Suddenly, the teams that HR leaders were trying to build engagement strategies around started working from home. With this, strategies have to change in order to engage a team no matter their location. The good news — employees are happier at home and may be more likely to stay in their current position simply because they’re remote. In fact, companies allowing remote work have 25% lower employee turnover than those that don’t. But when so many open job opportunities are remote, you need to stay competitive and pay attention to what employees want in the virtual workplace to really motivate and engage remote workers.

What They Really, Really Want

When social activities and travel came to a standstill, employees craved forward motion. In fact, 70% of US employees are at least somewhat likely to leave their current company and accept an offer with a new company known for investing in employee learning and development.

#EmployeeDevelopment and engagement go hand-in-hand in the virtual workplace. Keep your teams engaged with these tips from @CaliperCorp:
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When teams only see each other over occasional Zoom calls, perks like catered lunches, in-person team-building retreats, and happy hours you depended on for engagement don’t make sense. In a remote work world, employees want their skills developed.

A look at the stats:

• 80% of employees say learning and development opportunities would help them feel more engaged at work
• 61% of employees (including those who already received training) said they need more to do their jobs better.
• Most employees (74%) don’t believe they are reaching their full potential.
• Since the start of COVID-related remote work,  78% of employees pursued training opportunities on their own, regardless of whether their employers have provided them with any.

This article will explain why employee development and engagement go hand-in-hand in the virtual workplace and how you can move your strategies in the right direction.

Retention Security: Achieved

You already know how valuable employee retention is to your company’s budget. Some studies predict that every time a business replaces a salaried employee, it costs 6 to 9 months’ salary on average. For a manager making $60,000 a year, that’s $30,000 to $45,000 in recruiting and training expenses to fill the position.

When people feel valued and invested in, they are less likely to look at other opportunities. As a company invests in its people’s growth, employees see that they can accomplish their personal growth goals within the organization. They subsequently grow in their commitment to the company and its goals. Some examples of learning and development initiatives that support employee retention include:

• Identify individual’s strengths with suggestions on how to leverage day-to-day tasks
• Professional coaching & goal setting
• Competency-based training & skill development

Leaders Ready at the Helm

When you develop great talent, they’ll see a future for themselves at your organization. If done right, this means effective succession planning and a pipeline of future leaders. The ability to do this lies in your ability to improve organizational readiness and identify successors for critical positions at any given time. Through coaching, goal alignment, and continuous skill development, employees will feel more invested in your company goals and mission regardless of their career stage.

Developed leaders are ready to react to crises and organizational change. Teams look to their leaders in times of crisis and sudden change. With the right training, leaders and future leaders alike can work in real-time with real information and within the context of their day-to-day work to ensure preparedness.

Seeking an engaged team with low #attrition? @CaliperCorp says the secret is #TrainingandDevelopment. See how it’s done:
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Collaboration From Afar

Even from the comfort of their own home, employees want a sense of strong team collaboration to stay engaged. An ADP Research Institute study found that feeling part of a team is a massive factor in employee engagement. It found that employees who felt like they were part of a team were more than twice as likely to be fully engaged. Improving the closeness and collaboration of a team becomes intangible in the virtual workplace, but it’s not impossible.

Individuals on a team can benefit from:

• Increased self-awareness training
• Appreciation of diverse personalities and backgrounds
• Talent audits to identify and leverage strengths
• Tools to improve communication and group work

Through improved collaboration and training, individuals on teams are likely to acquire new skills and learn from each other, continuously improving future collaboration and boosting engagement levels.

Knowing the connection between development and engagement isn’t enough. You need a clear strategy with context — as employee development is an ongoing process. As you work to motivate and engage your remote workers, lean on training and development. Investing in trustworthy collaborations and development tools brings them together when separated geographically.

With Caliper’s Precision Series, you can maximize employee strengths and develop areas of improvement through practical skills development — resulting in engaged, productive employees.

Reach out to see how Caliper can help improve your remote employee engagement through targeted learning and development.

Traditional learning is a large commitment for employees, and online courses can be hit-or-miss — the curriculum may cover inapplicable abstract theory, basic concepts, or irrelevant content. It can be difficult for employers to find impactful learning programs where employees can bring back knowledge and developed skills that result in recognizable, quantifiable results.

Competency-based learning, however, provides a customized opportunity with a reasonable amount of commitment for employees to continue learning, develop their skill sets, and become more effective in their role.

What Is Competency-Based Learning?

Competency-based learning uses a self-paced model, where learners aren’t restricted to the classroom in which they must meet curriculum deadlines or have long pieces of one-size-fits-all content to digest. It provides a more flexible learning schedule for employees and focuses on improving the current role’s skills. It doesn’t look to cover the depth of a subject, but rather the development of an area or skill.

Is your training model outdated, and your employees’ skillsets plateauing? @CaliperCorp explains why competency-based learning makes for stronger #EmployeeDevelopment.
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For employees, they have more control over their learning and can balance their workloads better. Instead of taking university courses (which require an application process and a large sum of tuition) or online classes (which may not be specifically valuable), you can tailor competency-based learning to the employee to develop the skills they need, thereby improving the output of their role.

Employers looking to improve employee skills for a specific role can use competency-based education to save on higher costs that a university would require, implement a specific curriculum for the role that would lead to better outcomes, and allow the employee to better balance learning with work.

Bonus Material: Caliper breaks down the benefits of using a Competency-Based Training Model in your workplace.

How Does It Provide Continual Learning & Professional Development?

