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A CLEAR Approach to Agile Goal Setting

A business without goals is like a ship without direction  ̶  you will end up somewhere, but you won't know where (and your "crew" likely won't be too pleased with the landing spot).

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“In Case You Missed It: Best Performance Management Articles this Month”

Find yourself having trouble keeping up with the latest HR/talent management industry news? With our new monthly series, you’ll never have to miss a beat!

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Who Do Performance Reviews Really Help?

It’s time for the annual performance review process: managers are wracking their brains to complete all of the paperwork; employees are stressed out thinking about how to condense a whole year of accomplishments into a few sentences and a 30-minute conversation, and HR is languishing in deadlines and details to ensure the entire process goes off successfully.

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What Do Employees Need from Performance Reviews?

The performance review system, as it stands today, is broken. Employee engagement rates are abysmal, hovering around 30% according to Gallup research, and part of the reason for that is employees simply aren't getting the substance they need from managers during performance reviews.

So what do employees need from performance reviews?

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Simple Steps to Improve Real-Time Feedback & Recognition

We want information and we want it immediately. Whether it's our phones buzzing with a Facebook notification letting us know it's a friend from middle school's birthday, or a pop-up on our computers telling us we have a text message, we live in an always-on world.

Why then is the workplace falling so far behind?

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Managing a Toxic Superstar Employee

As Fox News finally showed Bill O’Reilly the door late last week, managers everywhere winced in sympathy. Many have lived through the realization that they have hired, inherited, or created a toxic but high-performing employee. Businesses value superstar employees so much that they often turn a blind eye to toxic behavior—but this is a mistake, and can end up damaging both a company's reputation and its wallet. Ultimately, it's a manager's job to take control and curb toxic behavior as early and as quickly as possible.

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6 Performance Management Lessons Learned from Marathon Training

Today is a sacred day in Boston as the annual Patriot's Day Boston Marathon runs from Hopkinton, MA all the way into the city.  Thousands of runners will take part, and for all of them, the day is the celebration and achievement of months and months of focus, training, coaching, learning and athletic performance management.

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TalentFirst Appoints Julie Zadow as CMO

TalentFirst Appoints Human Capital Management Leader Julie Zadow as Chief Marketing OfficerCompany Sets Stage for Rapid Growth in Burgeoning Performance Management Sector BRIDGEWATER, NJ—March 29, 2017—

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6 Tips for a Performance Management Spring Cleaning

With the first days of Spring finally here, it might be time to take a pause and assess your people leadership score for the first quarter of the new year.  Q1 is inevitably the time when businesses come out punching, charging at the new year's goals and objectives, ready to jumpstart the strategic plan, duel with the competition, and drive immediate results for the quarter and beyond.

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Annual Performance Reviews...Still Serving Two Masters?

TalentFirst had a great chat this week with WilliamTincup, the President of Recruitingdaily.com, and one of the most experienced advisers in the HR Tech space.

We were discussing the evolution of annual performance reviews, and the reality that many companies readily admit today: The original system of annual performance reviews was designed, as William put it, "to serve two masters, which never works."

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