Using social goals as part of your performance management process

There’s no doubt that setting goals is a vital component of the performance appraisal process. Goals can give employees direction, they can be used as a performance indicator as well as act as a tool for motivation. But with the accelerating speed of change in organisations and the demand for quick responses and continuous feedback, annual goals can quickly become obsolete. So should we be re-thinking the way we use goals as part of the performance appraisal process?

By using a more collaborative approach, empowering employees and changing from a culture of top-down control, some organisations are moving towards more transparent and agile systems to improve performance and accomplish workloads.

So how can goals be used collaboratively? Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, the two most recognised academic researchers on goal setting, have stated in their research that “Making a public commitment to a goal enhances personal commitment.”

Making a goal public or social will certainly encourage collaboration among team members and open communication between colleagues. Social goals allow employees to work in real-time by sharing work amongst peers, managers and teams. Goals are shared and worked on collaboratively across teams and the organisation. Individual performance is monitored in real-time and has direct relevance to results.  Teams can rally around objectives in an easy, open and social way. This helps teams to stay focused on what really matters and encourages individuals to work towards driving the key targets that impact the business.

There are a number of new and innovative social performance management platforms on the market now. These systems fully embrace the concept of collaborative, social goals. WorkSimple’s platform allows individuals and teams “to set relevant goals that impact work happening on a daily basis.” The platform provides a news stream which enables individuals to view what their peers are working on and see how their own work fits into the bigger picture.

Rypple, which has recently been acquired by Sales Force describe their approach to social goals - “you can inspire your team to set challenging objectives — and actually accomplish them. Objectives and key results achieved are showcased on individual profile pages so people know where they stand and what’s expected of them….. Share your goals publicly on Rypple and access resources from across the company. People in your organisation can join goals — and invite others to collaborate with them. Teams aligned around achieving the right objectives work better together and more effectively.”

So adopting a social approach to performance management can certainly help companies to align goals in real time in addition to making them highly focused.  Ultimately, the workforce feels more engaged, more in touch with where the business is heading and more empowered to engage in its success.

A different approach to using performance feedback

How often do you receive feedback on your performance? For many, it’s like waiting for a bus – nothing for ages and then it all comes at once. You might receive it just once or twice a year during a performance appraisal or perhaps, if you’re really lucky, monthly or weekly during a team briefing.  In many organisations feedback is still associated with a formal appraisal process or annual event.  In fact, feedback given outside of these times might even go unnoticed because it’s not considered “formal”.

Ideally, feedback should form part of a coaching process which gives direction and guidance on how to improve personal performance. It’s normally considered the manager’s job to give it. There are obvious problems associated with this; if feedback is only given periodically it can be out of date and irrelevant. If it’s mainly given by the manager it can be unknowingly biased or inaccurate. It’s true that the trend towards 360 degree feedback has helped to balance out any discrepancies by creating an opportunity for individuals to receive feedback from peers, colleagues and even external sources.  However, 360 feedback is often linked to an annual performance review and therefore can also be out of date and inaccurate. Colleagues can be scratching around for something to say for the sake of it. Unless continuous notes have been made throughout the year, often only the most recent events come to mind.

So how can personal feedback be given more effectively and not used as just part of the performance review?  How about turning it round and creating a different working culture where employees are primarily responsible for getting their own feedback, not annually but daily in real-time. Why not make giving feedback more personal, interactive, timely and focused … rather than just an activity which take place during the formal review process?

For this to work, employees will need to adopt a common belief that it’s everyone’s responsibility to continually share and seek out helpful information. Employees need to feel empowered to comment on their colleagues’ performance … constructively, not critically. And, they should understand that it’s not only the manager’s responsibility to give feedback.

Feedback given to an employee by their superior on their strengths and weaknesses gives a top down message that employees should not seek out their own feedback.  But, surely the receiver of the feedback will be more responsive to criticism or praise if they’ve initiated the request for feedback and surely it’s easier to give constructive feedback if it’s been asked for?

Generation Y are communicating constantly and expect instant answers.  When it comes to finding out how they’re doing at work, will they be content to sit back and wait for formal feedback to be given in a periodic review?  Unlikely …. Requesting and giving feedback daily and continuously is already part of their busy social networking life!

So when re-thinking your appraisal process, consider feedback as a separate process. Of course, making this possible requires a ‘platform’ – I’ll be talking more about social performance management platforms during the next few weeks.

Is it time to re-think your performance appraisal process?