Using a competency-based learning model allows employees to continue learning beyond the classroom and improve their skills on their time. Unlike traditional schooling, where employees put a degree on their resume, they instead develop the professional skill sets needed for their specific role.

Competency-based training offers practical soft skills for the workforce in areas such as influence and persuasion, driving results, learning agility, active listening, etc. The employee can enhance their skill in an area and then work on developing it on-the-job. It’s a win-win scenario, with more control over the cost of learning for the company and greater flexibility for the employee.

Bonus Material: Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our Emotional Intelligence series to see how you and your employees can develop your soft skills and foster a culture of success in your organization.

Continual Learning with the Caliper Precision Series

When you implement competency-based training, it’s going to be different than other forms of training. When we look for continual learning, we look for the following criteria:

• Practical, specific skills development with coaching-enabled eLearning.
• Self-paced. Usually, it allows employees greater flexibility without multiple hard deadlines.
• Complementary to current roles. The skill does not replace training but makes the employee more effective in their current role.
• An ongoing process so that the skill acquired has more than a single-use case or isolated value.

Competency-based training is taking over, and it’s the catalyst for more effective #EmployeeDevelopment. Companies save costs, and employees grow professionally. Learn more about competency-based training here with @CaliperCorp
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Companies usually implement their competency-based curriculum in-house, but it can be a substantial amount of work to maintain the curriculum, measure its effectiveness, and add new skills. Furthermore, determining whether it’s effective can be difficult among smaller sample sizes. Many times, companies need to develop the skills of employees that no one in the company has. This is why many companies look for external sources of learning. Nonetheless, finding a credible source of learning can be a hassle.

Tip: When employees have the flexibility and freedom to take ownership of their career development, it creates a culture of self-management. In today’s workforce, 72% of employees say they desire a role that allows for professional development. Utilize this desire to grow to transform your managers into great leaders.

The Caliper Precision Series helps develop employees by providing snackable, microlearning content broken up into modules for skill development. Each module allows managers to coach employees with focus areas. The Precision Series is dynamically configurable, enabling managers to customize the curriculum to the employee’s needs. The series scales learning among employees with nearly unlimited opportunities.

Competency-based learning is a practical option for companies to develop employees’ skills to save costs, provide flexibility, and enable employee growth. Choosing a competency-based training option, such as the Precision Series, is vital to the objective’s success.

Do you want to learn more about competency-based training and how it can transform the productivity of your workforce? Check out our Caliper Precision Series and see how it can move your team’s learning objectives forward. Or, for more information about how Caliper helps develop strong leaders, reach out to one of our experts or sign up for your free demo today.

Companies have been sharing the various ways they are tackling performance reviews this year. Some organizations are postponing or delaying their reviews, while others are ditching the formal review format and are, instead, leaning toward more consistent and frequent feedback. Put simply, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to conducting performance reviews in 2020, but by arming yourself with the right knowledge and tools, you can find ways to adapt your process to work for you and your employees. Check out our three performance review tips for managers. 

Rethink Your Ratings

Measuring performance this year can be tricky. Many of the organizations’ goals before the spread of Covid-19 are no longer applicable, as the workplace environment and benchmarks have shifted. Leaders have found that traditional systems of rating employees on their performance are ineffective, as they don’t account for an objective measurement of success. The bottom line is that the metrics you’ve previously used to track and rank employees are unfair benchmarks for analyzing performance. 

This year, over 69% of employees have stated that they have felt burnt-out by work. @CaliperCorp says that #PerformanceReviews are the perfect time to boost morale with these 3 tips:
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As you approach performance reviews, allow for flexibility in your ratings. Rather than using cut-and-dry numerical rates, tackle the discussion with openness. Use the time to speak to your employees about the challenges they have faced, and highlight specific achievements or projects they have completed over the last year. Using a hyper-specific magnifying glass on their yearly performance will allow you to provide insightful tips and recommendations on their performance. 

Performance Review Tips for Managers #1: Rather than measure success against a set of metrics, break down each project, and provide feedback on a case-by-case basis. This method allows you to provide specific, frequent feedback (and did you know that 69% of employees prefer consistent feedback compared to annual reviews?)

Channel Compassion 

This year, it is important to recognize the stresses and challenges employees have faced, both professionally and personally. Employees have been juggling new responsibilities, sometimes without proper training, and many parents are juggling full-time jobs with becoming a full-time homeschool teacher. When approaching performance reviews, be mindful that everyone’s situation has been unique this year. 

Be transparent in your conversations with employees. With many organizations still working remotely, these performance reviews allow managers the opportunity to connect with their employees in a meaningful way.  It takes extra preparation for a virtual performance review. Some things to help you prepare include:

• Provide feedback ahead of time — This allows both parties the chance to read through the questions and data provided and prepare for a more detailed conversation during the review.
• Take notes — Bringing notes to the discussion will help streamline the conversation and provide talking points to support their performance.
• Ask for peer feedback — With over 42% of all employees still working remotely, it is difficult to see your team’s daily success or pitfalls. By asking peers for feedback, you can get a more holistic view of how effectively they perform at their job. 

Remember to be empathetic with your employees. Under these unusual times, it is essential to reinforce your company culture by showing your employees you understand their troubles and will support them in any way you can.

Performance Review Tips for Managers #2: Sometimes, it’s best to be quiet. Performance reviews are a two-way conversation, which means that listening is just as important as speaking. Let your employees have the chance to talk about their experiences this year — you might walk away with a better understanding of their situation.  

