Srikant Chellappa is the Co-Founder and CEO at Engagedly and is a passionate entrepreneur and people leader. He is an author, producer/director of 6 feature films, a music album with his band Manchester Underground, and is the host of The People Strategy Leaders Podcast.
The level of creativity and innovation among employees is often proportional to the size of your workspace. Your workspace affects engagement, innovation, and productivity. Employees need to build connections in the workspace, a factor that can drive or dash their motivation to work. When employees collaborate in a workspace, employers get a good return on their financial investment. This hints that employers should invest in providing a good workspace that supports collaboration. Employees who engage each other within their workspace tend to achieve better results than others who have a disconnect in their work environment. As an entrepreneur, you can build innovative offices to improve employee collaboration using the steps discussed below.
1. Build openness and transparency within your team
You need to lead with your vision when you want your team to be committed to collaboration in your organization. Do not give out confidential information, but giving a vision will help your teammates develop loyalty and productivity. Talk to them about the challenges and possible issues, and share your team incentives to brainstorm possible solutions. If your staff is familiar with the company’s strategic objectives, then your team can work together to achieve a yearly profit. One option is running innovation challenges and asking your team for their best ideas to solve the company’s issues in the game plan.
2. Enjoy collaboration across different departments
Judgment-free workplace culture will encourage ideas, discussions, and solutions. Fear of rejection or judgment will discourage participation among your team members and deprive the organization of unique solutions in the minds of your talented team members. Be informed. Commit to having management not use intimidation as a tool in running their departments. It will clog the idea funnel. Avoid too many guides so that you do not stifle innovation and creativity. Be about creative freedom; this gets your team laughing, having fun, and creating solutions. This makes every day different and fun.
Offices in Los Angeles provide the proper infrastructure to guarantee that your teammates get the best places to collaborate and improve team bonding. Organizing monthly outings for your departments and staff will also help staff members become better team players and improve productivity. Office spaces in Los Angeles are marked by affordability for outright purchase or rent and are designed to be suitable for business. Some come with game rooms, free snacks, and weekly happy hours. The fantastic architecture will do wonders for morale. What better way to build up collaboration between team members!
4. Get appropriate leadership
Proper leadership is the crux of building a team of employees collaborating for growth. Having an open-door policy and maintaining communication between management is fluid and is a game-changer. Teach your team to practice synergy and let everyone know that collaboration is a priority. To do this, you have to show, not tell. Work directly with them. Create a system in which everyone has to complete their tasks for any project due for completion. As much as they follow a chain of command, ensure that your office is also open for anyone who wants to discuss. Work on consistent visibility between directors, managers, and employees. This will skyrocket creativity and productivity in your organization. The best leaders use every resource available to help achieve their organization’s goals.
5. Use the right technology, engender positivity, and be free with benefits
To have an interconnected workplace, you must procure the right technology. This helps the employees do their jobs. This is a good investment in teamwork and innovation. Give appropriate results when teams are creating excellent results. If your team hits a goal, reward them with something valuable to them. Reward individuals to encourage continuous collaboration and get feedback from your team. Use constructive criticism; this will help your team improve. Encourage peer-to-peer conversations so that you are not bogged down responding to everyone. This also encourages more collaboration.
Conclusion
It is not surprising that the new generation of workers loves collaborative spaces. Collaborative spaces create a creative culture – an essential tool many companies miss. Productivity is a bar that can be raised when you make intentional efforts to increase employee collaboration. The steps in this article will help you restructure your office and create a healthy environment for your workers to collaborate.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you improve employee collaboration? Book a live demo with us.
Daisy is an industrial and organizational psychologist who researches to identify solutions to problems that improve the well-being and performance of organizations and their employees. Daisy is also a freelance writer and often writes articles for credible blogs.
Engagedly Announces the HR Influencers List for 2022
St. Louis, MO, August 03, 2022 – Engagedly is excited to announce its sixth annual list of “Top 100 HR Influencers of 2022”. Some of the key people on the list are Josh Bersin from Bersin Academy, Jennifer Kirkwood at IBM, Verna Myers at Netflix, Melonie Parker at Google, Lou Adler of The Adler Group, Ellyn Shook of Accenture, Angela Duckworth, Adam Grant, Jeanne Meister of LinkedIn, Leena Nair of Chanel, Marcus Buckingham among many others who have led the thought leadership in people practice in these volatile times.
