To everyone who is reading my blog, I want to say a giant THANK YOU for tuning in. HR With Attitude will be on hiatus through the holidays but I’ll be back with even more sass in 2017.
Peace out 2016! I will not miss you.
Monthly Archives: December 2016
Dear Santa
Dear Santa,
On behalf of all of us HR professionals that have been nice, and not naughty this year, here are a few things, in no particular order, that we are wishing for:
- An HRIS system that actually does what it purports to do. Has a user-friendly interface. Doesn’t require a 45 minute hold to get a customer service rep on the line. And reps that are actually knowledgeable of both the platforms they represent and HR stuff.
- CEO’s and other company leadership that are less narcissistic, less bottom-line obsessed and actually DO value the contributions of his or her employees by showing them not just saying it.
- Fellow HR professionals who are less rule and policy oriented and more strategic and progressive thinking.
- Some clarity from the U.S. Federal Government on the ACA, and the FLSA, that balances both the best interests of the citizens and corporations.
- To stop giving companies the same rights and privileges as human beings. And if we can’t do that for some dumb reason than start holding companies accountable for their fraudulent and unethical actions, just as we would any individual person.
- Employees who require less hand-holding and are more self-sufficient.
- That HR stops being assigned non-HR things like coordinating company potlucks and buying office supplies.
- Some attention. A seat at the table. Some realization that if HR is done right, it can be a hell of a factor in the success of the business.
- For other non-HR professionals to stop thinking they know HR stuff. Cause you don’t.
- Our bosses to get the hell out of our way so we can actually lead some positive change within our organizations.
- More compensation, nice benefits and some recognition for our contributions to the company.
- A workforce free from toxic employees and dumb managers.
We are all very excited for your visit this holiday and will leave out some company branded pens and coffee mugs for you and your reindeer.
Love,
HR
The Pulse of Performance
If you’ve read my blog before, you might get the sense that I am ready to scrap the traditional performance review. Your sense is correct.
My problem is not the “annual” part, it’s the entire foundation of the performance review. The traditional performance review process simply doesn’t fit our current work world, which lives in days, weeks and months, not years and where the traditional management hierarchy doesn’t exist and where teams get a hell of lot more done that a department, where employees work flex schedules and don’t meet face-to-face sometimes ever, and where our companies span time zones, countries and cultures.
Also, why are we doing performance reviews? Are we doing them because that’s what we’ve always done? Are we doing them because we believe people want feedback on their performance? Are we doing them to reward high performers? Are we doing them to tie compensation with merit?
I would argue that companies should still have some mechanism to provide feedback to employees; however, the whole traditional review process should be thrown in the garbage and replaced with something that actually aligns to the work world of the 21st century.
If I worked with an unlimited HR budget and a leadership team willing to give it a try, I would initiate a performance pulse check. This pulse check would be much like the pop-up you get on a website after you make a purchase or engage in a customer service exchange that asks you to rate your experience with emoticons and asks for comments. Something like this:
Both Employees and Managers would have the ability to request feedback by sending a quick pulse check. Employees could request feedback from anyone including their manager, project manager, team lead, peers or customers at any time and get on-demand feedback. Managers could schedule routine pulse checks, for example, monthly, quarterly or at the conclusion of a major project. Further, the manager could submit requests for feedback from anyone that interacts with his or her employee from peers, to other managers to external clients.
The application could include required or optional prompts to provide commentary and not just a rating if someone chose a poor or exceptional rating. Or, lay a roadmap to provide further ratings on other specific criteria or core competencies such as results deliverability, communication, negotiation skills, responsiveness, etc…
With the ability to give feedback in a wink of an eye, the assumption here is that more people would be willing to do so. The instantaneous feedback also provides more relevant data to the employee to act upon- the employee will know almost immediately whether a course correction is needed or to keep up the great work.
Over time, this data paints a picture of the employee’s performance trends which his or her manager can take specific action on. From the collection of feedback from multiple sources, the managers can determine key talent ripe for succession plans and also where training needs are essential for improved performance.
This should be the current and the future of performance evaluations.