Celebrate the Successes

This year has been challenging for everyone, and we can all agree that celebrating the wins when they come is crucial for keeping morale high. Keep this in mind as you approach performance discussions. Shift your focus from the shortfalls, and instead highlight the things that employees have done well. 

With many employees still working #remotely, HR Professionals have to find innovative ways to conduct their yearly reviews. @CaliperCorp has 3 tips for #HRLeaders as they adjust and adapt their #PerformanceReview processes:
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These wins don’t have to be colossal achievements or tangible accomplishments. Instead, they can be intangible assets they provide to the organization, such as increased transparency in communication, shouldering more responsibilities within their department, or finding innovative ways to continue working in a new environment. Take the time to acknowledge these achievements and provide recognition for those who have earned it. 

Performance Review Tips for Managers #3: This year, over 69% of employees have stated that they have felt burnt-out by work. HR Professionals agree that burnout leads to higher levels of turnover. Employee morale and retention rates have an immediate and direct tie to recognition. Taking the time to celebrate the small wins just might save your bottom line.   

Like nearly everything else this year, performance reviews will take some adjusting and adaptation. As your company prepares for performance discussions, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. What works for one organization doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for yours. But, take confidence in knowing that we are all working through similar troubles. 

Caliper’s Talent Management solution enables organizations to provide a holistic and insightful performance review and offer support where needed. To learn more about how Caliper can help you facilitate an effective performance review during these changing times, schedule a demo today with one of our experts. 

Employee Motivation Tip 1: Offer your employees a form or agenda around the review. Even more frequent performance reviews still require this structure. Employees often don’t know what their performance review will look like; offering them a preview helps them to prepare better. 

Another issue with the annual performance review is it suffers significantly from recency bias on both sides. That’s probably especially true in the current climate. However, your employees need you to evaluate their performance, even if it looks a little different this time around. 

When it comes time to prepare for performance reviews, organizations need to ensure they are allocating their time and efforts into a quality conversation and effective process. In today’s work environment, it is increasingly evident that traditional review methods are no longer the most productive or effective strategy. 

Employee Motivation Tip 2: Even if you have informal performance conversations, do your best to keep a record of these. Studies show informal performance conversations are more appreciated by employees and result in higher engagement. Suppose your company still uses more traditional performance reviews. In that case, you can collate this informal feedback in an effort to make these more comprehensive and get your employees used to discussing performance on a regular basis. 

A majority of employees believe formal reviews have no impact on their performance, and only 5% of managers are satisfied with performance reviews. Something has to change, and that’s why more and more organizations are throwing them out and rethinking their review process.

As you begin to transform your performance management strategies, questions will arise. How often should performance discussions take place? How will employees be rated, and how does pay align with those ratings? How simple or complex should they be? Should data be involved? If so, how does data play its part?

Don’t hold #PerformanceReviews just for the sake of crossing off your checklist. @CaliperCorp says you should use these discussions as an opportunity for #collaboration and #coaching for the future:
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These questions can divert you from the most critical aspect of reviews: employees need to be held accountable for their performance in a more inspiring, helpful way. By doing so, you’ll see more productive, engaged, and happy employees (and managers).

Frequent Reviews Make Accurate Reviews

Fair and accurate feedback is critical to the performance of an employee. In fact, 85% of workers would consider quitting after an unfair review. The frequency of reviews also influences the effectiveness of the conversation. As reviews become more infrequent, it becomes more challenging to remember details, increasing the likelihood of unfair or inaccurate discussions. 

Change frequently happens, whether it be over a year or a few months. Toss in leadership changes, personal and professional priorities, and varying business objectives, which adds up to a vast amount of ground to cover in one discussion.  Having one-on-one conversations once a year doesn’t allow for changing priorities and expectations to occur naturally and in real-time. 

Consistent discussions better equip both managers and employees to keep to their goals. Additionally, it offers the opportunity to align your development with your team’s objectives relating to the organization’s mission.

Employee Motivation Tip 3: Ask your employee to prepare their goal statements ahead of time. When employee goals align with corporate goals, they’re easier to map out a plan for success. Ensure you have their goals from the last review handy (if applicable) and have drawn lines between your performance notes and the company goals so you can assist in making these connections. 

Continuous conversations also ensure that feedback happens in real-time and provides an opportunity for regular documentation to refer back to in future discussions. This allows employees and managers to correctly recall details within the right context and timeframe, letting nothing fall through the cracks. 

When organizations move to more frequent performance discussions, they offer a more profound clarity to each role’s responsibilities. Employees with transparency in their performance feel a heightened sense of inspiration in their work. 

Taking it a step further, accurate reviews leverage technology and data to see how an individual’s performance stacks up against the expectations set for them. Having key metrics available to perform such an analysis makes a big difference in the employee’s efficiency and overall development.

Make Reviews Action-Oriented

Don’t hold reviews just for the sake of crossing off your checklist. While it’s an essential conversation for employee development, performance reviews should also aim to accomplish something tangible and set up future expectations. 

Creating action-oriented goals and using frequent conversations to track an individual’s progress can dramatically increase motivation to achieve their goals. Here are a few guidelines to making that happen:

• Give both recognition and feedback. Call out what they’re doing well and encourage attention to areas of opportunity.
• Revisit your old conversations. Acknowledge when things from previous conversations are moving in the right direction and when they could use more focus.
• Coach and support them. Offer the guidance, resources, or tools they need to succeed.
• Carefully choose your words. Words carry a lot of weight in motivating or deflating a person’s value. Ensure your phrases are avoiding bias and are measurement-oriented rather than personality-oriented.

