Achieve Digital Signature Legitimacy for Employee Performance Review in Canada

How to eSign a document: digital signature legitimacy for Employee Performance Review in Canada

and at this time let's begin today's event why performance reviews don't work it is my pleasure to introduce our speakers for today Tonya chair mony practice leader leadership development and Christina Cleveland senior director talent development solutions at Canadian Management Center both Tonya and Christina brings strong backgrounds in HR learning and organizational development as well as change management they work with CMC clients to develop strategies and solutions that will help both individuals and organizations outperform and consult with clients as it relates to their leadership development strategies particularly those focused on maximizing employee performance and potential Tanya I'll turn it over to you thank you so much Erin and thank you everyone for joining us for those of you who are new to Canadian Management Center we are a national organization dedicated to prepare the next generation of leaders to thrive in tomorrow's marketplace for those of you who know us I welcome you back if you'd like to join the conversation any of you on trip Twitter we invite you to follow us our handle is at Canadian management please feel free to tweet any of the insights that you get from us today using our hashtag CMC events I'll also mention that our webinar is being recorded so you'll receive access to this and it will include the slides as well so that you can review this at your convenience and feel free to share it with people that have missed today and that you think had benefit from what we have to share we're going to jump right into things here we are talking about the dreaded performance review and we're going to take a look in particular at the emerging drivers beyond just the dread that are leading more and more organizations to move away from traditional approaches to performance management and to start our session we'd love to gather some info insights from those of you participating today so that we can get a better understanding of where is your organization as it relates to annual performance reviews so in a moment you're going to see some poll questions open up on the right hand side of screen and what we'd love to know is does your organization conduct annual performance reviews do you still use ratings to evaluate performance and finally our third question is to use an online tool or platform to facilitate feedback between leaders and employees if you could take a moment now to respond to each of those questions and very important you must click Submit in the bottom right hand corner in order for your response to be tabulated so I invite you now to take a moment to put a response don't forget to hit submit and it's going to be interesting to observe where your organization is relative to the trends that we are going to be talking about today and I think at this point we can close out the poll and it's going to take a moment here for our results to be tabulated my guess is that if you're joining us today whether or not you are using ratings or conducting those reviews that there is still some desire to continue to evolve the processes that you have in place and we have some great information to share with you about that and here are our results so it looks like 89% of you are still conducting annual performance reviews I shouldn't say still doesn't mean that you always did and 10 percent have said no in terms of ratings do you use ratings a majority are using ratings at 77% and 38% of you are actually employing online tools and platforms to facilitate feedback Kristina I'm going to invite you to to comment on some of these results in to segue into the the drivers that we're going to be discussing today drivers for change yeah forgive my coughing it wasn't because of the results so glad to be participating with all of you today and clearly the headline attracted you to today's session and so it's interesting to see at the diversity within the group of those of you participating today variety of industries and sectors and certainly from different locations across the country but what is uniting us all is definitely the opportunity to look at how we can continue to advance our approach as it relates to performance management and it feels like you know in the HR grouping and profession there's certainly you know different trends that are emerging as a result of you know what's happening within our workforces but it sort of feels like the healthcare profession where they tell us you know coffees not good for you and then coffees good for you and eggs aren't good for you but now eggs are good for you and it seems that way as it relates to performance management that long ago performance management was introduced to ensure employees were aligned to strategic priorities that they were able to have a mechanism to review their performance and explore development opportunities but also to get feedback on how they could improve and certainly look to find ways that they could boost employee performance them or at least manage and monitor and measure it in some way so the shift away from traditional performance reviews continues to gain attention in HR and OD communities and you know this conversation probably started about five years ago but it's anticipated that the majority of Fortune 500 companies will make the shift to evolve what we know is traditional or annual performance reviews by the end of this year so progressive organizations that many of us look to like Adobe Microsoft GE FedEx Zappos and Deloitte have made the shift a couple of years back and are still settling into a new normal in terms of the processes aligned to not having performance ratings and to developing the skills that are required to fill the gap at this annual activity or annual event typically facilitated at as time you mentioned you know what we are going to explore today are the drivers that are pushing organizations into the direction of eliminating performance reviews so that you have an opportunity to to think about you know these these drivers and how it impacts your organization and what you may need to be thinking about to initiate a change inside your organization or to influence others inside your organization to be thinking about this so before we get into that we want to just share a few statistics that reinforced the position that performance reviews don't work and so the first one that we're pulling up is that it's from an article in a Psychology Today which is giving us an indication that one third of performance reviews actually result in decreased employee performance so the very thing that we're trying to do in terms of boosting employee performance finding opportunities to improve growing and advancing our employees is simply not happening in these performance review discussions and in fact it's actually the opposite so we're getting decreased employee performance as a result of these conversations and the experiences that people are having the next statistic comes out of an organization called poor ecology and what they're indicating is that 60% indicate they haven't received useful feedback in the past six months so I'd love for you to take pause for a