Could a business improve its organisational performance without using an annual appraisal process? Could performance management ever change from being a top down to a bottom up process?  Could you afford to abandon performance reviews altogether?  Some interesting questions but we can’t get away from one fact; employees need to know where they stand and organisations need to know how employees are doing. But, how would we achieve this without the performance appraisal?

In many organisations a performance appraisal is currently used for a number of reasons; giving feedback, coaching, setting goals, setting pay rises and bonuses, measuring performance, identifying training and development needs, boosting motivation and providing recognition. All this important information lumped into one end of year formal meeting . Often this meeting is met with dread, fear, anxiety or disillusionment by employee and sometimes even manager.  An hour’s formal meeting is seemingly all it takes to analyse one year of an employee’s hard work, create a learning and development plan, set objectives for the following year and even sometimes set bonus or pay rise. Often the information used is calculated using unreliable ratings or out of date statistics gathered from employee, manager and sometimes, if using 360 degree feedback, other team members.  Not forgetting that the success of the meeting relies on the fact that the manager is a good coach and the employee is receptive. In a matter of minutes, a previously motivated employee could turn into a shrinking violet. So, what’s the alternative or is there one?

It’s true people need and want to know how they’re doing and understand the information that may influence their career development or pay but is it really necessary to discuss so much and place so much emphasis on one or two meetings a year? This not only puts pressure on the ability of the manager but also on the relationship between the employee and the manager.

With this in mind, I think the first step in the journey to re-thinking your appraisal process should be to consider an appraisal as a number of different processes.  These processes could be divided into goals, coaching and development, feedback and recognition, remuneration, and motivation for example.

Over the next week or so my blog will take each of these processes individually and look at how they could be implemented differently and more creatively to eventually negate the need for an annual review.

What's different about social learning platforms?

I was recently asked what the difference is between a Learning Management System (LMS) and a Social (or collaborative) Learning Platform (SLP).

Simply, a Social Learning Platform creates a continuously evolving collaborative enterprise learning environment whereas a Learning Management System is a static platform which enables the management and delivery of learning content and resources.

So what exactly is ‘collaborative learning’ and how can it benefit business? To answer that question, let’s firstly look at some basic facts about the way we acquire knowledge. There are two methods to consider; firstly, formal structured learning which is made up of face to face activities like classroom training and coaching and secondly, self-led web based activity such as elearning courses. This type of ‘structured’ learning can be managed and monitored using an LMS.

But what about using the knowledge acquired through the secong method, ‘informal’ learning? According to research carried out by Princeton University, 70% of an individual’s knowledge base is acquired through informal learning; learning from experience, role models and problem solving for example. Informal learning happens, often subconsciously, as part of our everyday life. It’s not planned or structured and therefore often isn’t taken account of in business learning strategy. Organisations who've introduced a Social Learning Platform have taken a huge step towards making use of this invaluable resource. But, how?

Firstly, a Social Learning Platform encourages and incentivises employees to share the knowledge they’ve gained from both informal and formal learning by allowing them to create and upload their own learning material. Secondly, employees are encouraged to communicate proactively, the aim being to create and support a mentoring or coaching culture developed from within; ultimately, employees learn from each other. The Social Learning Platform acts as a central hub which is constantly evolving and growing as new knowledge is added daily. This can be in the form of video, documents and links to websites. When I explained this to my fifteen year old daughter she said “Mum, that sounds like Facebook” - Well, in fact some Social Learning Platforms are intentionally designed to look like Facebook, but don’t be fooled; there are some essential differences. Apart from being flexible to business needs, branded and unique to each organisation, in my opinion, a good Social Learning Platform also has the following elements;

Firstly, a top-down library of learning resources, very similar to a traditional learning management system. Secondly, a bottom-up element which enables employees to make their own contributions to engage others and build content. Thirdly, a community environment which encourages employees to connect and share their knowledge with each other. When these three elements come together, the result is the creation of a continuous learning and coaching culture. However, a truly effective Social Learning Platform should also contain a performance indicator or leader board. A ‘shared learning community’ will only be successful if everyone takes part. By providing public recognition for time spent learning and sharing, the leader board ensures that employees feel incentivised and motivated to get involved. All this information of course needs to be linked by a skills matrix providing a meaningful collaborative and continuous learning environment.

Some static learning management systems have now added a social element to their platform but I sometimes wonder if this has been thought through carefully enough … By introducing a chat or community feature only - is this really going to work if employees aren’t engaged or incentivised to participate? Couldn’t they use other social networking tools for this?

Surely Social Learning Platforms are the way forward for enterprise learning.

