Support of the CEO and Executive Team

When CEOs model the way for effective talent management you see successful system implementations and results. This includes defining clear expectations, setting individual development goals, conducting performance reviews on time, coaching and mentoring individuals, and holding managers accountable to fulfilling the same performance. We find that managers are most uncomfortable with building employee relations and holding others accountable to meeting expectations. They are uncomfortable with the dialogs and conversations required to be effective. They often let their own insecurities get in the way of helping others be better. The CEO is the best person to help managers overcome the fear and intimidation of the process and coach others to success.

Avoiding Complexity Creep

Complexity is what makes most good intentions a wasted effort. Without clear expectations, it is easy for complexity to creep back into the process. People start adding and building in features for all the contingencies and therefore confuse the true purpose and meaning required for the process. Your talent processes should be audited at least annually to look for opportunities to streamline and eliminate unnecessary complexities. This requires measuring outcomes and monitoring processes to determine what you need to weed out to optimize the time of HR staff and managers.

The Right HR Management and Talent Leadership

Few HR managers and staff have business systems and operations experience. This lack of understanding often makes it difficult for them to effectively integrate talent practices into the organization’s functional aspects. This may impede them from displaying the courage needed to engage and educate managers on the importance and practical steps to implement talent management priorities.

Internal Focus on Continuous Process Improvement and Paperless Processes

HR involves a lot of paperwork and provides great opportunities for savings in the time and money spent on resources – people, paper, email, and training. Talent managers must understand the business and where reduction in resources can be implemented.

Passion and Courage

Talent management is about people coming together to achieve a common purpose. The leader’s passion and commitment to achieve a vision is required to engage a systemic and focused talent program. Leadership must be persistent without compromise to achieve a focused and deeply engaged system. Passion is contagious, and the courage to take action only occurs when leadership sets the right example.

Share Your Experience

What challenges or successes have you encountered in your talent management program?

When you’re running a business you take great pains to develop your vision and strategy and to use a model that works. When you put so much effort into putting all the pieces in the right place, why would you even consider changing the configuration of your unique processes to accommodate the rules and structure of a talent management system? That’s what many systems require; we’ve heard it from our clients, and we’ve experienced it ourselves.

BLOOM Performance Management System Eliminates the Excess

Front line managers need a system that supports them and helps them align talent with strategy. In our experience, successful talent management software means that you connect:

• Strategic growth initiatives
• Transparent measure for success
• Organizational structure
• Roles & key results areas
• Individual development plans
• Talent & performance reviews
• Rewards, advancements & incentives
• Learning & development programs

A Better Way: Simple Talent Management

We designed BLOOM® to be a simple talent management system. BLOOM’s approach:

• Wins early buy-in from front line managers because they understand the benefits of talent management AND how to use the software
• Clearly connects business strategy with organizational structure
• Supports your business process rather than imposing a rigid framework that just doesn’t fit
• Achieves quick, easy implementation without additional fees (often that means you’ll be up and running in a matter of weeks (or days if you have all your data ready) – not months!)

Other systems are these systems overly complicate and priced so that clients pay for those little- to never-used features!

We become enamored by bells and whistles for many reasons. In the world of talent management, it is usually out of wanting to cover all of the bases, except we find that most HR managers and executives don’t really know what performance management game they are playing when they are making their selections. Here are just some of the reasons why:

1. There is no focus on process. Letting software dictate your process is a huge mistake. This immediately causes the mindset to get every feature possible just in case you may need it someday. There is no focus on real objectives, culture, and steps for success. Upon signing of a new talent management software contract, you are left with a pile of tools and no vision of the house you are trying to build. This leads to overload and confusion at the start of your implementation process.
2. The assumption is made that “we can just turn off the features that we don’t want need.” If the features are there, they must be configured and reasoned with. Here is where the trade-offs begin. This will always make your talent management process more constrained and complex than it needs to be.
3. Another assumption: “the more we invest in the most robust system, the better the results.” When it comes to talent management systems, the proof is in the ability to successfully implement system use with front line management. Here, their measure is the simpler, the better. Your managers simply do not have time to be talent management software experts. They want to learn the system with a 2-hour or less training and move on to meaningful results. If they are spending more time tracking performance in software than mentoring performance in the field, then you have a problem.
4. Paying for expensive software cannot replace the value of top-notch HR management. Technology does not run itself – people and processes run software. HR management is the director of the orchestra. In fact, the more complex you make the system the higher the executive talent needed to plan and oversee the implementation all of the components.
5. “The more we pay, the more we prove our commitment to people.” This one may not be as conscious as the other assumptions. However, there are organizations where being and having “the best” is a part of their culture. In the quest to be the best, you can also end up buried in fees and features that take months if not years to sort through. At the end of the day, your people want to invest in them, not your software. They need to know very simply what you expect of them and what resources they have for growth and development. This is not complicated, nor should be the software that tracks it.