Common Mistakes Managers Make on Performance Reviews
It is a rare phenomenon in HR to see a performance evaluation from a manager that even meets our expectations let alone exceeds them. Here are a sampling of a few common mistakes I see on the regular:
- The manager uses the annual performance review to rake an employee over the coals for his or her entire prior year’s performance. It is NOT okay to use the annual performance review to tell the employee they’ve sucked all year. As a manager, why would you endure that? Think of all of the lost productivity and pissed off coworkers. If you wait a year to tell someone they’ve not performed to your expectations, guess what, it’s not their fault, its yours for not having the spine to confront it sooner.
- Failure to clearly communicate expectations and objectives of the position. Granted, this discussion should be happening within the first week of a new hire’s onboarding with the company and should also be reiterated during ongoing performance discussions. This exact thing is the reason you see employee’s rating themselves as exceeds expectations, while the manager is left scratching his head wondering how the hell his employee could lack such self-awareness. In the absence of this information, an employee will always default to what they believe are the expectations and objectives and perform accordingly. Duh.
- Failure to keep any documentation from the review period to look back to. And thus rely on memory. An HR professional can always tell by a manager’s vague and sweeping statements in a performance review that he or she has no fucking clue what his or her employee accomplished all year. You know what also gets forgotten when only memory is relied upon? An employees’ weaknesses, fails, and areas of opportunity. Fast forward to 3 months later when Mr. Manager is in HR’s office complaining about his employee’s performance issues. HR pulls the performance review and lo and behold nothing has been indicated on the evaluation, but Mr. Manager insists this has been happening for months or years. Sorry, Mr. Manager, your documentation does not back up your accusation. Discipline and termination are going to be pretty difficult to justify.
- Never awarding an employee anything other than a “Meets Expectations” although his of her performance clearly goes above and beyond. This is a great way to actively disengage your employee, reduce his or her productivity and send your employee to the next job offer that is extended. If your employee is killin’ it at work- give them the props they deserve. An “Exceeds Expectations” should never be elusive but it should be reserved for the rare but deserving “A”-game employees.
But to the HR folk who see the above on a routine basis, I would ask what they are doing in their respective organizations to fix it. Rampant crap reviews are more indicative of poor training and unclear managerial expectations than they are any single manager’s fault. HR- get your shit together, and start whipping those managers into performance review ninjas.
How Is This Not a Thing?
The future of HR is the bot. In fact, I’m not sure if it’s the future or we, as a profession, are just catastrophically behind in the way we leverage technology to further our tactical and strategic purposes. Yeah, pretty sure the latter is the culprit.
In basic terms a bot is a software application that can run tasks that are both simple and repetitive. Just like every other technology, bots have evolved. Add artificial intelligence to bots and you get virtual personal assistants, like Siri.
Next sprinkle in some emotional intelligence to that bot, and you have a new virtual HR Representative that can interact with human employees.
This new virtual HR bot, let’s call him Toby, will revolutionize HR.
Instead of staffing HR help desks and employing an army of employee relations representatives to answer the same mundane questions day-to-day, employees can instead access on-demand a bot from an internal portal or on their mobile device and ask questions that are most relevant to them at that moment. Routine questions that clog our HR inboxes and take up our precious time can be virtually eliminated. Toby can answer questions on where to access employee pay stubs, how much your individual deductible is, and when your self-evaluation is due.
Further, Toby can pinch hit as your on-demand Manager resource. When your managers have pressing questions and concerns such as initiating a status change, or an FLSA question, or a training need, he or she can simply access Toby for exactly the information they require at that moment rather than waiting on their HR Specialist to be available or wasting time sifting through training materials or public drives or FAQ’s to access the information.
Consider the possibilities of using bot technology, Toby in this instance, as your orientation and onboarding specialist. Toby is programmed to communicate with your new hire prior to their arrival, preparing he or she for their first day, assisting them with new hire paperwork and benefits enrollment and being a touch point in that first crucial 90-days of any new hire’s experience with the company.
Toby, our friendly bot, is also available at any time to take first reports of injury, employee suggestions and initial complaints. Toby can also conduct stay and exit interviews. Rather than waiting for a manager or an HR representative to be available, employees can access Toby 24/7 while the human HR team collects all of the data retained by Toby iand allows us to focus more on the overall alignment of HR with the business.
There are probably hundreds of more HR responsibilities that bots can take on to create a successful life cycle for the employee. This idea radically changes the playing field for the skills and competencies that are required of human resource professionals. I’m game, are you HR?