Learning Leaders

This week the winners of the Bersin & Associates 2012 Learning Leaders(TM) Program, now in its sixth year, were announced. The report makes interesting reading, detailing how the winners improved their businesses with innovative, efficient and effective approaches to employee learning and talent management.

Kim Lamoureux, Senior Director of Research Practices and Principal Analyst said "Learning teams increasingly measure how training and development contribute to the top and bottom lines of their organization. Social networking for the first time played a role in almost every entry, enabling learning and talent leaders to leverage the expertise of their people to find new talent and train current employees without creating formal programs."

I will being summarising its contents in my next few blogs but, if you can't wait, you can download the complimentary 108-page report from http://marketing.bersin.com/2012LearningLeaders.html

The latest acquistion in the talent management software market

There’s a lot of movement in the talent management software industry. Today’s announcement that Oracle has agreed to buy Taleo is just one in a long line of acquistions in the past 6 months. SAP acquiring SuccessFactors plus Salesforce acquiring Rypple. Who will be next in line?

New HR cloud based solutions are coming onto the market at a rapid pace and most are taking into account of the growing popularity of social, collaborative platforms. It’s also interesting that technology which was originally aimed at the consumer, like apps and social networks, are now moving into the enterprise market.

However, it needs to be remembered the HRM needs are diverse and often unique to each organisation. Finding the right solution isn’t an easy task for any organisation, there still isn’t a product available which is flexible and customisable enough to fit ‘all’.

Will Rypple make a Splash?

Rypple is a web-based social performance management tool which provides a more collaborative and social approach to performance management.  The system allows for continuous conversation between employee, manager and other team members.  The software employs various game mechanics, like badges, which can be custom-built to reflect a company’s own values.  At the same time it provides a platform to create ‘social’ goals for teams and managers. Goals can be shared and employees can join up their goals and invite others to contribute.  Other team members can comment, rate and provide feedback on an individual’s performance. Employees are encouraged not to sit back and wait for feedback; social performance tools encourage you to check and see how you’re doing.

Founded in 2008, Rypple have raised $13 million in funding and can boast Facebook as one of their clients but will it catch on? Rypple’s social performance platform certainly provides a way for teams to communicate effectively and targets can be easily monitored on a daily basis.  It’s great for rewarding a job well done but it doesn’t take away the need for private one to one meetings to give constructive criticism.  Making your performance management process agile is all about making it continuous and constant and social performance tools do that. However, they don’t take over the need for an annual review. 

The concept is good and Rypple have certainly made a splash in the HCM world by recently being acquired by Sales Force. Furthermore, they’ve recently launched a new android app for mobile use. l’ll be writing more about social performance management tools next month.

Social Learning Platforms - are they the answer to improved performance?

The current trend in learning and development is centred on social learning, mobile technologies, gaming and collaboration. It’s all new and buzzy and there are some very exciting social learning platforms emerging. But before rolling out a new innovative learning programme within your organisation, it may be advisable to step back and remember that the latest trends will not act as a simple replacement for your organisation’s learning needs or a magic formula for improving overall performance. Many of these new platforms will only really work if all employees are committed to the concept. Try a pilot with one department or team. Let its success sell the new concept for you. If it’s as good as you think then the word will soon get around!

Mentoring - the great come back

Peoples’ approach to learning is changing … fast.

Just look at the most successful forward thinking organisations today. They aren’t just led by the CEO, COO and CFO; it’s more and more common to see a CLO (Chief Learning Officer) sitting alongside the main decision makers in the boardroom. Senior management are finally seeing the significance of learning and how it directly links to competitive edge and success.

Added to this, there’s now an expectation by employees that an employer will support their learning needs. Organisations are unlikely to develop and, ultimately, retain talented people if employees aren’t presented with the opportunity to learn and develop.

Of course, presenting learning opportunities to employees is no longer the challenge it used to be. Web based programmes have completely transformed the world of learning. Employees can take more control of their learning and go about it independently.

Yet still, there will always be a role for the mentor. E-learning will suit some topics but others, particularly behavioural and management skills, benefit from the support of a mentor. There’s no doubt though that, in the coming years, mentoring will no longer be seen as a benefit available to only senior management. Personal mentoring will be as common and as accessible as elearning is today.  New technology is now providing mentors and personal coaches with a greater degree of flexibility for supporting employees continuously and remotely.

With some managers and work colleagues now taking on this responsibility comes the obvious benefit of hands-on, work related experience. Added to this comes a natural linkage towards social and collaborative learning, a trend that the most forward thinking organisations have already identified and acted on.