moment and think about yourself and whether or not you've received useful feedback in the past six months and really if you unpacked the word useful what does that mean to you so Zanger Folkman actually initiated a study and it gave an indication that 56 percent of people prefer constructive feedback over praise so useful feedback isn't just about telling me how great I am or that I'm doing something really well but actually giving me constructive feedback that's going to help me learn and grow which gives us a baseline starting point that people want to be successful they want to grow they want to evolve but you know the majority are indicating that they haven't received feedback that's going to enable them to do that within the past six months and then finally a new research report that was issued by the Gallup Organization this is a great one and I think we'll actually go ahead and share a link in the chat panel for you to follow up on after the webinar this is a 2017 release and this is showing that only 14 percent strongly agree that their performance reviews inspire them to improve so when you look at that statistic many of you are here today because the headline like we grabbed your attention in terms of performance reviews don't work so we don't believe they have an impact but we look at something like 14% only agree that the performance reviews inspire them to improve and you think about the time and effort that goes into conducting these annual reviews the money that gets invested in facilitating these processes and systems and they actually aren't delivering any type of return for us and like we said in fact they might be initiating the opposite so certainly these statistics lead us into understanding why there's a need to re-engineer performance management and the corporate executive board found that more than nine and ten managers are dissatisfied with how their companies conduct annual performance reviews the majority of us don't like receiving them and we also don't like facilitating them for those of us who are people leaders so with dismal statistics like this that's paint a picture of the negative impacts it's no wonder that the game is changing and what we want to review and transition into now are six drivers that we've observed that are certainly helping to influence the shift before I jump into the drivers I do also want to invite you in the chat or Q&A panel share your feedback your thoughts insights anything that's resonating with you today as we move through the conversation it's really helpful for us to be able to tailor our approach so the first driver is based on revelations in neuroscience and so turns out our brains actually hate performance reviews and so the image you see on the screen is not a chewed up piece of dom it is in fact a brain and he's not happy I'm going into a performance review discussion and what the revelations and neuroscience are showing us is that there's psychological impacts of performance reviews and the ratings actually ends up provoking a fight-or-flight response in the individuals that are participating in these conversations which actually ends up getting in the way of thoughtful and reflective dialogue that will lead to constructive feedback and ultimately to improve them so performance reviews and the idea of being rated and so being you know put onto a five-point scale three point scale whatever it looks like in your organization triggers what's called a threat response in our brains so the what that threat response does is it actually may initiate what's called an amygdala hijack which you know can cause nervousness they can lead us into a conflict discussion it can cause us to be more defensive as opposed to you know being open and prepared to engage into a dialogue that is going to have a meaning impact on us if you think about employees who may have a relationship that is somewhat strained with their leader the response in this scenario where there may already be symptoms of low trust the negative impacts are certainly exacerbated so you know many people if you think about yourself either performance reviews you've received or performance reviews you've conducted have you ever experienced a scenario where you've sat in front of somebody and you just can't believe the feedback that you're getting because it's so opposite to how you may have interpreted your behavior how you may have interpreted your results and how you performed and that you've just gotten feedback way at a left field that isn't aligned with how you think you show up in the workplace well that's exactly what we're talking about is that it can trigger this threat response that is going to end up ultimately impacting what you take away from that conversation certainly people are showing signs of this with Legion leads us into driver too so frustration from employees and leaders nobody likes them nobody likes conducting performance reviews they find it to be an arduous process in some cases it just seems to be a tick in the block exercise it it ends up having a negative impact and only two and ten employees actually agree that their performance is managed in the way that motivates them to do outstanding work and so that's another scientistic that's coming from the Gallup Organization Christina I'm just going to I think on that point we have a participant Terry you asked because there any research between the performance management process and employee engagement and I think just to that point what you're pointing out from Gallup starts to paint the picture that yes there is evidence that you know performance management the traditional approaches are demotivating as you say driving engagement down and the things that are missing are opportunities to really motivate engagement or if you comment further on that no I absolutely and thanks for asking that Terry so certainly the statistic that I just mentioned was only 2 in 10 employees agree their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work so certainly when you think about tapping into that discretionary effort and the desire to be able to contribute more go above and beyond is definitely in acted as a result of poor performance management conversations or systems that just aren't working for them and coming back to what we mentioned earlier as it relates to only 14% are inspired to improve their performance so for those who may be struggling and may have some room to grow we're not reaching them when you think about the formal approaches that we might be using today the third driver is what's referred to as an unconscious bias and the impact that this can have in the performance review process so for some of us we may even rate ourselves lower than our leaders so judgment plays a huge role here but again the Gallup Organization indicates that the majority of employees actually don't feel that their performance reviews are fair or that they're accurate so they might not be reflective or truly reflective of you know how they feel they may be showing up at work and coming back to that neuroscience point whether we realize it or not our brains actually have a natural tendency to store information into groups in order to be able to process it more easily and this can lead us to make snap judgments about an individual before we even realize it and that