Insights on Performance Reviews: Week of December 1, 2019
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I’ve been researching the performance review process and talking to customers about what they like and don’t like about the process. Here are the key insights from the week of December 1, 2019:
Angela is a Talent Operations Business Manager (HR) for a 400 employee company. Their company does government contracting including environmental remediation and software. Her responsibility includes overall talent operations including 1) optimizing internal processes and 2) HR, employee engagement, HR policies (handbook - refreshed in the last year).
Her key goals and objectives in Q4 include 1) benefits enrollment 2) performance reviews, and 3) compensation reviews.
Her organization has 6-7 HR professionals, which is considered a generous staffing ratio.
For their performance reviews, before they were on a annual cycle. Now they are on a twice a year cycle. The mid-year discussion is in August. In 2019 is the first year they did a mid year discussion. In 2020, it might be a little more formal and tie mid year performance to bonus.
They can never imagine a situation where they move to monthly. Twice a year is as frequent as they would do perf reviews.
They do use ReviewSnap for reviews. Workday is too expensive for a company of their size. They have separate single systems for payroll, benefits, etc.
Before, the performance review process was very manual; happened via email. They couldn’t see employee history. They wanted to automate the process to save time.
The reason employee history is important is because:
HR wants to get data and be able to calibrate. They also want to see if certain groups perform better than others.
Executives have similar interests.
They also want to share the performance reviews with other managers.
The biggest challenge is getting employees and managers to complete the performance review. (Sometimes they want skip level to complete the review). Now that the system is automated they can do 360 peer review feedback; before only executives would do it.
Their perf review had 3 sections:
Goals: What do they want to accomplish and achieve? Filling it out usually focuses on status such as on-target, behind target or ahead of target. It never discusses the quality of the deliverables.
Core Values: This is more focused on how employees work.
Overall Performance
Angela’s biggest pain point is getting the managers to complete the reviews on time. Her biggest metrics include completion rate and getting people to finish on-time. Also her employees aren’t very tech savvy; they want a more straight-forward interface. She does lots of trainings, webinars and recordings to educate her employees on how to use the perf review software.
She is intrigued by software that can train employees on how to give feedback; she says ReviewSnap does a pretty good job today with competencies.
Generally when it comes to “who” to sell to, she suggests thinking about “who demands it more.” For HR the value prop might be “how to make the perf review more successful.” For business-side the value prop might be to “save time".
She finds the value prop “decreasing lawsuits” to be interesting but needs proof. Perhaps discuss how Maven keeps on top of various state laws which change all the time.
Zach is the former COO for an architecture firm. He believes that the #1 item on his wish list is reminders. He’s a huge fan of Catalytic Coaching.
A is a Bay Area compensation consultant. His notable clients include Zoom; he mainly focuses on companies who are at least at the series C stage. He helps companies define levels and pay ranges for each level.
His biggest challenge is figuring out how to scale his business; he’s a one man operation.
He doesn’t define responsibilities for each level or department. That’s usually something that the HR department is comfortable doing.
He normally hangs out and learns more about the compensation industry using a website called WorldAtWork.
A is Seattle startup founder. HIs expertise is design and design thinking. A few thoughts:
He loves the concept. It feels like Grammarly for giving feedback.
The preview pane doesn’t make sense; it obscures ability to see phrases.
He would love to see a search box to search for particular items.
He would love to see integration w/ slack.
In general, he loves ideas that are:
Friction-less
Low latency
Backed by data
A is an ex-Amazon PM.
He liked eliminating the preview pane and the strong tie-in w/ performance reviews.
From a priority perspective, he thought search functionality was more important than saving favorites.
The biggest insight was the focus on the employee not manager. That is for the employee Maven can help employees to better “Articulate their work output so they can be calibrated accurately.” If I were to take another attempt at it, it might be: “Show your work output so you can be calibrated accurately.”
He had a fun acronym: POC.
Profile: What are you, the employee, known for?
Output: What results did you achieve?
Calibration: What’s your ranking?
A liked that each achievement was tagged to a value. He did think it’s up to organizations to determine whether achievements were tagged based on values, outcomes (e.g. sales targets), job description, or something else.
Another idea (LL): as an employee, you can use the phrase builder as an exercise.- use it to inspire yourself on how you want your boss and others to remember you.
He did find it that it’d be a valuable tool to gain “mutual understanding” between employee and manager on what needs to be worked on.
N is a product manager for a 1,600 person telecom tech company. He doesn’t have any direct reports.
They do performance reviews once a year, around March / April.
There’s no mid-year review, and there’s no self-appraisal.
N doesn’t remember what the performance review tool is called. He remembers it being cumbersome to use; managers found it easier to copy and paste questions into Excel, answer inside Excel, and then paste the answers back into the tool.
Perf review does affect compensation. Approx. 70% of bonus is based on individual performance; 30% of bonus is based on corporate bonus. Bonus is capped at an absolute and max amount of $15k.
Like most other employees, he felt the quality of the review is based on manager; his recent experience is that the reviews are not fulfilling.
He wished his current employer had a self-appraisal. He’s had self-appraisals elsewhere, and he felt it was a nice self-reflection.
Tim is a founder of a HR tech startup and part of a TechStars Seattle batch. They’ve now moved on back to their former employer. Here are some key learnings:
Started with building a HRIS like Namely and BambooHR.
Then they evolved to create programs to train junior managers. It started with Coursera-like courses and suffered through many of the same problems (e.g. engagement). They tried to increase engagement by adding gamification; that didn’t really move the needle on gamification.
As part of their course, they had a feedback feature in Slack. Eventually, they decided to build the course inside the Slack app.
Then they decided to build a weekly check in feature similar to 15Five inside the app.
The weekly briefing feature asked about sentiment. It had drill down questions like if you had a weakness with communication, it would ask you follow-up questions from there. It would then ask your employees did your boss improve in that dimension?
In general, Tim found HR tech challenging for a few reasons:
HR has limited budget. He felt that sales and engineering departments had more budget at their disposal.
With the limited money HR does have, they prioritize purchasing:
Compliance tools
Or software tools that are known quantities (e.g. CultureIQ, Lattice, Reflective)
A SaaS sales consultant, Jonathan Dwyer, recommended that they stop selling to HR and sell to VPs instead.
15Five does not sell to HR. Non-HR leaders can justify that goal-setting is not a HR responsibility.
In general, he was a fan of building tools on Slack.
Pros: Engagement is high. 70% of the tool engagement was on Slack.
Cons: Can’t do anything complex UI wise. Slack can be unresponsive when it comes to fixing bugs.
Microsoft Teams: don’t have a POV on whether it’s a good application to build apps on.
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