You’ve lost more sleep over this employee and spent more hours editing his review than you have with any of the others. You’ve gone over all the facts in your mind a thousand times. You want to make sure you’re being fair. And you want to do what’s best for the company, the employee, and the members of his team. So how can you turn a host of mistakes and disasters into a host of positives? And how can you press the reset button on this troubled employer-employee relationship?

A Bad Review: The Aftermath

1. Know exactly where you want to be by the time the review session ends. Set clear goals for yourself. If your goal is to have the employee recognize the gravity of the situation and understand his proximity to termination, act accordingly. But if your goal is to find any possible way to keep him on board and retain the valuable skills for which he was hired, let that guide your process.

2. Know what you’ll do the day, week, and month after the review ends, and make sure the employee also has a clear action plan. How frequently will you check in on his progress? What clear, measurable standards will he be held to during the probationary period?

3. Do you want him to start seeking work elsewhere, or would you rather prevent this from happening? You can’t control his long term plans, but if you know for certain which you would prefer, this will inform your approach to the review.

4. Document, record, measure, and clarify every step of the process. These records are vital for performance tracking and legal compliance. Don’t step into such subjective territory alone. Having a great software platform at your side can help both of you navigate the process and can help sort out any future disputes or miscommunications that began in the heat of an emotionally charged meeting.

To learn more about emPerform, visit www.employee-performance.com and request a free trial.

FEEDBACK.

So why is feedback so critical? Why is feedback so challenging and how can employees and managers embrace feedback in their day-to-day activities?

Making the most of feedback requires a clear understanding of why feedback is essential, why it is often mishandled, what opportunities exist and how you can use fresh & modern approaches to bring a tired performance-management process back to life and unleash the power of the F-Word.

During this webinar, our panel of experts will provide leading-edge insight into:

• The overlooked importance of ongoing performance feedback
• The challenges HR, Managers, and Employees face getting, giving, using, and managing feedback
• How continuous feedback is shaking up traditional performance reviews.
• Creating a feedback-centric culture

Join CRG emPerform and panelists Marnie Green (Management Education Group), William Tincup (Tincup & Co.), and Elisabeth Lecavalier (Forensic Technology) as they share their insights into the F-Word. This exciting and informative presentation will touch on best-practice approaches and practical concepts you can use to exploit the F-Word in your organization and see results – fast.

Date: Wednesday, June 13th, 2012
Time: 11AM EDT – 12PM EDT
Click here to Register.

*Registration for this webinar is on the HR.com website. If you are already a member of HR.com, please login to register for the webcast. If you are not a member of HR.com, you will need to sign up for a FREE HR.com membership before registering.

To learn more about emPerform, visit www.employee-performance.com

Each of these questions can be addressed by a well-developed, carefully-examined review process that matches the culture, pace, and goals of a specific industry. But there are some inherent obstacles that are specifically addressed by software platforms. The software you choose to support your company’s review strategy should help you overcome common problems like these:

1. Growth Tracking

Managers and employees should be encouraged to maintain close relationships and open communication. But no manager on earth has the memory and cross-referencing capacity needed to track the growth of multiple employees across multiple metrics from year to year to year. Your software should help you immediately identify the difference between a high score and a growing score across wide range of data points. Rely on the click of a mouse, not a manager’s brain power.

2. Objective Comparison

What defines a productive employee in your industry? If you can’t answer immediately, your software should be able to answer for you. Performance criteria should be measurable, consistent, easily referenced, and applied to all relevant employees in a meaningful way. Humans are fallible when it comes to objectivity. But software programs like emPerform are not. Yearly goal ratings, development milestones, performance feedback and comments, 360 review results – numbers don’t lie, and appropriate software modules tell it like it is.

3. Record Transfer

Managers change and HR professionals come and go. But records and metrics don’t have to change with them. Clear job descriptions and past performance reviews should be controlled, archived, and easily accessible to managers and HR by flexible software platforms, not people. To keep a management hand-off simple and error free, employee documentation should be understandable, easily accessible, and rapidly transferable to the new manager or new system.

To learn more about CRG emPerform‘s powerful performance management software, visit www.employee-performance.com and request a free trial.

Growth! Productivity! This is the season for a renewed focus on skill development and personal enrichment. Plus the promise of all that these things bring, including swelling revenue streams, new ideas, and burgeoning bottom lines. To make the most of the season and its effect on your employees, it might be time to turn your HR focus to competency development. Great employees are always interested in learning new things and expanding their skill sets, and there’s no better time than the present to provide the resources employees need to increase their value to the company. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind as you move forward.