certainly can have an impact on where they may fall on a five-point scale but if we take a moment to just unpack unconscious bias a little bit more unconscious bias refers to a bias that were unaware of we sometimes don't even know that it's happening and it is generally outside of our control and so it's automatically triggered by our brain and influenced by our background or personal experiences and our own history and often sometimes performance reviews end up being more of a reflection of the rater than they are of the actual employee or the performance of that employee and so there's a couple of different categories as it relates to unconscious bias so one would be central tendencies if you think about a five-point scale you may we may have a tendency to just put everybody loved everyone into the middle because it prevents us needing to provide detailed evidence about why somebody may be below the line in terms of not meeting expectations or to also do the same in terms of justification particularly if this is tied to compensation as to why somebody may be on the higher end in terms of exceeding expectations recency bias is another example where we're only recalling most recent performance of the employee and so you know as we think about an annual review process if being able to then come back to an employee and reflect on the past months incredibly difficult unless you've been absolutely vigilant and documenting details throughout the year I don't know about many of you but as I get older sometimes I walk into a room and I don't even remember why I'm there so you can think about performance alone yeah thinking about performance reviews and looking back over 12 months it's not realistic and so looking at only recent performance could lead a leader to over value or undervalue an employee's performance and not provide an objective view of the bigger picture we also have the halo effect so this is where your top performers come in and you may end up developing some blinders as it relates to that individual where they can do no wrong it may put us in a situation where you know the positive has outweighed the negative and we don't want to provide constructive feedback to them and then the last one is that is negativity bias and again this is where your brain is having an impact on you without you potentially realizing it and that's that negativity makes a bigger impact on our brains than something positive so if you think about an employee that you may be working with and you delegated them a project and it wasn't done or it wasn't done very well you may have made a judgement or assessment about that employee as being you know incompetent demotivated unwilling ineffective because your brain is going to hold on to and interpret that negative experience so certainly we have a natural tendency and that's why you think about headlines in the media negative titles tend to capture attention negativity will have a bigger impact on our brain and that will certainly impact what we may be doing when we're actually reflecting on reading and individual so when that unconscious bias is applied to performance appraisals it can lead to in accuracy it can show signs of favoritism in terms of an employee and leader relationships and in some cases can lead to unfair treatment of employees and certainly if you have a diversity and inclusion function inside your HR organizations that they would be individuals who will talk to you about some unconscious bias and how that can show up in different systems that we may have and performance appraisals is certainly a large offender so that leads us to the fourth driver which is perceptions of unreliable data so when you think about unconscious bias and the impact that can have on our ability to be objective you know these annual conversations tend to be pretty subjective in discussion and dialogue and that leads many HR organizations to be thinking that the results that they're actually getting are in fact unreliable the corporate executive board research has found that almost 9 and 10 HR leaders say that the process doesn't actually yield accurate information and for those of you who do have performance management or performance appraisals tied into compensation or total reward salary increases if these results are in influencing compensation data but they're actually unreliable we can see the disconnect in terms of how they're ineffective but certainly too many of our clients have have talked to us about performance reviews when we look at leadership development opportunities and where they have leaders who might be looking to exit employees from the organization but when you go back to performance review data that you may have on a particular individual it's all positive or fairly neutral and there's not a whole lot of indication that this employee has not performed up to a standard overtime that would justify an exit for that particular individual so certainly some organizations feel that they need to have the paper trail of performance management and what we're hearing back is that in some cases it works against them because the paper trail isn't giving them an indication that an employee hasn't been effective I'm going to move into driver five I've meant me to mention a couple of times about in performance appraisals being tied into compensations and here's this term coined by a couple of celebrities in terms of conscious uncoupling but many organizations are looking at a conscious uncoupling of compensation and annual performance reviews which is really good news for employees when you think about the unconscious bias piece that we had talked about and also because a lot of employees don't feel that their performance metrics are within their span of control and they don't feel that their rating or evaluation that they're receiving is influenceable by them and certainly is going to be then tied to a final number as it relates to what they may be getting as a merit increase so there's still a connection to performance for prate pay but a transition to more frequent and objective feedback throughout the year can actually lead to a more balanced assessment or something that contributes to something that really is so critical for employees I'm going to pause there for a moment Tonya if you want to add something there yes I was going to say so for the reasons you mentioned between unreliable data and people not feeling in control of the ratings as are some of the drivers of why people want to separate the compensation conversation from the performance conversation of course though then the question becomes oh my goodness how do we compensate in a discretionary manner how do we you know determine compensation when we don't have a rating so for those of you considering removing ratings or if you have removed ratings this question comes up and you know the answer in terms of how to approach that I would say depends I have a couple of comments that first of all for the reasons you mentioned a lot of people don't perceive the ratings to be fair anyway so they may not perceive their compensation to be fair and there are other constraints around compensation such as budget such as forced ranking but beyond that if you don't have ratings how you distribute that compensation is really going to depend on the strategy