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Does performance management have to be painful?

When is the last time, as a people leader, you entered into the season of performance management with wide-eyed excitement? Does that sound ridiculous? I’m laughing even as I write it. Traditional performance management processes and tools are typically time-cycle driven, rating and ranking focused and arduous and tedious for managers and employees alike. Regardless of the characteristics of the manager/team member relationship, few welcome this time of year.

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Setting Goals – Part 1 of 3 - New Year, New Goals What's the point if we don't stick with them?

In organizations, most of us begin our fiscal year with some form or another of goal setting. As people managers, we hold a meeting with each of our team members to discuss what their top priorities should be. Some of us request that each team member come prepared with their ideas of their goals. We come to some form of consensus and enter those goals into our performance management system.

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Goal Setting – Part 2 of 3 – New Year, New Goals – Keeping on track with goal agility

What happens when we have a major business event during the year that was unexpected? Have you heard of VUCA? It's actually a military term that has been adopted in the Talent Management arena, and often used when discussing Performance Management.

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Goal Setting – Part 3 of 3 – New Year, New Goals – Building collaboration and engagement with goal transparency

So you've created great goals with pathways to achieve them for 2016 for all of your team members. You've also accounted for potential unexpected VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) events that your team members may or may not experience during the course of your company's fiscal year.

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We need better performance management technology, but where do we begin?

At some point in any Talent leader’s career it’s likely they will be tasked with making a major change to any one of their Talent Management processes and systems ranging from talent acquisition to on-boarding through to succession planning, and the idea of making such a major change can be a daunting one! One particular process that is under a lot of scrutiny right now at many organizations is the performance management process and the systems that support them.

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Performance Ratings – The Great Demotivator

The other day I received an email from a friend that stated, "Had my performance review today, apparently I ‘Meet Expectations’; I went home and started applying for new jobs." This may seem like a drastic reaction to being told that you meet expectations, but unfortunately, responses like this are not uncommon. Labeling people with a rating, whether good, bad or neutral, can cause a negative reaction and can actually have the opposite effective of what was intended.

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Performance Ratings – Finding a Better Way

Ask most HR people why their company uses a performance rating scale and you will likely get a response such as, "Without ratings, how will people know where they stand?" or "How will we justify increases if there are no ratings?" or even, "It’s just the way it has always been done here." Labeling employees with a rating is a practice that has been in place for a long time at most companies and more times than not, performance ratings are linked to other processes such as salary increases,

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Annual Goals-It’s Time for a Visit!

It’s hard to believe that the first quarter of the year is over already! Didn’t we just ring in the New Year, make (and probably break) our new year’s resolutions, and set our annual goals? Although it may seem like we just finished setting goals, now is the time to revisit them for a few reasons.

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Keep Goals on Track with Links to Learning

In my last blog, I encouraged readers to visit their goal progress so far for the year and to evaluate where their time is being spent. Hopefully you have done this yourself, and have analyzed how you are using your time and have identified any barriers that may be getting in the way of your highest priorities. Perhaps you are one of the lucky few who are 100% on track with your goals and every day, you are able to spend the majority of your time in high payoff activities.

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Talent Management – Is it the all you can eat buffet of HR?

Ask ten people to define talent management and chances are, you will get ten very different definitions covering everything from how you hire to how you fire. But no matter how you define it, there is one common element at the root of talent management - people. Ideally, talent management should be a series or set of integrated processes that impact every stage of an employee’s career with the goal of keeping them engaged, motivated and productive in order to help a company meet its strategic and operational goals.

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