Employee Core Competencies as an HR Tool

Competency-based assessments are not a new innovation or trend but an overall good practice to adopt. Employee competency assessments have been around long enough to have withstood the test of time and have proven to be a very useful tool for the HR professional’s toolbox. Employee competencies are a list of skills and behaviors that are specific and well defined and are used to lay out an organization’s performance expectations for a job or the organization’s culture as a whole. There are many resources out there for the HR professional to help them develop and customize a list of competencies their organization can call their own[1].

Employee competencies can be used in a variety of ways. They can be integrated into performance appraisals, hiring practices, succession planning, as well as on-boarding orientations and other forms of employee communication. Competencies are a way to address both the technical skills of a job and the more difficult-to-define behavioral expectations of a job – sometimes referred to as the “soft skills.” But, there is nothing soft about these skills and a well-defined set of competencies can help an organization better evaluate and measure employee performance.

Competency Skill Checklist[2]

The actual number of competencies an organization may choose to use varies widely from one organization to the next, but a good rule is between 10 and 20. Some examples of competencies organizations might use would be:

1. Business acumen
2. Emotional stability
3. Interaction with others
4. Problem solving
5. Use of software tools
6. Work ethic

Notice that they are a combination of both skills such as “Business Acumen” and “Use of Software Tools” and behaviors such as “Emotional Stability” and “Work Ethic.” How the employee competency is defined should be determined by how each organization chooses to define it to fit their current work culture or the way they want it to be.

Competency Development: Building the Skills Needed for Success

1. Tailor training resources to the needs of your staff. Before you adopt a training program to bolster existing skills sets and build new ones, you’ll need to have a strong understanding of current employee benchmarks. Managers should know exactly how well-equipped their teams are for certain tasks. They should also know where employees are headed, and what they need in order to get there. Goal setting starts with the annual review process, and meaningful reviews start with solid metrics, excellent record maintenance, and sophisticated review software. Can your software track employee progress across multiple metrics from year to year? If not, it’s time to switch to emPerform.

2. When it comes to training programs, discriminate carefully. Not all training modules are created equal. Once you know what your employees need, do some research and find the training resources that work for your business model, your culture, and your environment. Some modules may seem like they fit the mark, but look closer. Don’t waste budget resources on a program your employees can’t use or won’t retain.

3. Allow your employees to guide the process. Keep communication channels open and encourage managers to do the same. That way you’ll be prepared when employees request specific training and educational resources that can help them meet their personal career goals.

4. Set clear expectations and document progress. Automated solutions, such as emPerform, allow employees and managers to create competency development plans, set expectations, track progress and monitor results. Having a platform for properly documenting competency development not only keeps employees on track, but it sets clear performance goals for employees to follow and gives managers the tools needed to monitor and assess results.

[2] Payscale.com ‘Employee Competency Checklist’ http://blogs.payscale.com/compensation/2010/01/employee-competency-checklist.html

Keep these considerations in mind as you move forward with employee terminations:

KNOW THE LAW

Carefully review both state and federal laws regarding termination in your area, including statutes covering discrimination, wrongful termination, and breach of contract. If you need help, obtain professional legal counsel. To find resources on Canadian Labour laws, click here and for U.S. labour laws, click here.

FOLLOW PROTOCOL

If no clear termination protocol exists for your company, now is the time to generate a by-the-book procedure that can be applied consistently and fairly. Some companies follow a termination checklist that begins with a verbal warning, then a written warning, then unpaid leave, then formal termination. If you institute this plan, be prepared to follow through. This means that both minor offenses (like taking home office supplies) and major offenses (like stealing large sums of money from other employees) must be treated with the same verbal warning, and the warning will need to be documented in a consistent way.

HAVE A WITNESS

At least three people should be in the room when the final conversation with an employee takes place. This can ease the awkwardness and smooth out any complications if something goes wrong. During the conversation, be honest, but don’t argue with the employee. Everything you say can open the door to additional questions about the necessity of the termination.

DOCUMENTATION IS VITAL

Never attempt to terminate an employee for performance issues without a documented series of poor reviews. Sophisticated software like emPerform can help you keep clear records, and with these records, you can produce immediate evidence of all the areas in which the employee’s performance varied from clearly defined expectations. You’ll also need to make sure that these defined expectations match what employees are actually expected to do. In all cases, clarity, adherence to procedure, and consistent documentation will be your best protection against legal action and financial loss.

Visit www.employee-performance.com to learn more about emPerform and to request a live demo.

Our close contact with HR professionals gives us access to plenty of horror stories. And too many of these stories are about outdated (pre-emPerform!) management strategies for appraisals and overall performance documents.

We admit we’ve seen some pretty crafty solutions, including meticulously formatted spreadsheet forms with umpteen versions floating around and some very ‘attractive’ and buggy intranet-based IT web forms. Over and over again, we see a focus on executing the process and very little time and focus left over for strategic performance management tasks and analysis. So what are some key indicators that it’s time to ditch your current processes and modernize?