Systems like BLOOM come with a simple methodology that streamlines operations and keeps the complexity and high-expense out. Be clear on the process you are trying to achieve for optimal talent performance and keep it simple. Your bottom line will be richer and your people will be thankful.

Interesting in learning more about simple talent management? Contact us to schedule a demo of BLOOM.

“The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” (http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 slide 7)

Although the idea is not completely new, Netflix approach is easy to understand. They outline these seven aspects of their corporate culture:

• Values are what we Value
• High Performance
• Freedom & Responsibility
• Context, not Control
• Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled
• Pay Top of Market
• Promotions & Development

The company values judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, innovation, courage, passion, honesty, and selflessness and they address in general terms what each of those mean beginning on slide 10 (http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664).

How can a company succeed with such loosely defined policies?

The answer is simpler than you might think: they trust their employees to make good decisions. They can do this because they focus on hiring and retaining high-performing employees. Performance matters. The values permeate the Netflix culture from hiring to promotions or firing.

Netflix understands the value of top performers.

Netflix asks the question: “who would you fight hard to keep?” The answer identifies high performing employees, whom they reward based on quality of work and effectiveness rather than the number of hours they log. Employees who don’t contribute much or who resist challenges are essentially dead weight: they drag the team down and better serve the company by moving on than by hanging on. The Netflix example emphasizes the importance of providing context so high performers have enough information and knowledge to make good decisions; the alternative – establishing control – leads to bureaucracies and red tape that bog down progress and stifle growth.

How to align top performers with company values and strategy.

Generally, top performers have can-do attitudes and get things done regardless of whether their job description includes the task. How do you measure autonomy and results? A strategic performance management system like BLOOM provides tools to track education, talent reviews, and most importantly it provides a means to align an organization’s strategy – including initiatives, objectives, goals and action steps that are directly tied to employees. BLOOM even integrates the company values into talent reviews to assure employees are aligned to the culture.

When an organization enables top performers to operate by values rather than requires them to adhere to strict rules, it enables the adaptability, purpose and creativity that lead to company growth and innovation. It instills a sense of trust and ownership.

Think about the values your organization has. How do they and their resulting processes contribute to your culture? How do they detract? What motivates each – a desire to innovate or a need to control?

We developed the BLOOM® performance management system to take bigger picture questions into account, and you should be asking those questions if you’re not already. Specifically:

1. How often will the organization complete formal reviews?
2. Will reviews be completed at the time of each employee’s anniversary date or will there be a unified annual process where reviews are completed at one time throughout the organization?
3. Which rating scale will we use?
4. What do we want the review to measure?
5. How many people will give input to each employee’s review?
6. Will managers be expected to work with employees and set individual development goals and training at the time of the review?

A sound performance management system like BLOOM® will help you manage your performance review process. Here’s how:

1. How often will the organization complete formal reviews?

BLOOM® accommodates 90, 180, and 365 day review cycles, which you enter when you first implement the system. BLOOM® then automatically schedules new reviews and due dates so you don’t have to monitor the calendar or notify managers. When you enter a new employee, BLOOM® sets up a 90 day Introductory Review that the HR administrator can disable if needed. When the manager completes the Introductory Review and HR approves it, BLOOM® schedules the next review based on your review cycle. Some organizations conduct informal check‐ins between formal reviews, and we often provide our clients with resources to guide these informal check-ins so they align with the bigger picture, too.

2. Will reviews be completed at the time of each employee’s anniversary date or will there be a unified annual process where reviews are completed at one time throughout the organization?

How you structure review schedules is up to you. BLOOM® can accommodate either option. Having said that, we believe that a unified annual review cycle helps streamline the review process and save paperwork time. It also forces a sense of urgency for completion throughout the organization.

3. What rating scale will we use?

BLOOM® offers a 3, 4, and 5 point rating scale. If you read our post about rating scales you know that we recommend a 5-point scale because we believe it gives an opportunity to communicate all conditions of employee development.