Instead of reporting back to your employees everything they’ve done since your last conversation, make sure there is a clear outcome. Many people believe the best performance reviews start at the end, with clear performance metrics and objectives. During your discussions, set a task, deliverable, or short-term goal for your employee to complete. These conversations should not only discuss performance but also drive it. You want employees to feel empowered and excited about where they’re heading, and giving them small, achievable outcomes helps them feel like they’re making real progress.

Employee Motivation Tip 4: Always measure results, not people. Many managers use performance reviews in order to critique habits or personality traits. While these can sometimes impact work, they have the more debilitating effect of making the review about the individual instead of actual performance. 

Work Together for Better Performance

Performance reviews should never be a one-sided conversation. Managers and employees are a team and need to work together to achieve their goals. Viewing these one-on-one conversations as an opportunity for a coaching session, rather than merely as a performance review, is a more effective way to frame the matter at hand. Coaching is a form of training and development that fosters a meaningful relationship between a manager and an employee. 

#DYK that only 5% of managers are satisfied with their current #PerformanceReview processes? @CaliperCorp breaks down the three most essential tips for motivating your employees when performance discussions roll around:
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Employees can leverage their managers’ knowledge and expertise while accessing the tools they need to enable their personal development. By allowing individuals to contribute their input, feedback, wants, and needs, managers provide them with an environment where they feel supported and encouraged to find success.

To facilitate an open conversation with individuals, you should:

• Ask them about their vision for themselves
• Listen with curiosity
• Be accurate in your reflection by showing you understand their needs
• Be supportive
• Provide constructive, honest feedback
• Communicate clearly

Active listening is essential to a successful performance review. Listening to your employees allows you to learn from them and to understand their daily working environment. When it comes down to it, participating in a conversation isn’t always about sharing your view. Conversations where the employees are being talked at rather than listened to can contribute to feelings of lowered morale, decreased autonomy, and less confidence. 

Employee Motivation Tip 5: Conversation starters and prompts often help less gregarious employees to articulate their thoughts. The same holds for managers. Work with your performance review team to ensure every employee receives consistent preparation, and every manager follows a similar process.

Performance reviews should be a mutual discussion of what the individual wants and how the manager can help them get there. By working together, individuals gain a sense of contribution to and control of their development and are more likely to accomplish goals they’ve set for themselves.

With Caliper’s Essentials for Coaching, you’ll be able to motivate and engage your employees so they feel passionate about the work they’re doing. Want to take a look at how our products can help your company? Get in touch with our experts, and we can get you on the right path to developing more successful employees.

This article was originally published on November 14th, 2019.  It was updated on October 15th, 2020.

Through revised talent management tactics like hiring for potential over skill set, nurturing strong, thriving company cultures, and empowering growth and development, companies are increasingly leveraging the power of their people in order to unlock their greatest success. How do we know? Our readers told us as much.

Did you know? Revenue drops by 33% when there’s low #EmployeeEngagement. See what else everyone was talking about in 2019 over on the @CaliperCorp blog:
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This year, our most-read blog posts were those that focused on management empowering the individual to see great returns. Below are Caliper’s top 5 blog posts from 2019:

#5: The Basics and Benefits of Competency-Based Training

Training and development are critical to individual success and employee productivity and the best way to cost-effectively level up your organizational skill set. Competency-based training allows individuals to follow growth plans that are suited to their unique learning needs and are tailored to specific job needs, adaptive to different learning styles and timelines, cheaper than formal learning programs, and personalized to individual ambitions and motivations. Here’s an excerpt:

Modify your training programs and modules to suit your interests, skills, and development needs… Some people are naturally more talented at specific skills than others, and that goes for how people learn new skills, too.

With competency-based training, you can customize how your team tackles training by catering your programs to meet their individual needs. Pair the training with each individual employee’s personality assessment in order to create a more effective and targeted development program.

By focusing on individual competencies, companies are able to fulfill their employees’ learning and growth objectives, while aligning their training to more strategic business outcomes. It’s a win-win.

Learn more about the Caliper Individual Developmental Guide

#4: How Promoting Employee Happiness Benefits Everyone

Company culture was big in 2019, and for good reason. Operating incomes can drop by 33% when employees show low-level engagement. A strong company culture with happy employees leads to increased employee productivity, higher retention rates, and more engagement and participation from individuals. This blog post explains how employee happiness makes an impact:

Companies that scored the highest reported nearly three times a return on assets and doubled their return on sales. Your employee experience isn’t just tied to happiness but also productivity throughout the workplace. The better the experience your employees have, the happier they become.

Adding simple changes can help employees feel like their entire life isn’t about their job… When employees aren’t having to constantly worry about work after work, it increases their drive… Having a clear break between life and work is an easy way to promote happiness.

It’s becoming more and more clear to organizations that they need to place the individual experience as a top priority.

What happened in #HR last year? @CaliperCorp has a roundup of their most visited blogs, and how all roads lead to #EmployeeProductivity:
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#3: The Value of Self-Awareness at Work

Enabling happy employees isn’t just about putting a foosball table in the break room and filling a fridge with endless refreshments. Those are attractive perks to being in the office, but they aren’t the things that make employees feel fulfilled.