and the culture that you want to drive through at some of the clients that we work with Christina for example and I'm thinking of one in particular who felt that individual ratings ran counter to the culture of collaboration and innovation that they wanted to drive so they remove the ratings and what they decided to do is to compensate people at the team level and I hope that not only will that drive greater collaboration but hopefully also make people less reticent to take risks that they might be penalized for if you will if it was an individual performance rating granting compensation other client organizations are looking at basing those comp decisions you know paying sort of like cost-of-living increase but beyond that looking at things like success in projects or achievement of goals but here again you can see how the importance of being able to define really clear goals becomes that much more important if you're not using a rating then you really need to ensure that those goals are really clear and measurable I guess my final comment there would just simply be how you choose to do that depends but people are looking at the full range of total incentives that are available recognising that compensation is only one piece and in fact it is the most powerful piece when it comes to driving performance comp is great for attracting talent and keeping it but not necessarily driving discretionary effort so you need to be looking at other recognition factors and we'll be talking a bit more about that in a moment great thanks Tonya I'm so certainly there's more work that needs to be done as it relates to looking at you know what the impact of decoupling performance reviews from compensation is having I know that in conversations we've had with a few of our clients who have dabbled in removing their performance ratings some have had greater success than others but they have transitioned by in some cases reorganizing the timing of one performance reviews are done and when increases are given they've looked at you know making a total disconnection from them but you still have employees in the background who are how hold the perception and really again this is where brains come into play believe that in some way behind the scenes that their performance reviews or the discussions that they're having are going to be connected somehow to salary increases so it's going to take some time to initiate this transition and there's likely not a one-size-fits-all approach it's certainly going to require you to evaluate the needs in your organization the strategic priorities for your organization and even what available budget looks like to see how you're going to align you know how you want to incent employee performance but to Tanya's points certainly having really clear objectives is going to become even more important driver six that emerged for us is this evolution of feedback and the transition of one conversation to many and you know we've seen this emerge in discussions that we have with our clients as well and when we look at leadership development programs and the fact that you know you need to be providing regular ongoing feedback to employees but when it comes to the actual annual performance review really organizations are transitioning into not just having this one annual dreaded event but is instead having multiple and dreaded events throughout - here I'm just using of course these are not to be dreaded they're going to be very effective conversations but moving to having more conversations more frequently so that employees and leaders are developing a different relationship in terms of understanding that there's opportunities to both give and receive feedback but the key point here is that it's two-way that it is a dialogue and it's not just about telling the employee you know what they're doing well or giving them suggestions for improvement but also being open to hearing their feedback as well and so this transition is certainly having an impact in terms of what we're seeing in organizations many believe that this is driven by the shift in the workforce so seeing that we've you know got a demographic shift where we have Millennials and Gen Zed that are coming into the organizations and you know apparently demanding for more regular feedback that they need to have conversations more often and there has been some organizations that are using technology enabled solutions and throw the percentage of you who indicated that you are using a tool we'd be interested in hearing your thoughts in the chat panel as well so the technology enables solutions as it relates to feedback is being able to create platforms or apps that allow managers to provide real-time feedback to employees for them to not just get feedback from their leader but also from their peer group from their manager once removed which creates a little bit more transparency of their respective activity and allows to facilitate a little bit more dialogue but as it relates to the workplace again just coming back to the fact that people perceive that you know baby boomers traditionalists for morale on the lines what we see on the left-hand side of the screen as it relates to you've got a job you're looking just to be employed for a paycheck you've got your annual review you're looking for more structure and just being told what to do and the shift into the workforce is now appears to be more focused on wanting to work in an organization where you are aligned for the purpose of the business that you're in you're not looking for a boss you're looking for a coach someone who's going to be invested in your development and growth you want people to ask for your involvement and you want people to provide flexibility in your work environment create scenarios where you've got continuous dialogue and certainly have the opportunity to contribute to meaningful work but what we are seeing is that this isn't generation specific and certainly the impact of performance reviews not working is not limited to just one generation if all generational cohorts that exist in the workforce today and the factors is that regardless of the generation that you're in we're all united in the fact that we have the same reactions from a psychology perspective as it relates to those annual events and what the brain needs to be able to be most effective so there's a lot that's driving the opportunity to reevaluate what you may be doing as it relates to performance reviews inside your organization and some people are just ready to make the transition rip the band-aid off and then move forward without doing annual performance reviews and we've seen some of our clients do this so the champagne bottles are being already popped open because the managers and employees alike are celebrating the elimination of performance ratings but there's certainly a significant need to be in a situation where you're preparing your leaders for a reboot in your organization and a lot of companies haven't adequately prepared for this and certainly you're seeing some slide back in terms of resistance from employees performance being impacted employee engagement being impacted as well because there aren't mechanisms in place to be able to facilitate these so the transition from one to many conversations and if the conversations that were