4. What do we want the review form to measure?

With BLOOM® you can customize your performance review form based on the following criteria:

• Work Relationships
• Creativity & Initiative
• Communication Skills
• Role Knowledge (view training record)
• Organization Standards
• Individual Goals (imported from the employee record)
• Competency Review (imported from the role description)
• Pay Data (this can be turned on or off by role, giving managers the ability to view their employees’ pay data)

One approach is to choose criteria based on the company values and the current priorities required to achieve the strategic initiative. Another approach is to solely base the performance review on the role requirements and individual contributions of each employee.

5. How many people will give input to an employee’s review?

It’s important for employees get perspective and input from more than one person. BLOOM® can currently capture a variety of information in each employee’s review form:

• Primary and secondary supervisor can enter feedback.
• Executives can view and edit reviews for anyone who reports to the managers directly reporting to them.
• Employees can complete self-reviews without seeing managers’ comments until the review interview.

6. Will the managers be expected to set individual employee development goals and training at the time of the review?

Your company procedure for setting employee goals will determine the answer to this question. However, we recommend making it a part of the review process because goals are the most effective way for managers to communicate individual performance enhancements. At the very least these should be reviewed. Additionally, it is good to revisit the existing goal notes and review progress and resources needed to complete open goals. Use BLOOM® to enter new goals that require attention before the next review period.

Let’s talk about strategic performance management

Contact Insight Strategic Concepts – maker of BLOOM® – to learn more about strategic performance management and the BLOOM® system, or comment below with more questions you’ve found helpful.

Let’s acknowledge some assumptions about performance reviews

Performance reviews are subjective by nature, and that makes them an opportunity for managers to have a positive impact on employees’ performance. Performance reviews have emotional impact that will make or break relationships between employees and their managers, and those relationships affect the organization’s overall health. Your managers must understand the power of influence and how to use any scale you choose.

Why are 5 points better than 3?

Opinions about the “right” number of points vary.Some researchers claim that 3-point scales are sufficient (Jacoby and Mattel 1971). Others claim that when a researcher is interested in averages across people or will combine several individual rating scales in order to create a new scale, then 2‐ or 3‐ point scales are “good enough” (Lehman and Hulbert (1972). If, however, the researcher is working with one rating scale and is interested in individual behavior, more scale points are needed and the recommendation is to use of a five‐ to seven‐ point rating scale. There is also evidence that the more scale points used, the more reliable the scale (Churchill and Peter 1984).

One thing is clear: a rating scale needs enough points to extract meaningful data. Friedman and Friedman conclude that that researchers should consider using anywhere from 5‐ to 11‐point scales. At Insight, we believe this is especially true when making observations and conclusions about human behavior and its implications for development and improvement.

BLOOM’s 5-point approach to performance reviews

A 5‐point scale gives an opportunity to communicate all conditions of employee development:

• 5 – Exceptional performance. The employee changed the way the company operates and has provided great value to customer experience and profitability.
• 4 – Above average performance. The employee excels over others in a talent area. (It is manager’s job to find and cultivate these talents.)
• 3 – Performance meets expectations. Every job has tasks that need to be done consistently well. Discuss and acknowledge these so that employees can focus on the most opportunistic aspects of their jobs.
• 2 – Needs improvement. Without this rating there is no opportunity to convey areas where an employee seems to be slipping and needs support. This is a great opportunity for the manager to develop a better relationship with the employee.
• 1 – Poor performance. Behavior exists where an employee is experiencing apathy over a period of time even after developmental interventions.

What you can do to improve your organization’s performance reviews

Educate managers about how the review system affects the sense of connection between manager and employee. It’s unrealistic to believe and operate as though a strict performance system achieves company goals without potentially damaging the relationships required to make those goals happen. That’s why we stress the importance of addressing the use and purpose of the rating scale from the top down in your organization.

Build flexibility into your new review system. Managers must be trained on how to understand and communicate with different types of people in relevant ways to achieve results. They should use performance reviews as a tool to inspire employees and to help them grow. A well-developed performance review system will engage the skills, talents, and interests that ultimately contribute to the organization’s goals.

What scales has your organization considered? What are you currently using, and what are you learning?

Works Cited

Churchill, Gilbert A. Jr. and J. Paul Peter, (1984), “Research Design Effects on the Reliability of Rating Scales: A Meta Analysis,” Journal of Marketing Research, 21(4), 360‐375.

Friedman, Hershey H. and Esther M. Friedman (1997), “A Comparison of Six Overall Evaluation Rating Scales,” Journal of International Marketing and Marketing Research, 22(3), 129‐138.