A good way to tap into employee productivity is by encouraging self-awareness in your leaders. Leading with self-awareness increases empathy and understanding of others’ needs — a self-aware leader is better about assessing their own needs, and those of everyone else, too. Here’s what we said on the topic earlier this year:

By bringing awareness of one’s self into the workplace, leaders are able to better identify who they are as an employee and why they work the way they do. Using this information, leaders can then play to their strengths while understanding their areas of developmental opportunity… For these reasons, employees often note a healthier work environment under such superiors. Not only are there benefits to the leader and the employees, but there is also a significant positive correlation between self-aware leaders and company performance.

Encourage your leaders to get to know themselves, their work style, strengths and weaknesses, and how they prefer to communicate. Have them ask for feedback from their teams, and reflect on how their feedback aligns with their understanding of themselves.

A self-aware leader who can examine their own tendencies and motivations has a much better chance of understanding and managing to those of the individuals on their teams.

Learn more about Caliper’s Essentials for Coaching

#2: Six Components of Self-Management

Similar to self-awareness is self-management. This, too, takes discipline and introspection, but is a more all-encompassing — often more experienced —  style of working. Self-management leads to higher productivity, engagement, and fulfillment. This post breaks down the 6 elements that most directly contribute to self-management. Those traits are:

• Composure under pressure
• Self-awareness
• An openness to change
• Professionalism
• Ownership of work
• A focus on learning

For a deeper dive into the six elements of self-management and how to coach to these individual traits and bolster your employee performance, take a look at the 3-part series we wrote this year that explores this topic in more detail.

#1: 10 Best Practices for Effective Team Building

The common thread through all of our most popular posts this year was one of employee productivity and efficiency, and our most read blog post follows suit. Workplace dynamics are changing. What was once about hierarchy and corporate ladders, is now about flattening out and increasing collaboration and cross-departmental functions. Teamwork is more important than ever. This post establishes how to create effective, well-rounded teams, while fostering relationships and team-building from within. This post reminds us:

Team effectiveness is not something you think about offhandedly in between the other stuff. It should be your focus. Projects will come and go, but the team is the engine that drives the business result. And just like engines need maintenance to run efficiently, teams need to revisit best practices to make sure effectiveness remains optimized. It is the most important investment you can make for your team.

Your employees are your most valuable asset, and we can’t envision a 2020 year that doesn’t increase its focus on these topics. To learn more about what Caliper Profile assessments can do to boost employee productivity and focus on employee growth and development, reach out to our experts to get started.

Melinda Kennedy, an Organizational Development Consultant for more than 15 years here at Caliper, recently hosted a webinar on exactly what makes an effective employee performance review. She says there are ways to examine your current processes to evaluate where and how to make your reviews as valuable and powerful as possible.

Here are three ways to take charge of your people management in the new year and get both employees and managers engaged and invested in employee performance review:

30% of millennials have reported quitting a job after a #PerformanceReview because they aren’t getting valuable feedback. @CaliperCorp has advice on how to re-examine your employee review process in the New Year:
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Should You Switch From Annual Reviews?

It’s difficult for employees to have a full understanding of how they’re performing if they’re only hearing about it once or twice a year. 30% of millennials have reported quitting a job after a performance review — not because they can’t handle the criticism, but because they aren’t getting valuable feedback that helps them understand their own performance and what they need to do to be effective. Then, ultimately, they feel blindsided with a poor review at the end of the year. 

Melinda discusses the “Growth Divide” in her webinar, noting that leadership and employees don’t always agree on what constitutes growth: Executive leaders consider things like market share, revenue, and other measurable indicators of company growth and competitive strength, while employees consider the things that are necessary for them to contribute and thrive within with organization. According to the study used in the webinar: 

• 50% of employees want performance conversations on a monthly basis, but 69% of managers still only conductive employee performance reviews once or twice a year.
• 50% of employees don’t feel comfortable raising issues with their manager in between reviews, but 75% say they’d be more proactive if they received more frequent feedback.
• More than 90% of employees would like mistakes and opportunities addressed in real-time, but 67% of managers admit they remove mistakes from reviews because too much time has passed since the event to be relevant.

So, what does Melinda say to correct those issues? Make it agile. Many companies have eliminated the appraisal aspect of performance appraisals, and instead replace them with real-time feedback in the form of one-to-one conversations. Terms like “appraisal” have taken on negative connotations for both managers and employees, and as such, those conversations tend to begin from a space of negativity, rather than one of growth. Instead of rehashing the past year, leverage that data to drive the conversation into the future — how can information be used to set up an individual for success in the year ahead?

Melinda says to change the way we see performance reviews. It’s a cycle, not an event. Managers and employees should work together to plan their goals and development, manage the process closely throughout the year to ensure there are no surprises, review the progress, then repeat the process over and over. It’s not a singular event, it’s a cycle of planning, check-ins, and review.

Are Your Conversations Valuable?

You might have already implemented regular one-to-ones, but are you making the most of your time together? A live poll taken during Melinda’s webinar gathered the responses of HR managers and revealed that their gravest concerns with employee performance reviews are that they’re too long, too outdated, and too generic.

The goal of performance review conversations is to create a closed feedback loop — no gaps, stalls, or misconnections. A good conversation is one that is accurate, effective, and relevant to the employee — that is, feedback that’s useful to them, that they can accept as a tool to use in their development. Instead of using your reviews to think about what happened over the past year, reframe them as a way to look forward. Use this time as a way to examine future needs, future desires, and what you can do together to make it happen. 