This annual event aims to recognize Human Resources and People Services disruptors from across all domains of HR who are making tremendous strides in innovation, growth and technology.
The nominees were selected through extensive research and open nominations announced on their website, social media, and press releases. The nominations were then scored on the basis of recency, frequency, innovation, follower count of Twitter and LinkedIn, and finally the amount of speaking engagements and publications. Engagedly’s research team narrowed the list down to a 100 from nearly 500 nominations gathered from different sources and from our own research.
Engagedly’s President and Co-Founder, Sri Chellappa, explains the intention behind this recognition in his own words,” The last two years have been challenging for people leaders and all those who are into people practice. It would have been impossible for organizations to transition from a physical office to remote work and then to hybrid work. This year’s honorees are leaders and visionaries who have made a significant difference with their innovative work and ideas in these challenging times. It gives me immense pleasure to announce the 6th annual list of Top 100 HR Influencers by Engagedly.“
Engagedly emphasizes that this list is not in any specific rank or order. Individuals have been categorized based on the type of work they have most notably been involved with, like HR Tech, Analytics and Strategy, Leadership and Development, Talent Acquisition, Organizational Development, Total Rewards, and Diversity and Inclusion. These categories are in no way intended to minimize the entirety of these influencers’ accomplishments. HR is an industry that is growing in all directions, and it is difficult to perfectly formulate a process that will recognize all HR professionals that are doing incredible work.
Check their complete list of top 100 HR Influencers here.
Engagedly is a fast-paced growth provider and an award-winning talent management solution provider. Built upon best practices and decades of research, Engagedly’s People + Strategy platform is evolving performance management, development and engagement to drive successful organizational outcomes across the globe.
Talent is always acknowledged. Companies are always on the lookout for talent. Once they hire talented individuals, a business needs a foolproof talent retention strategy to avoid attrition. The year 2021 has been marked as the year of theGreat Resignation when thousands of employees willingly resigned from their jobs. The resignations were so rampant that they gave birth to a whole new economic crisis. The crisis started when the American administration declined to provide remote work benefits to employees in response to the lethal COVID-19 pandemic, which fueled rampant resignations from employees.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than4.5 million employees resigned in November 2021. New job openings also fell below 11.4 million.
Why Did This Happen?
Job dissatisfaction or zero pay raise amidst an increased cost of living did not seem to matter much when compared to safety concerns due to COVID. Many people preferred remote working opportunities rather than going outside to work. Receiving a resignation letter from an employee is a considerable cause for concern for an HR, especially, if the resignations are coming from top talent. Companies started to think about how they can retain top talent, reduce attrition, and establish an engaged workforce in the organization.
Here is where talent retention strategies come into play. What exactly is a Talent Retention Strategy and how can it benefit your business? Without further ado, let us find out.
Why Do You Need a Talent Retention Strategy?
A talent retention strategy is the collective efforts of HR leaders to hold on to the top talent in the organization either by creating a more lenient work culture for the employees or by opening diverse feedback channels.
With the ongoing COVID pandemic already having crippled the world economy, losing top employees can be a costly affair for companies.
Apart from the high cost of replacing a worker, employee attritiondecreases the overall productivity of a company and also lowers the morale of the existing employees.
According to the Houston Chronicle, ahigh employee turnover negatively impacts the existing employees and customers of the company. The departure creates an additional workload for existing employees; with such a heavy workload, it is not possible for them to perform well.
Therefore, companies should do all they can to retain their talent, and here’s how.
A Foolproof Employee Retention Strategy
1. Find out why your employees want to leave
Companies experiencing increased employee attrition should first try to gauge why their employees want to leave. It is not always the work environment or insufficient pay raise that urges employees to switch jobs.
HR managers should complete the screening process strategically when hiring new candidates. Anymistake can cost you losing top hires. The entire interview process should be transparent. Any kind of ambiguity will cost you in the long run. Therefore, identifying the right candidate who will stay with the company through thick and thin is the key to retaining the best talent.
Screening the candidates based on their previous commitments speaks volumes about their tenacity and willingness to stay at the company when things get tough.
3. Provide effective orientation and mentorship programs
The hiring process remains incomplete until the new hires are given a proper orientation aligned with the objectives of the company. The orientation program should teach the new employees ways to thrive in the company culture. Assigning a mentor to new employees ensures steering them toward accomplishing the company’s objectives.