Jacoby, Jacob and Michael S. Matell (1971), “Three‐Point Likert Scales are Good Enough,” Journal of Marketing Research, 8(4), 495‐500.

Lehmann, Donald R. and James Hulbert (1972), “Are Three‐Point Scales Always Good Enough?” Journal of Marketing Research, 9(4), 444‐

446.

Employee assessments are mutually beneficial: they provide the employee with valuable information that they may not realize about themselves and your managers with greater insight into the employee’s mindset. Such knowledge provides a foundation for further employee and, by extension, organizational development. Here’s how that works:

1. Organizations that want to make an impact and to contribute to their communities need a passionate, collaborative spirit and effective teamwork in order to succeed.
2. True collaboration requires team members who share a common goal and have the relationship-building skills to help the team run smoothly.
3. To develop relationship-building skills an individual needs self-awareness; when a person is tuned-in to who they are and how they operate they are better equipped to understand and relate to other people.
4. Assessments yield information about a person, thereby increasing that individual’s self-awareness.

Where to begin? Assess more than one area as you work at strategic performance management.

When you plan assessments be sure to address all three parts of the mind to get a more complete picture:

1. Affective: the feeling part of the mind
2. Conative: the striving part of the mind
3. Cognitive: the thinking part of the mind

All three parts intertwine to formulate how a person feels, acts, and thinks. Assessing only one or two leaves knowledge gaps that can result in misunderstanding or misinterpretation.

Knowing more about your current and prospective employees enables your managers and HR department to:

1. Better match people to teams. Too much inertia or polarization of talents and skills in any team will bog it down and stunt creativity and decision-making.
2. Recruit the best fit for a job. You know what you need for a specific position, and greater insight into a potential team member enables you to align the right person with that role. Many assessments are unbiased (e.g. gender, sex, and religion) and appropriate to use in the selection process. For more information about Insight’s Whole Mind Assessment (pdf).
3. Develop skills and optimize talents. When you understand how your individual employees operate you can better develop their abilities and help them learn how to enhance their talents.
4. Bring awareness that might otherwise be overlooked. Most of us are not aware of how our feelings about ourselves and about the world impact others. Some people may think they know, but do not see how it continues to impact others. Assessments can help employees objectively see how the three parts of their mind interact and influence the workplace. Assessments also highlight areas for development and can open a door for dialogue about improvement strategies that help individuals better communicate, listen, collaborate, be less defensive, and be empathetic toward others who need improvement.

Interpreting assessments requires understanding and a strategic approach

At Insight, when we work with clients who are addressing employee development, recruiting, team formation, or leadership development we typically use 5-6 assessments. Results should never be used as an excuse for a person to do things a certain way because assessments are intended to increase awareness in order to learn how to modify affect and skills to work more collaboratively with others.

Without collaboration and effective and balanced communication in the work environment, it can be very difficult to be an efficient and productive team. By equipping employees with self-awareness, you empower them to take ownership of their behavior and to become valuable contributors in your organization.

5 Steps to Implement the BLOOM® Performance Management System

Each of the implementation steps builds on the previous phases so that you will have all the right pieces in place when you introduce BLOOM® to your employees:

1. Create wage scales
2. Create training classes/programs
3. Enter role descriptions
4. Enter employee data and define and enter individual employee goals
5. Create and enter strategic initiatives, objectives, goals, and action steps

Step 1: Create Wage Scales

Using your performance management system to keep track of wage scales is essential if you want to monitor the wage analysis for some or all of your employees. Although this step is optional, we strongly recommend including compensation data so that you will be able to easily identify top performers in your organization as well as those who are not pulling their weight.

Step 2: Create Training Classes/Programs

Training classes and programs provide opportunities for employees to gain knowledge, which ultimately benefits the organization. Enter training opportunities and requirements in BLOOM® and later connect the classes and programs with one or more role descriptions to ensure that employees continue to develop the skills and knowledge they need to work effectively.

Step 3: Enter Role Descriptions

Role descriptions are critical to any performance management system. They enable employees to understand exactly what their position entails, and managers and leaders to delegate responsibilities, determine compensation, and conduct performance reviews.

Step 4: Enter Employees and Define and Enter Individual Employee Goals

Employees are the heart of your organization, and they are the heart of the BLOOM® performance management system, too. Once you reach this step you will begin to clearly see how BLOOM® reveals the bigger picture; you will see which employees fill each role, how their compensation compares – an indicator of who is ready for a promotion and who has a ways to go – and how they contribute to your company’s strategic growth.