Looking for advice on how to refresh your #EmployeeReviewProcess in the New Year? @CaliperCorp has 3 questions that will help start the conversation:
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How do you facilitate a more powerful conversation?

1. Provide feedback in real-time. By addressing issues and opportunities in-the-moment, managers and employees don’t miss opportunities to grow, correct, or discuss behaviors at a time that is relevant.
2. Understand the individual’s motivation. Not every employee is driven by financial compensation, and a manager’s motivations might not match that of an individual. Consider who is part of the conversation, and what drives their behavior. Seek to understand their motivation before you attempt to have a conversation so you can come from a place of empathy.
3. Include individual development goals. Ensure that the individual can be confident that the conversation is of benefit to them, not just the company. Expectations can be set to meet company goals or standards, but also take into account the needs and wants of employees, too.
4. Make it honest and meaningful. Be sure that the feedback you provide comes from a place of honesty, meant to provide real value to the individual, rather than reciting from a programmed, formulaic one-size-fits-all routine. Holding meaningful conversations is a great way to reinforce great behavior and propel performance forward continually.

Do You Have The Necessary Tools to Make Great Coaches?

Melinda explains two Caliper-backed philosophies for effective coaching:

Listening Plus

Go beyond listening. Give individuals extra attention to discern all there is to be heard. That can be done by listening for clues that might tell you more than just what their words are saying. Ask questions for clarity to ensure what you’re understanding them correctly, and repeat what you hear to ensure you’re truly aligned and you close the feedback loop.

Caliper-Powered Discovery Questioning: 

The concept behind discovery questioning is to use sharply focused questions that help individuals discover options for themselves, rather than outright giving them the answer. Ways to make this effective is to stay self-aware and remember your own tendencies as opposed to that of the individual you’re coaching. What might spark an idea for you, might not be the same for them. Instead, ask them questions that help them think about their options. Make sure the questions are relevant and help push the conversation forward.

While these tactics are useful, we aren’t all natural-born coaches. Most coaches will need help developing the skill set to ask the right questions and guide the conversation properly. The Caliper Essentials for Coaching report is a useful tool for putting the conversation into context and providing questions and recommendations to conduct a powerful discussion. Also, a valuable takeaway for employees is the Individual Developmental Guide to help them better understand their individual strengths, motivations, and natural tendencies and how to maximize them. 

To learn more about the ways the Caliper suite provides coaches and individuals with the tools they need to hold powerful and valuable performance conversations, contact our experts today and learn how development consultants like Melinda Kennedy can help your organization. To watch the webinar recording and learn more, click here.

In 2015, Airbnb became one of the most notable companies to tackle the topic of employee happiness by hiring someone whose role was specifically dedicated to managing and improving their employee’s experiences. At the time, they transitioned their Chief Human Resources Officer into their shiny new position, the Head of Employee Experience. 

The Head of Employee Experience combines traditional human resources processes and the responsibility of focusing on their new initiative — the “workplace as an experience” vision. Airbnb worked to achieve this vision by creating a group of employees in most offices that worked as a “ground control,” focused on bringing the company’s written culture to life. 

Your employee’s experience is not just tied to happiness but also #productivity throughout the workplace. @CaliperCorp sheds light on why you should be promoting #EmployeeHappiness in your organization:
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So why are companies focusing so much on employee happiness and their experience at work? Beyond ranking well in Forbes’ Best Places to Work List, there are a number of benefits that outweigh the cost of investing in employee happiness. However, most offices can’t afford to hire a Head of Employee Experience. Often, departments delegate responsibilities to a single person or a team of individuals to ensure that tasks don’t fall through the cracks. At the end of the day, you want your employees to be both happy and productive. So, what are you doing to promote their happiness?

Productivity, happiness, and your bottom line.

A report titled The Financial Impact of a Positive Employee Experience dove into the correlation between financial returns and employee satisfaction in their current role. It was found that companies who ranked in the top 25% reported nearly three times the return on assets, and doubled their return on sales. These findings make it clear: Your employee’s experience is not just tied to happiness, but also productivity throughout the workplace. You can drastically improve your company’s bottom line by increasing your employees’ experiences. A happier workforce is a more productive workforce, which in turn creates a more profitable environment. 

Bonus Material: See how the Caliper Essentials for Coaching can improve employee morale, confidence, and creativity.

If you notice that productivity is low and it seems you’ve done all you can do to promote employee happiness in the workplace, take a look at your hiring practices and see if there needs to be more precision when hiring. Sit down and take the time to assess gaps in your hiring process, and determine ways in which you can improve. Moving forward, this can tremendously impact your employees’ future happiness and productivity.

A work-life balance is integral toward fostering a happy workforce. Being able to separate work and personal life provides untethered freedom, allowing employees ample time to unplug and recharge. Finding small, simple ways to promote a healthy work-life balance can help combat burnout and can help your employees feel as though work doesn’t permeate every aspect of their lives. When employees aren’t having to worry about work outside of the office, it increases their drive. Allowing employees to recharge gives them the opportunity to come in with a fresh attitude instead of being bogged down. Having a clear break between life and work is an easy way to promote happiness.

Engagement, happiness, and a retained workforce.

The average cost-per-hire for companies is $4,129 per new employee, according to Hire by Google’s latest research, and the cost-per-hire of executives is exponentially higher. Recently, the Work Institute looked at trends in employee turnover and predicted that in 2020,  1 out of every 3 workers will leave their current jobs. When it costs nearly a third of an employee’s salary each time someone leaves their position, it is critical for companies to find ways to engage and retain their current human capital. 

