantee awareness of best practices and key accountabilities.

You need to be sure you’re building something that will hold up to outside scrutiny, display your company values in a positive manner, and help everybody appreciate the weight and importance of the work they do on a daily basis.

Key Takeaways

As we move into 2020, we must augment our practices to reflect the faster pace of business and the increased urgency of success and profitability at scale.

Proactive, ongoing performance management has the potential to strengthen any business and foster healthier discussions about work between employer and employee. Just remember:

• Constant assessment creates a feedback loop that keeps employees, ground-level managers, and upper leadership on the same page when it comes to talent and performance management
• Regular feedback sets low achievers up for improvement and provides high achievers with the recognition they need to thrive
• Making the transition to ongoing feedback isn’t as difficult as you might think as you’re just formalizing and validating the work that many of your managers are already doing in an unstructured way
• Rolling out your new assessment system requires appropriate educational support for both assessors and individual employees to ensure strong coaching and good buy-in
• Feedback should be based in measurable data, not just qualitative observations or feelings