Step 4 is also a time to enter individual development goals, too. Including these goals is optional, though they provide another chance for employees to engage the organization, see how their ambitions contribute to the company’s mission and vision, and have a sense of ownership.

Step 5: Create and Enter Strategic Initiatives, Objectives, Goals and Action Steps

The company’s mission and vision provides guidance at a macro level, and how that mission is carried out requires detailed initiatives, objectives, goals, and action steps. Make the most of the opportunity BLOOM® provides for you to keep track of your strategic plan – including assigning tasks and deadlines to teams, roles, and employees. When employees see where they fit into the bigger picture they understand how valuable their work really is.

Putting It All Together

For any performance management system to have an impact on your business it must be used effectively and consistently. BLOOM® is no different. Your managers must understand the importance of strategic performance management, be able to use the system, and see it as an asset to their work since BLOOM® provides a place for them to keep track of team data, log performance notes, and track employee goals.

The BLOOM® team has extensive experience in human resources and will guide you through the five steps of implementation. Contact us for more information or to schedule a demonstration.

• Methodology based on Insight’s experience. You save the time it would take to develop, track, and support an in-house performance management system.
• Automated features. Wizards and email notifications provide guidance and reminders, and its documentation and tracking save you the time and hassle of tracking down information and generating reports from scratch.
• Develops better habits. An effective human resources program requires commitment. Small businesses that adopt the right habits and use BLOOM to manage strategic initiatives, roles, and employee performance can save the expenses of an HR person and haphazard in-house talent management systems. Like any tool, though, BLOOM is only effective if it is used regularly.
• Support that small business needs. BLOOM is Software as a Service (SaaS) and includes support services for related management development.

Now we’ve updated our pricing structure to better meet the needs of small businesses. The 30-day trial is free. Take a look at BLOOM to see how you can effectively align your business strategy and employee performance for less than you might expect.

Understand why strategy is important

In their book Strategic Planning: A Practical Guide, Peter Rea, Ph.D. and Harold Kernzer, Ph.D. note that no strategic approach fits all situations, and as a result “contingency theory rules the day” (2). What is equally true, the authors say, is that all strategies require good sense and judgment. Further, while there is no singular school of thought on strategic planning all definitions speak to these concepts:

• Formulation of long-term goals and allocation of resources
• Serves as a “vision of success” and how to achieve it
• Necessity of free will and intentional design (qtd. in Rea and Kerzner 2)

Strategic planning sets the course for your organization’s future and as a result impacts not just the organization as a whole but each team and employee as well. Strategic planning, say Rea and Kerzner, “must function beyond an office of well-educated executives who are insulated from those who make the organization work” (3).

Strategic planning determines your organization’s direction, and a lack of focus leads to an erratic, uncontrolled lurching into tomorrow.

Formulate a strategic plan when conditions are right

If your organization has skills, resources, and the commitment of key decision makers then creating an implementing a strategic plan will serve you well (qtd. in Rea and Kerzner 9). Without this trifecta that forms a stable foundation, though, any plan you make will not endure. Further, your strategic plan must head in a direction that others are willing to follow (Rea and Kerzner 9); this may mean initially making decisions and changes that are agreeable to most everyone, and once those pay off push a bit further with more innovative plans.

Strategic Planning offers several questions to use as a basic framework for any organization’s strategy:

• Strategic issues
• Competitive advantages
• Compatibility of products/services and customers
• Innovation and growth
• Stakeholders’ satisfaction
• Strategy integration/measurement (Rea and Kerzner 11-12).

Think about the many ways your organization can grow

Insight has identified 44 diverse ways to grow – from sales to profit to people. Specific examples include ideas like branching into e-commerce or licensing, diversifying offerings, empowering employees as experts, and implementing a performance management system enables management to track progress. We encourage you to review the 44 strategies for yourself by downloading the PDF.

Get ready to make your organization BLOOM®

Our proprietary performance management system, BLOOM®, enables administrators, managers, and employees to form the big picture – the strategic plan – organize it into meaningful goals and milestones and then into actionable tasks, and see where each employee fits into the overall plan. Administrators provide the vision, managers provide the necessary notes and resources (e.g. spreadsheets and PDF files), and employees help carry out the plan to reach the goal. Because BLOOM® includes timelines and due dates anyone can see when a milestone has been completed and what’s past-due. Contact us for more information or to schedule a demo of BLOOM®.