New employees may have a lot of inhibitions when they start working in a new environment. The mentors have the responsibility to make them feel comfortable. Once the new hires gain confidence, they can offer fresh ideas that will work positively for the company.
4. Deal with transition effectively
For the past two years, many employees have been working from home, which has irrevocably altered their working habits. Even if most offices have announced to resume work from the office, it will take time to deal with the transition. After the pandemic, most employees still prefer to work remotely. If companies fail to provide that option, these workers may resign. Therefore, companies should consider providing flexible working hours to employees to give them time to adapt to the new changes.
5. Reduce dependency
The dependency of the company on their best performers may prove to be detrimental when the best employees leave the organization. To curb such dependencies, companies should try to promote teamwork so that the entire responsibility does not lie on a handful of employees.
Delegation of responsibilities also reduces the workload thus helping employees maintain a healthy work-life balance.
6. Boost employer-employee connection
Fostering healthy workplace communication ensures active participation from employees. Proactively connecting with team members and making them feel that their decisions are valued can work wonders. Giving the employees a voice in the company’s decision-making helps in retaining employee engagement in the organization. According to the white papers released in a company’s survey,about 90% of the employees unanimously agreed that they would not switch jobs too often if their voices are heard by the management and their feedback worked upon. HR leaders should try to promote constructive and timely communication.
7. Provide competitive compensation
Providing competitive compensation and perks is an extremely important part of any talent retention strategy. If a company is running on a tough budget and is in no position to announce a pay raise immediately, it should consider other ways to compensate employees. Offering a yearly bonus or some perks like health care benefits and retirement plans might keep employees motivated. Companies that offeredexpansive wellness offerings during the COVID 19 pandemic faced less employee attrition.
People tend to leave if they feel there’s no vertical or horizontal growth in their current organization. Organizations can retain top talent by investing in their professional development, like upskilling. Upskilling is extremely important, especially as the losses incurred by a company due to ineffective training of employees can add up to millions of dollars.
Moreover, providing avenues for professional education uplifts talent attraction and retention. Setting a clear career path for employees makes them more creative and engaged at work.
9. Inculcate good leadership
If you want to retain good employees, make sure you have good managers in your organization. Your managers should have excellent leadership qualities which will play a vital role in engaging and retaining employees at your organization.
Training your managers would help them handle employees better. A manager should also be well-conversant in dealing with employees having diverse personality traits; merely instructing them about their work is not enough.
Managers should also be able to help with conflict and stress management. Instead of passing challenges to their subordinates, managers should know how to tackle them.
10. Avoid employee burnout
Employee burnout is a serious issue that causes organizations to lose many great workers. Lack of energy, feelings of isolation and alienation, and negative emotions are serious symptoms of burnout. However, with a strategic approach, companies can easily avoid employee burnout.
Employers should look for people struggling with burnout emotions and empathize with them. They can talk to each team member to find out if there’s too much workload. Think about ways to reduce that if possible, have an outing or a team lunch together if the team had worked too hard to meet a deadline. These gestures can go a long way to help dealing with burnout.
11. Acknowledge employee contributions
Acknowledging and appreciating an employee’s contributions toward accomplishing the objectives of the company helps in promoting employee retention. Employers should not miss any opportunity to celebrate the company’s achievements together with the employees even if their contributions are not that significant.
With the skyrocketing cost of replacing employees, it is crucial to have a comprehensive talent retention strategy in place. But is it possible to implement the correct strategy overnight?
Probably not. That’s because each company has its own policies. Changing them to make place for others takes time. Employers should try the employee retention initiatives that are best tuned with their organizational objectives.
Key Takeaways
Despite all your efforts, some employees may eventually leave your company. But with a time-tested Talent Retention Strategy in place, you can at least make sure they are leaving for the right reasons.
Employees who willingly switch jobs despite being supported and valued in the current organization can be expected to praise your company, which will have a positive impact on the company’s reputation and future recruitment efforts.
Companies securing high employee retention rates are always at a competitive advantage over others in terms of accomplishing business goals or recruiting new hires. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to develop well-executed employee retention methods to enhance the company’s potential to hold on to top talent.
Worried about how to retain your top talent? Need help to build your brand image? Fret not. Engagedly can help you do both.