happening annually were ineffective and leaders didn't have the skills to effectively navigate those conversations and certainly those skills still transferred into the ongoing feedback that employees may be receiving and there's a need to focus on preparing leaders for reboot so what we want to transition into is just talking about some considerations for your organization before you know you consider making the immediate transition into celebrating the removal of performance ratings so the first one is that many organizations that are making this transition are in fact looking at resetting performance conversations and that's creating a shift between very balance between what the focus of the conversation actually looks like so some clients have transitioned to quarterly conversations at a minimum many organizations are looking at monthly again it's going to depend on what's right for your organization but the focus of these discussions is split with 25% being focused on reflection or what we would call a review and 75% focused on looking ahead or what we're calling a preview in terms of what may be coming up in the upcoming months or upcoming quarter so this shift actually keeps the conversation focused on possibilities it keeps it focused on potential and maximizing performance on upcoming projects and deliverables rather than spending the majority of our time on things that have already happened that employees have no influence or control over making a change to what has occurred but rather keeping it focused on what they can do differently the next one or what they can do better and similarly for leaders to have the opportunity to get more insights on how they may be able to support their employees so as clients have them transitioned into these conversations of review and preview and many are also providing discussion questions through your leaders to help facilitate these conversations to build a coaching capacity to be able to navigate this dialogue so providing a simple questions template so for example if we take a look at the looking back in the review section a question there could be you know how have you made progress on your objectives or what impact did you see as a result of your efforts in that in this last quarter whereas the looking forward questions or the preview questions are focused on you know what you want to achieve and next quarter getting employees to think about barriers that might get in the way so asking what might get in the way finding out what they'll do to grow themselves or asking what support you need from me as a leader or even one one question that one of our client organization asks you know how will you collaborate with others so they've got a real focus on building collaboration more synergy inside their organization breaking down silos so asking a question about how will you collaborate with others is putting the onus on the employees that in a break past a silo and think about with a bigger and more strategic mindset about how do you how will you collaborate with other people if this is not just about you achieving a particular goal but about the way that you're doing it and how you're engaging with others they're resetting the performance conversations are certainly a good way to start the transition into looking at an opportunity to remove performance ratings and to improve the effectiveness of performance reviews should your organization we need to continue on that track and Christina if I might just make a comment there I love those questions we had a common here in the chat panel from Magda who's saying that you know in her municipal environment they offer cost-of-living increases for compensation so compensation is not linked to the reviews so they're focused on development but they're still having challenges with completion at the end of the year and I think if you can imagine a shift to Otto's those questions that you just shared with us now and having that ongoing conversation we really need to to shift the focus from you know driving completions at the end of the year to really having meaningful dialogue all the way so if we can be asking more of those questions I think the real intent of performance management can come to life that's great thanks Tanya I also notice the comment from grant who's noting that their system allows for progress notes that employees and managers can input throughout the year to avoid the I forget syndrome that may come up that would only cause them to focus on the last month or the last quarter so there's constant opportunities to review throughout the year so that's fantastic grants thanks for sharing the second thing that that we wanted to just put some attention on is redefining what feedback looks like in your organization so grant that point about progress notes I think is really important here because it's not just about feedback being one way it's certainly about feedback being a continuous and being a two-way dialogue between leaders employees but also looking at more of a 360 angle too in terms of peer groups clients managers once-removed vendor partners that you may be collaborating with depending on the role for a particular individual there's certainly many people that are going to have a different experience with those individuals and we want to redefine what feedback looks like and that it's not just about managers providing one-way feedback to employees that's certainly an opportunity to create the step continuous dialogue so more informal feedback should be the norm and should be a continuous group of discussion as I mentioned so whether that's redirected or reinforcing feedback to provide employees with opportunities where they may need to improve or what they're doing really well that you want to see more of but this opportunity also allows employees and leaders alike to build a growth mindset so those of you who are listening today may be familiar with Carol Dweck's work on them the growth in the fixed mindset and also the mixed mindset and the growth mindset really focuses on establishing the general premise that we can all learn we can all grow we can all get smarter we can all improve as opposed to a fixed mindset which may lead us to believe that people are who they are and they can't change so certainly there are opportunities for us to build an understanding with individuals that we can all develop and we can all all teach and continue to expand and I know I continue to plug this them Gallup research and Tanya we may want to share that again in the chat panels just so that it's top of mind for individual but them in this recent Gallup poll it indicates that employees who receive daily feedback from their managers are three times more likely to be engaged than those who receive feedback once a year or less so for the individual who asked the question earlier I think this might have been scary about the connection to engagement certainly that gives us an indication that when we're getting feedback on a more regular basis we're feeling more engaged and more connected to our leaders also certainly to the organization and the work that we're doing so redefining feedback is certainly an important component as you make a transition into evolving your performance management systems the third one is that refocusing on activity and