Employees are more likely to stay in an organization that offers opportunities to create meaningful relationships with their coworkers. @CaliperCorp offers insight on how #EmployeeHappiness benefits your company:
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Employees are more likely to stay in an organization that offers them opportunities to develop in their professional careers and create meaningful relationships with their coworkers and supervisors. Developing and enforcing friendships can have a great impact on your organization. Work friendships help employees to become more engaged and more innovative. 

A highly engaged workforce has resoundingly positive effects on your company. Employees will have higher ratings of profitability, productivity, and satisfaction in their roles. Additionally, a highly engaged workforce is 59% less likely to move onto a new role at a different company. Retaining your top talent will help your bottom line — rather than spending your budget on hiring and onboarding new employees, you can invest in your current workforce at a much more cost-effective rate. Take this cost-savings approach when it comes to factoring in your budget for employee happiness. 

Ask your employees for suggestions.

Your employees know what they want out of their employer better than anyone else. Take the time to ask why they enjoy their jobs, and what they would like to see changed. Doing so offers valuable insight that you can’t gather anywhere else. The classic “suggestion box” isn’t a groundbreaking tactic, but at its core, it opens up the discussions that are necessary to understanding the mindset of your employees. 

Offering your employees the support and opportunity to ask questions and suggest improvements in your organization can serve as a big win for your company. This strategy allows your employees to tap into their resources, technical savvy, and creative expertise. Their suggestions may highlight things you’ve missed in your organization, or uncover tools and resources that your employees need to become more productive and successful in their jobs. 

By inviting employees’ best ideas, you are continuing to foster and promote a more collaborative culture that sparks creativity. 

Tip: Incorporate a suggestion box in your organization. Each month, choose one suggestion and utilize this as a way to improve your company, whether big or small. Your employees will not only feel heard and appreciated, but this is also a simple and quick way to increase employee happiness. 

It might be strange to envision happiness as something you can offer to your employees, but by tweaking different aspects in your workplace, you can find ways to both not only improve your organization and benefit employees. It’s possible for your employees to be happy and productive in the workplace, and it all starts with active listening and ensuring that your employees feel engaged and valued. 

Caliper offers tools and resources that your company can use to assess, track, and improve employee engagement in your workplace. Get started with our scientifically-verified assessment and reports, and see how Caliper can help transform your workforce.

These meetings can be delicate and uncomfortable, so to set the tone and steer the conversation, it’s helpful to have a set of prescribed phrases that managers can turn to in order to jumpstart conversations and tailor feedback to individuals while still maintaining a measure of standardization to the feedback process. Providing feedback in a clear, intentional way that’s valuable is difficult, and 44% of managers find providing negative feedback to be stressful. Ineffective feedback makes for an underwhelming performance review that doesn’t serve the employee.

#PerformanceReview time got you stressed? @CaliperCorp has 40 phrases to get any conversation started off on the right foot.
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To facilitate more successful feedback across the board, we’ve created 40 starter phases to guide your performance conversations and foster collaborative discussions around all aspects of performance management, from the good to the bad.

Download the 40 Phrases!

When They Exceed Expectations

Even when the conversation is positive, managers can feel uncomfortable about having performance conversations. But these conversations help build trust between managers and their teams and can aid in creating a more comfortable atmosphere when constructive feedback is needed. These conversations strengthen relationships and can lead to increased engagement, so approaching them with the same care you would for more sensitive discussions does a service of good to everyone involved.

An example of some of the statements that can be individualized to the conversation when the employee exceeds expectations include:

1. They consistently produce a high standard of quality
2. They are an essential contributing member of the team or department
3. They exceed their performance goals regularly
4. They always meet deadlines

Want more? Download all 40 Phrases!

When they Meet Expectations

Performance conversations don’t just happen when someone excels or when someone needs improvement. Excellence or struggles will likely be project-specific, or act as an excellent way to identify when an employee is ready for promotion — or find a job that better fits their personality. For the most part, performance conversations will be with employees who are competent at their jobs and perform their functions well. But when things are rolling along at a steady, productive pace, that doesn’t mean you can’t have meaningful performance conversations that drive development and growth.

These conversations present an outstanding opportunity to uncover what makes an employee tick. What parts of their job do they enjoy performing? Where do they struggle to feel motivated? How can you learn from these aspects to inform their goals and learning objectives? Here are a few phrases to get started:

1. They recognize the needs of others and provide help when needed
2. They have good working relationships and collaborate well
3. They fit in well and promote company culture
4. They effectively communicate their needs and expectations to their team and leaders

Want more? Download all 40 Phrases!

#PerformanceReview is a delicate art. @CaliperCorp has 40 phrases that help you facilitate the right conversation for the right subject matter, every time:
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When They Need Improvement

These conversations can be delicate, and it isn’t a surprise that many managers feel pressured to deliver negative feedback with sensitivity and compassion. These are significant moments to build the relationship — they offer mentorship and coaching opportunities that can help turn a struggling individual into one who is confident, performs well, and can turn a discouraged, disengaged employee into one who finds the motivation to improve.

To steer the conversation respectfully, you can start with these phrases. Ultimately, you can present them in a way that both addresses the core issue while trying to understand the root cause of the situation:

1. They respond negatively when they receive in-the-moment coaching
2. They ask for help first before trying to solve the problem themselves
3. They don’t ask for help when they’re feeling overwhelmed
4. They don’t implement coaching or feedback

Want more? Download all 40 Phrases!