The HR Glass Ceiling
HR has been very busy over the past few decades, very busy trying to figure out how to get ahead, how to reach those upper echelons of corporate leadership and really influence our function’s agenda. Us HR professionals seem to think we have some secret knowledge that if only if we were able to get in the ear of the CEO, we could really influence the success of the company.
It’s like the HR profession has its own glass ceiling to overcome. We’ve tried a bunch of things to chip way at that ceiling and they have failed.
HR tried rebranding efforts calling ourselves the people department or any assortment of silly names. This effort has failed to highlight our value.
For years, HR has hunted for the elusive “seat at the table”. Meanwhile, through blood, sweat and tears, we have seen every other department, but HR, get that seat and we are still left at the kids table.
HR professionals went the way of consultancies. By being outside of the business, the business would finally realize how much they needed us. Wrong.
The problem is not the name of our department. The problem is not which seat we have at what table. And the problem is not whether we advise the company as an internal department or externally, as a consultancy.
The problem is gender stereotypes and the perceived value of masculine versus feminine traits in the business world.
The corporate world is traditionally assigned male characteristics and companies’ that show ultra-masculine traits are generally regarded in popular opinion as successful. Highly sought after leaders are goal-driven , confident, non-emotional, aggressive, independent, disciplined, strong, logical and rational. All typical masculine traits.
HR, a historically female-dominated profession, is described as having feminine characteristics no doubt due not only to the gender of those in the jobs but that HR deals with people issues. Successful HR professionals and departments are empathetic, patient, understanding, receptive, nurturing, affective and helpful.
The same reason women hit the glass ceiling is the same reason why HR isn’t taken as seriously as the IT department or the sales department or any other revenue generating department. It’s because traditional feminine characteristics are not valued in the business environment. They aren’t perceived as the cold, hard traits that boost the bottom line, build profit and make shareholders happy.
This is not to say that HR should whine and sit idly by doing nothing because the culture holds us back. Oh no, HR needs to be disruptive. We need to push back. We need to be fuckin’ smart and demand that people respect our value. Once more minorities, millennials and Gen Z are sitting on corporate boards and in government, and once CHRO’s are legitimately considered as successors for CEO jobs, HR will no longer be seen as a department to tolerate but a force to be reckoned with.
9 Do’s and Don’ts to Completing Your Self-Evaluation
Once or twice a year many companies undergo a formal performance review process. On average, most companies ask for their employees feedback by way of a self-evaluation. Most employees exude an audible groan, give it a cursory overview and write down the same garbage year after year.
As much as I don’t totally agree with the standard annual review process or the 360 review process on principle, I totally support the notion that an employee is his or her own best advocate. And if you are given the opportunity to speak for yourself, absolutely take it seriously and follow these do’s and don’ts.
Do keep a running diary or file ALL YEAR ROUND of all of your work accomplishments, projects completed, client accolades, awards, educational achievements and peer praise. Also, keep notes on areas you made mistakes, encountered the issue again and improved.
Don’t blow off the process by not writing anything or digging up last year’s review and re-writing the same things. This is a signal to your boss that you are not taking the process seriously. Why would your manager bother with putting any effort into your review or development, if you do not bother yourself.
Do provide concrete and clear examples of the competencies you have demonstrated over the course of the review period. For example, if your company prizes efficiency, provide an example of the time you identified a redundant process inside a workflow, brought it to the attention of management, and how the elimination of that process resulted in less time taken to complete the process.
Don’t sell yourself short. Provide any and all examples of your work accomplishments, do not make judgement calls on the level of impact to the business or department. Your role and your performance have a purpose to the company, otherwise the job wouldn’t exist.
Do provide areas that you may have failed in or areas of improvement. You should be the first one to bring this up, not your manager. It shows you have self-awareness and that’s important.
Don’t rate yourself as a “Meets Expectations” or “Average” on all rating categories. This is called Central Tendency Bias and highlights our human propensity for avoiding extreme categories. But this is just lazy, don’t do that.
Do review your performance reviews from prior years so that you can identify areas that you have improved upon over time. If you don’t have copies, ask your manager or HR.
Don’t forget to address your work goals. The review process is about the past but should also provide some direction for the future. Be the first to write down a few goals that you would like to address with your manager during the performance discussion.
Do proof-read your self-evaluation for grammar, spelling and content before you turn it into your manager.
HR With Attitude 