impact so performance discussions to date have traditionally focused on accomplishments it's just you know sort of the task list or project list of what you did and what to suggest what we're suggesting is that you're refocusing the conversations on activity and impacts so this starts to move beyond just tasks and actual work product into a conversation on behaviour so it's not just about what you did it's about how you did it and the impact is about what the result actually was so the connection to impact is important to facilitate between leaders and employees in terms of alignments but that employees are starting to get more over line-of-sight and visibility and to how what they're doing fits into the overall organization and work that we've done on employee engagement has given us insights into the fact that alignment is a key component of engagement and if we think about that beanbag image I had up earlier people are looking for purpose and meaningful work and they want to know how what they're doing fits in and contributes so the conversation about what we've achieved within a period of time whether that's going to be monthly or quarterly needs to refocus on activity as well as impacts and the next one that we wanted to be able to review with you is them look at the opportunity to reevaluate objectives and re-evaluating objectives is really just about having the flexibility to and appreciating that our strategic priorities are certainly intended to be fixed but given the fact that we're in this stem bucha world which you see a is the acronym that I just mentioned the volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous environment limits the ability to be able to set long term objectives that can really stick and so if any of you on the line have gone through a process of established establishing annual performance objectives and and a half joke in that some of us establish our annual performance objectives six months into this into our fiscal cycles but if you have established annual reviews chances are as you look at those annual reviews are they still priorities for you based on what's happening in your department based on what's happening inside your organization and what you're being called to focus on so are they realistic so this term agile goals has been coming up in terms of how we're establishing objectives so many people find themselves setting these goals at the start of the performance cycle and then revisiting them only to realize that you know priorities have been deferred resources have been reallocated and so these agile goal processes would align more to quarterly check-ins that create the opportunity for you to reset on priority areas and to ensure that the goals are still meaningful and relevant so of these skills that I had them I just introduced in terms of reevaluating objectives refocusing on activity and impacts redefining what feedback looks like the thing that we also think is is critically important is looking at an opportunity to rebuild the skills of leaders so whether you're in a situation where you're still conducting annual performance reviews we're going to be transitioning to ask you for some feedback about where you think people are in terms of their ability and skill and confidence to navigate these performance conversations but everything that we've just reviewed right now is going to call on those skills in an even more significant way and so it's really important that we take a look at the skills that are required but our starting point is definitely where people are so we do want to transition into another poll for those of you on the line and ask what percentage of leaders in your organization have the skill and confidence to navigate performance conversations so this of course is going to be your own personal reflection and assessment based on what you know of the leaders inside your organization but where do they fall on the scale is it less than 10% of leaders in your organization's who have the skill and confidence or does it move along to more than half so please go ahead and select your option on the right-hand side of the screen and we'll just ask you to make sure you click on the submit button and we're going to actually have the opportunity to evaluate where we are for those of us who are participating on the line in terms of some current research that's out there so Aaron sort of go ahead and close out the poll and tanielle invite you to join back into the conversation as we get to see these results coming back in thank you yes it will be interesting to see what our perception is suppose us of us so there the word those of us on the line versus the little bit of research here I'll be sharing in a moment and so while the results come in I would invite people to again just submit any comments or insights in the chat panel as well as questions into the Q&A panel and you know it's interesting we asked you a central tendency biased and we asked you then to select a rating on a scale here but it looks like the majority of those of you participating 11 to 25% indicate that that's the percentage of leaders in your organization who have the skill and confidence to navigate performance conversations they were still looking at less than a third of your organization's leaders who have skill and confidence to navigate performance conversation absolutely and I find it interesting 18% say more than 50% I'd love to have a conversation with those of you who rated that and to understand some of the great things you're doing in your organization to enable that because there is definitely a contrast between those who rated over 50% in this in this next piece of data that we had to share that comes from the corporate executive board and that is if we can go to the next slide there Christina M that only 5% of managers are able to effectively manage performance conversations so again that comes from the corporate executive board now the reasons there can be many reasons that can influence this everything from feeling overwhelmed in our work not having time making time for these conversations maybe not having had great examples ourselves so we haven't had managers who've been demonstrating the power of these conversations with us or perhaps even knowing how to manage the emotions that creep up into these discussions I mean there's a reason why we use strong words like dread as it relates to performance reviews so regardless of the reason our response has been to lean towards vilifying the performance reviews but you know as we've been alluding to if you remove these from the equation we still have a significant challenge ahead of us in transitioning managers to coaches whether or not you have ratings in place regardless we still need to be having those coaching conversations which brings me to our our next point around coaching when you think about the fact that one of the biggest drivers of talent retention engagement and ultimately of driving performance is providing people with the opportunity to stretch their skills in a way that aligns with not only what they're good at but what lights them up as Christina you mentioned I think more than once you know people want to have meaning and purpose in their work they want to have an impact they're looking for autonomy and to facilitate this you