21 Signs you Need emPerform

1. You answered ‘yes’ to any of the questions asked in the first paragraph.

2. You have to sort through mounds of file folders to find old appraisals (or even current ones).

3. Employees are using physical journals for documenting performance milestones or more likely – are not using anything!

4. Managers avoid you in the hall because they know you’re going to remind them once again to get their evaluations done.

5. You have different rating scales being used on different appraisals and then are forced to try to compare results.

6. Your company spends loads of time establishing strategic goals and for some reason, nothing is being translated into employee action.

7. You have no idea who the company stars are and definitely have no way of proving low-performance.

8. Your HR staff and department managers are experiencing communication and data sharing problems.

9. Your current system offers no cross-referencing capability.

10. Your current data just isn’t useful for any type of decision making.

11. Top management is demanding your voice in company decision making and your recommendations and insight into the current performance health of the company.

12. Employees and managers dread appraisals because the task seems tedious and not very valuable.

13. You have no way of using accurate performance metrics as a basis for fair and consistent compensation decisions and neither do managers.

14. Other than their own memory or some post-it notes, managers have no tools for employee goal management, monitoring, feedback assistance, journaling, competency management, or development planning.

15. Your company’s workforce is becoming larger and more spread out geographically, making it difficult to keep appraisals consistent and have them submitted on time.

16. Your competitors have been using an automated performance management system and are dashing ahead.

17. You know you want to start using 360 reviews for performance assessments but you just don’t have the right tools.

18. Having vacant leadership positions is costing your company far too much time and money.

19. You have a hunch that employee engagement is in the red but have no way of proving it.

20. You looked around for software to automate performance management but couldn’t find anything that was fully customizable to your workflows and content, allowed for hosted OR on-premise deployment, was easy-to-use and completely web-based, and had a price that didn’t make you gulp.

21. You want to automate the process of gathering data so that you can focus on analyzing and acting on it.

If you related to any of the points above, it’s time to get emPerform. We know…we get it…and we can help. Get started with a free trial and we’ll work with you to get you started quickly and at a price that will have you regretting not updating your processes sooner.

There are no simple answers to these questions, but while HR departments search and wait for a collective epiphany, here are five key points that managers and supervisors need to keep in mind:

1. The value of feedback stays high when channels remain open.

A sudden blast of unaccustomed feedback once a year, whether positive or negative, isn’t likely to have much impact on long term performance. A manager who rarely offers feedback will eventually seem disconnected from an employee’s daily activities. And how much can praise or criticism mean when it comes from someone with little knowledge of what we actually do? When feedback is rare, it’s jarring, questionable, and ultimately dismissible. Especially the negative kind.

On the other hand, regular doses of meaningful feedback build trust on both sides. Trust leads to credibility, and credibility leads to open ears and a calm, flexible response to performance assessment. Regular feedback transforms the process from an intimidating event to an every-day communication tool. Think of feedback and constant nudges keeping employees on-track and helping them to reach their goals.

2. Employees appreciate it more than managers may realize.

A manger may spend an hour searching for a way to phrase criticism delicately while, meanwhile, an employee continues to fumble in the dark, wanting nothing more than a clear indication that she is or isn’t on the right track. Employees are often less concerned with displays of approval then they are with doing a good job. Don’t underestimate their resilience. Most employees WANT to learn, want to improve, and want continuous feedback.

3. Don’t expect employees to read between the lines.

This is a common practice. Managers are hesitant to confront employees or simply do not make the time to properly plan or schedule proper feedback sessions. Instead, they make a comment or sent a small email and sandwich the feedback in other content. Employees cannot be expected to analyze their supervisors words or intents – and for good reason. No organization wants their employees spending time deducing meaning. If managers have something relevant and productive to say – positive or constructive – have on with it and be clear.

4. Be timely, specific, and focus on behavior.

The best employee feedback is timely, specific, and focuses on behavior and not the person or the intent. Solution-oriented feedback revolves around managers being committed to development and improvement rather than stone sold critique. Vague comments leave room for employee confusion and interpretation and feedback that isn’t timely can be a complete waste of time if the incident or project has passed.

5. Feedback represents valuable data, but only when it’s handled properly.

No matter how it’s collected or received, feedback represents a two-way data stream between a company and an employee. And like any form of data, feedback will have more value if it’s stored, managed, and aggregated effectively. No matter how you choose to shape your HR management strategy, a sophisticated software platform like emPerform can help you process feedback and get the most out of your employee-supervisor relationships.

The most stubborn review problems are common across a wide range of business models. Among them: 1) Reviewers pull punches to keep from undermining motivation, 2) reviewers pile on criticism, thus draining motivation, 3) employees resent, dismiss, or take reviews too much to heart, 4) review protocols don’t offer a road map to real performance change, and finally 5) employees are left with reviews that are too abstract, hard to contextualize, and offered by a single person—one supervisor or manager who may or may not have all the answers.