When You Want to Foster a Two-Way Conversation

Performance reviews should be collaborative. While a portion of the conversation will be instructive, there should be allotted time when the individual has the opportunity to communicate their needs and wants to their manager. To ensure employees feel comfortable expressing themselves, you can start by asking them some questions to enhance the conversation:

1. What is the most effective way to communicate feedback to you?
2. What are some personal goals you want to achieve?
3. What are some things that help you stay focused and organized to stay on track?
4. Have there been times when you didn’t get the coaching you needed?

Want more? Download all 40 Phrases!

To learn more about the ways Caliper can work with your managers to help coach and develop employees to their individual needs, reach out to our experts today to get started. For more starter phrases to guide your performance conversations, download all 40 phrases here.

Source:

http://schoutenoceanrace.com/media/1843/coaching-style-leadership.pdf

We have two questions:

1) What happens to people’s brains in year seven that suddenly enables them to grasp job concepts or handle situations they couldn’t have understood in year six?

2) Have you ever encountered someone who, after more than seven years at the same job, was still objectively terrible at it?

The answers are, respectively, “nothing” and “yes.” In other words, experience can be overrated when framed in such arbitrary and rote terms.

A person whose internal motivations, strengths, and behavioral tendencies align with the job is more likely to be a top performer than someone who has been scraping by for 8 to 10 years as a mediocre employee. Of course, if a hiring manager can find a motivated person who also has experience, that’s ideal. But hiring managers shouldn’t complain about not being able to find qualified applicants when they overlook or dismiss intrinsic potential simply because the applicant hasn’t been hammering away at the same tasks for years and years.

For clarity: When we say “potential,” we mean someone who has the blend of personality drivers that are scientifically proven to support strong performance in a given role, regardless of external factors like experience and education.

Let’s imagine a hiring manager experiences an epiphany (after reading this piece) and realizes she should be weighing intrinsic potential more heavily in her staffing choices. As part of her hiring process, she decides to use a pre-employment assessment because she knows the person who interviews the best isn’t always going to be the best performer. Let’s say she’s looking to fill a Project Manager position, and fortune favors her on this day: She finds an (inexperienced) applicant with the core Project Manager competencies of Process Management and Quality Focus.

The hiring manager makes the offer, the applicant accepts, and that’s it. The new hire gets thrown to the wolves and is inevitably brilliant because of his intrinsic qualities. The end.

Wait! Come back. That was a rhetorical device. It’s not the end at all. Potential remains potential until it is unlocked. And the key to unlocking potential is providing a job framework and definitions of success and then managing someone according to the same criteria that got them hired in the first place: personality drivers.

For this first-time Project Manager, it’s important to provide a definitive framework of the company’s or department’s systems, best practices, and administrative expectations. With his intrinsic potential for managing processes and upholding quality, he will “get it” and deliver results. In time, he may even find ways to improve existing processes, but he needs to know the baseline. Think of intrinsic potential like data bytes. Without a word processing application to show binary code as letters and spaces, you wouldn’t be able to read this sentence. Potential is like binary code, and the job framework is the application.

The same goes for Outside Sales Reps (with core competencies of Influence and Persuasion and Achievement Motivation), Financial Analysts (Deliberative Decision Making and Analytical Thinking), and any other role. People need to know what success looks like and how to focus their intrinsic strengths toward the achievement of objectives.

A common frustration for hiring managers is finding qualified applicants for field sales positions. As discussed above, many people equate qualified with experienced, but let’s assume the hiring manager in this scenario already buys into the value of intrinsic motivation. She begins looking in less obvious places for talent and hires an inexperienced but promising person who shows the core Outside Sales competency of Influence and Persuasion. Simply teaching the new hire product knowledge may not be enough to unlock that competency. It is important to illustrate what successful persuasion and influence looks like. Have the new hire model another successful salesperson in the organization. If the intrinsic potential is there, the new hire will click.

We can even boil it down to the trait level (beneath the complex formulas, performance competencies are really just clusters of personality traits). Pretend our fictional hiring manager from the first example hired two Project Managers, who both show the core competencies of Process Management and Quality Focus. However, on a trait level, Oliver is more of an analytical thinker and Stan is more concrete/practical. You can expect that they will approach decision making and learning from different perspectives.

According to the results of the pre-employment assessment, Oliver is task focused and socially reserved, and he prefers to work independently. He asserts himself as necessary, and he is resilient and levelheaded. Stan is more friendly and helpful, but dislikes taking risks and feels more comfortable acting only after consensus has been reached. And he tends to be a bit of a worrier.

With Oliver, the key to unlocking his potential is to deliver the message directly and afford him autonomy, while also being forthright in letting him know when he’s overstepping his bounds. Stan might respond better to a softer more constructive coaching style that nudges him toward greater independence without stifling his effectiveness at gathering feedback, showing responsiveness, and supporting teamwork.

Instead of trying to force Oliver and Stan into an identical mold, the smart hiring manager lets the job shape to them. Project phases that call for speedy results and overcoming complex process/technical challenges should suit Oliver’s strengths, whereas client-facing, brainstorm-intensive, or vendor-partnered components may align better with Stan.

Of course, fictional scenarios like these exist in ideal worlds, and people are often pushed outside of their comfort zones as needed to get the job done. But having a deep understanding of what motivates, drives, and inhibits applicants and employees—relative to core job requirements—can empower hiring managers to not only find the hidden potential in the available talent pool but also maximize that potential through targeted training, support, and development.