really need to understand what drives each person and our organizations need driven skilled employees to realize our objectives and this is really where coaching comes in coaching begins with both that growth mindset that you spoke about but also you curiosity and a desire to connect with people to help them see their potential as well as that ability that we spoke to you about providing feedback on things that may be blocking people from being successful and this is primarily done through the use of powerful coaching conference questions rather excellent listening along with a few other essential skills that leaders need in order to shift away from that dreaded performance conversation to ones that actually serve to motivate and and produce better performance and I'd like to talk about what some of those other skills are now on our next slide here so Christina has spoken to many of these but what this slide represents these six skill sets is a distillation of what based on our research the work with our clients our own experience really are those key skills that leaders in some instances employees need in order to have meaningful conversations I'm going to speak to them briefly here although we've touched on some of them that but the first one really is that need to be able to navigate performance conversations and here again understanding how our brain works so that we have managers can anticipate and mitigate reactions those emotions that are going to come up in a performance conversation and figuring out how do you make it safe to talk about performance some of it is what Christina talked to you in terms of the frequency of conversation and there are other things that we can do to make those conversations a lot more comfortable and a lot more every day instead of this big huge deal at the end of the year given a receive feedback we've talked a lot about feedback but the key point is here that it is two-way and notice that we're talking about receiving feedback as much as we're talking about giving feedback so leaders need to be willing able and comfortable to ask for feedback so they can model the behavior of receiving it gracefully and acting upon it so again there are a lot of things that we can be doing that are you know brain friendly to create safety and to create a culture of openness and ongoing feedback coaching for growth well I just finished talking about coaching but again the focus here when we talk about for growth is having more focus on forward conversations so looking forward to the work that's going to be done in the next month the next quarter anticipating the challenges might come and having those conversations from that perspective as opposed to at the end of the year when there's not much that you can do without things that you know at that point and when we say coaching for growth it doesn't exclude coaching performance issues coaching for growth includes dealing with performance issues but also again focusing on stretching our employees recognizing performance contribution the important thing there is that recognition is not a one-size-fits-all program so managers need that ability to align recognition with the individual what he or she would appreciate by way of recognition as well as to the effort of their achievement and as we spoke to in the compensation piece some of the most powerful forms of recognition have nothing to do with money and this is something that managers need to understand and understand how to leverage setting achievable goals now this is a skill set for both leaders and employees ideally goals are being set in partnership through that ongoing dialogue and as ratings may be disappearing those goals are going to become more and more important in terms of them being very clear and agile so are they evolving with business priorities and changes in resources and environment as Christina asked so we need to to think about that so think about your leadership team and and the employees within your organization how frequently are those goals being remitted Bruce revisited how well are they being written and finally as it relates to empowering employees managers need to understand how to remove barriers to success and then you know get out of the way let people shine understand how to make it safe to take risks and importantly when you're when you're empowering and stretching and giving more accountability to to employees managers also need to be mindful of not pushing employees from their comfort zone to their stretch zone right into the burnout zone so it's about understanding the difference between empowering and stretching people from completely burning them out so these six skills here represented on this slide also represents six modules of a new curriculum that we've put together called maximizing performance for better results and what we've done differently is that we've designed these modules to be very brain friendly so these modules are run from anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes depending on the module and they can be taken in any order at the pace that works for you either live on the web like we are now in classroom led by us led by you this is a curriculum that we have we are excited to have be using with some of our clients to enable that shift to more effective performance conversations so you'll hear more information those of you are interested on how you can reach out to us to hear more we're really excited to be sharing that with with our clients I thought before oh go ahead just want I just wanted to pause in there because I think regardless of where you are in the process of making a transition and you know 89% of you indicated that you're still doing annual performance review as I as we went through today's session these skills are still absolutely essential if you're going to continue with an annual review or you're going to transition into a new approach and earlier when I talked about feedback I dropped a statistic telling you that 56% of employees for first constructive feedback over praise but that certainly doesn't mean that they don't want praise so recognising performance contributions pista Tania's plaintiffs is definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach but this is about making sure that in leaders understand on a regular basis that necessity to be able to recognize and acknowledge employee performance so that the employees aren't feeling like they're coming into these performance conversations needing to defend themselves on on what they've achieved and the impact that that's had and Carolyn's asked a question Tanya and I'm not sure if I'm going to be misinterpreting it here though gearing self assessments to allow for thoughtful reflection for employees and if you've got a process right now where you allow employees an opportunity to do a self assessment and the leader is initiating an assessment and then they get together to have this conversation that certainly leaps and bounds ahead of not a leader simply doing a one-way rating but what we have seen come out of those conversations is that if you've got leaders and employees who are on opposite ends or have points that show a real disconnect in terms of how they made you read it and and particularly on thinking about situations where leaders have rated employees