What are 360 Degree Reviews?

As it happens, several of these problems can potentially be solved by one clever solution. If a review comes from multiple sources—not just a manager, but also a broad panel of peers and subordinates—then its take-home messages are more credible, more actionable, and carry more weight. 360 degree reviews are generated by several voices instead of one, which can increase both the accuracy and the impact of resulting data.

In simplest terms, a 360 survey provides a company and/or individual with confidential feedback on specific sets of competencies and behavioral traits as observed by his/her colleagues and other stakeholders. This feedback is meant not as a criticism of the individual but as constructive input that can lead to specific actions for improvement. It is meant to reinforce positive aspects of the employee’s performance as well as to improve performance by identifying possible areas of weakness. 360 surveys are a powerful tool with an important purpose – to harness the power of honest feedback from multiple sources.

In theory, a well designed and well executed 360 feedback can result in:

• improved understanding of the individual’s strengths and weaknesses in key aspects of competency and behavior
• setting a baseline against which future changes/improvements can be measured
• a good benchmark comparison between the individual’s own perceptions and those of the “raters”
• the identification of specific training and learning opportunities to make changes and improvements
• identification and development of future stars
• platform for employee opinion and improved employee engagement

The Perfect Answer…Maybe

360 degree reviews are not ideal for every workplace, and some precautions should be taken before a company adopts this strategy. Confidentiality, for example, is key to a successful 360 review process. Subordinates will only provide meaningful information about superiors if they feel safe from retaliation, and peer reviews will only have value if the review structure aligns with the culture. Peers should be asked for blunt honesty in a non-confidential setting only if the established culture is socially open and supports this kind of dialogue. Because the objective of administering 360 surveys is to solicit open and honest feedback, maintaining the confidentiality and anonymity of respondents should be of the utmost importance. There are a handful of ways to help protect confidentiality and anonymity to respondents. Online 360 survey tools, such as emPerform’s eSurvey, can help to protect anonymity by generating results without respondent information. For companies looking to guarantee absolute confidentiality for both the raters and individuals being rated, it is often advised  to trust the process to a professional third party service.

Cost and time investment can also be an issue. If supervisors typically devote one hour to each subordinate review, expect to add additional working hours for each 360 review that must now be completed for peers and superiors. Make sure these additional hours are balanced against the productivity benefits of the new review process.

To save cost and prevent potential risk, put your HR software platform to work. Make sure your performance management software comes equipped with an online survey tool for 360 reviews and other online surveys such as customer satisfaction surveys, employee engagement surveys, and 30-60-90 new hire surveys. emPerform comes standard with eSurvey, which  allows organizations to execute surveys and easily report on the results. Best of all – results from all surveys – including 360′s – can be used to augment performance appraisals, succession plans, and compensation decisions. The integration of rich 360 survey results into decisions making ensures that employees are assessed, developed and rewarded accurately and fairly.

By: Jennifer King

HR Analyst for Software Advice

Acquisitions of talent management vendors present new challenges for customers and the HR software industry. Even as companies make statements and reveal details for how they plan to align the two product lines, customers still have concerns about how, or whether, they will benefit, particularly in the areas of product integration and innovation.

In terms of product integration, customers who made investments in a talent management system that happened to get bought by a competing HRMS vendor are probably crying for help. These customers are stuck wondering how the acquisition will affect their contract with the acquired vendor and if they’ll be able to continue supporting its integration throughout the duration of that contract.

Another downside of large ERP vendors acquiring talent management providers is slower innovation for these product lines. Even though the acquired talent management products may find support through more developer and financial resources, innovation will likely slow down because the vendors have to support multiple product lines in addition to the recently acquired ones.

But while large companies are busy trying to figure out how to integrate their talent management acquisitions with their existing product lines and deliver those to customers, more standalone solutions from smaller vendors will begin to pop up and proliferate.

According to Ed Newman, chief analyst and HR consultant for Talent Management Technology, these acquisitions “create a spur of new, up-and-coming best-of-breed vendors in the market. This is just going to open up more room for innovation that will eventually serve as bolt-on products. That’s not necessarily bad for the customer. More innovation is good.”

I look forward to the new wave of standalone talent and performance management solutions. Their proliferation will be the driving force behind innovations in strategic areas like recruiting and employee evaluation software.

Jennifer King is an HR Analyst at Software Advice, an online resource for reviewing and comparing human resources software. Located in Austin, Texas, she reports on news and trends related to HR Software, employee evaluation software, and the HR industry. Read her full analysis of the recent talent management software acquisitions on the Software Advice blog: http://blog.softwareadvice.com