lower than they rated themselves that can definitely have a damaging effect in in these conversations and certainly would be an indication that the employee didn't expect to receive such a negative rating and that's where that regular and ongoing feedback is more essential so that's not a big surprise in this annual review but they've had some some warning so to speak of some understanding as they've gone in terms of how they can see you to build and improve and Kathy's mentioned that leadership in your organization are very progressive and that each manager has a one-on-one with their employee bi-weekly but they're reluctant to give up annual performance reviews but I find that really interesting and you know because we are seeing some of the opposite effect where you know executive leaders are seeing the opportunity to remove ratings and reviews and save money and they're willing to just pull the plug on it but I wonder Kathy for the leadership in your organization in these one-on-ones are they projects in task focused or are they development conversations and or that preview discussion and level of conversation that we mentioned earlier in terms of focusing on you know what's the head and how employees are going to achieve that and I wonder too if some you know in Kathy's example if they're having conversations along the way and they're course-correcting this does that allow that your end review to be truly a more of a celebration of achievements because you're not having to talk about things that people get blindsided about you know so maybe people actually enjoy being able to you know end the year with looking back on what's been achieved because they've been talking about it the whole way through so those are some great comments that we've shared yeah thank you so at this point we would like to hear from more of you in terms of what what insights have you gathered from our conversation today what are you thinking about where are you where you stuck what are you doing differently we love to hear from you and thank you to those who have already participated we'd love to hear your thoughts in the chat panel now and as we're waiting for for folks to to comment more I would just say just on that that recognition piece one of the things we talk about in our curriculum is that it's also not just recognition coming from managers is creating a culture of pure recognition I think one of the things that we're going to see is that as we're having ongoing dialogue it's going to also be inclusive of feedbacks coming from you know coming from peers coming from others coming more regularly and that counts for recognition as well so we're really shifting cultures by the nature of the way that we're holding those conversations and the frequency I'm just taking a look here in the chat panel [Music] so while while you read that Tonya just mention a quote from Karen which is indicating that we are you know we spend a lot of time and we talk a lot about the desire for our leaders to give feedback but also wondering whether or not anyone out there has taken a bottom-up approach and focusing on getting the employees to create a culture of feedback and to actively seek out feedback so if anybody is an organization where you are using a bottom-up approach you want to comment in the chat panel because certainly share that back and Karen you make an excellent point you know creating a culture of feedback isn't just about having that be initiated from the top down but certainly looking at creating a culture and an opportunity to share that information up and down and across the organization I think that's a really great point and we'd love to continue to hear from all of you okay great well there is there is one question here that has come in and and I'll direct this one over to you Kristina how can you persuade senior leaders that the process needs to change so I again we're going to sting a bit more of the opposite but I certainly can understand that in a lot of cases there are leaders who might be hesitant to make a transition over and I would suggest that it's really it's like any significant change management initiative you've got to start off with building awareness of the need to change and so you know we think about the drivers that we introduce today how are those showing up in your organization what feedback are you hearing about before the performance management process in your organization are there any indications through your employee engagement survey as it relates to you know coaching feedback development as well as the performance management system as a whole that are showing up as data points and that will give you an opportunity to be able to influence how the system may or may not be working and only once you build that awareness piece can you start to influence the desire from them about creating a bit of a burning platform on the need to change and then you've got to be prepared quickly to move through a plan of how to do it so I think the most organizations looking at a transition process as opposed to a drastic change over is is likely the way to go looking at whether or not your organization has the appetite for technology enables solutions to help facilitate some of this as well would would certainly be something that you need to consider but as it relates to influencing the senior leaders Tonya's they certainly look at how you can build awareness of the need to change great thank you for that there's a lot there's a lot of great comments coming in the chat panel I love the comment from real leadership is a lot like parenting this is missed on a lot of leaders especially if they aren't parents and Maria I'm going to take it to mean that the the facilitation part of parenting is the pointing out what they're doing well but then also providing guidance and opportunity to stretch and I guess other pieces the need to care and the reason I mentioned that is because someone else mentioned that you know the managers themselves need to be engaged they need to have a certain level of engagement to want to care enough to be developing their people so thank you for those comments I think we need to move ahead in order to close this in on time for all of you want to respect your time so with that I do want to say that we are we're really proud to support our clients across the country and many of you on the call today were invited by one of these amazing people our National Account directors who are also listening in today they'll be following up with you after today's session to continue the discussion on this topic so certainly if there are questions we didn't get to please feel free to pass them along to to one of them we also welcome you to visit us on our web site at CMC out-perform calm where you can get access to free resources and other thought leadership on emerging trends in the workplace and with that I want to thank my partner in crime at Christina Cleveland for for her insights and I want to thank all of you for carving out time for your busy schedules to be part of the dialogue we're really excited to support all of you as you look to evolve your practices in the organization so we we encourage your questions we'd love to support you and look forward to seeing you on a future session thank you and enjoy the rest of your afternoon