If you are running a start-up or small business, you know that hiring, training, and retaining employees can be tough. Without technology to automate repetitive human resource tasks, it’s quite impossible to manage people and responsibilities on time. Things can be even more difficult if your HR team is not performing to its maximum potential. That is where HR software for a small business works wonders!
How can HR software be of help in such a scenario? HR software solutions are tools that simplify various HR tasks, from recruiting and payroll to performance management and tracking attendance.
With good HR software, businesses have better access to data that will give them insights to make well-informed decisions in the company. HR solutions can also create a better working environment for their valued employees, which has a significant impact on company culture.
Identify Your Business Needs
When deciding which HR software to choose, managers often reflect on the company’s needs first. Doing so can help them understand the current working environment and issues that they’re facing. To choose the most appropriate HR solution, businesses have to review their present-day management systems.
List the top providers, features, and everything you want to change in your current system. Whether you need a better tax assistance solution or an automated payroll system, the key here is to simply get a clear overview of why you need the HR software.
HR software solutions are growing in numbers and they’re taking the business world by storm. According to a recent report, the global HR software market size is currently at $15.59 billion and is projected to reach $33.57 by 2028.
With HR software becoming more and more popular, it won’t be surprising if it soon becomes a must-have tool in modern offices. This is good because it means businesses are actively thinking of ways to improve the employee experience. Many CEOs and leaders now understand the importance of maintaining a great work culture.
That being said, there are many types of HR solutions available today. Here’s a quick overview of each and how they differ from each other.
Three Basic Types of HR Software
HR software unifies all employee data, from attendance to performance, to create appropriate solutions for your business. Today, modern HR software falls into three main categories: benefits and payroll, onboarding, and hiring. We can consider the following few examples as different HR solutions:
Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS): HR solutions that work primarily to manage and process employee data and company policies
Payroll Systems: HR software that automates complex payroll processes and can track timesheet data and pay employees on autopilot
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS): Programs that not only help businesses find, track, and manage candidates but also allow you to post on different job sites such as Indeed, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor
If you want a new HR software, you’ll want something better than your previous software. It’s not enough to get an HR software that’s effective, you should strive to choose a software that is scalable and adaptable.
Scalability is defined as the software’s ability to handle increasing amounts of data and tasks. In other words, a scalable software is growth-ready. Adaptability is another important feature to look for in an HR software.
Adaptable HR software solves myriad problems with specialized tools. It can provide companies and employees more flexibility in terms of workload and scheduling.
Rather than changing software and causing disruption in operations each time you need to undergo extensive operational changes, consider an adaptable HR software with full-fledged solutions already installed.
With adaptable HR software, you can create multiple work policies, reduce the rigidity of work rules, and provide a suitable environment for your employees no matter what phase you are in your business.
Consider an Easy-to-Use Software
HR software is built to be intuitive and easy to use. As the primary goal is to improve workflow and business operations, it makes sense that an HR software should be designed with user-friendliness in mind.
However, not all HR software are equal. Some are more intelligent and functional, while others—not so much. How will you know if the software is user-friendly and good for your team?
Here are some important points to look for:
The software doesn’t need any specialized knowledge or training to run.
It can be operated from any device or platform.
Using the software saves time and improves everyone’s productivity.
It doesn’t add stress and frustration to your current work.
There’s no need for additional modifications or installations.
It can work seamlessly with other applications.
Take Inputs from Your Team
Your team’s insights are a goldmine of information when it comes to what they need in HR. Managers should derive feedback from their team before even thinking of changing any software at work. If you want to have a successful purchase, involve the people who will primarily use the tool in the decision-making process.
Usually, managers conduct a brainstorming session months before implementing the software. The manager asks everyone about their daily challenges at work as well as current problems in workload.
After the meeting, companies should have a research and testing team who will choose the top-three software. Both these teams will then work together to find the right software to use in a given timeline. The more time you spend researching the best option, the better chances you have of succeeding.
Make Your Decision
The HR management software you choose will have a huge impact on your business. This means that a wrong choice can affect not just the workflow but also the growth of the business. Surely, you don’t want a stagnated company where each of your employees is aching to leave.
Before you make your final decision and hit the purchase button, it helps a lot if you can create a checklist of the features you need along with your budget for the software.
Improve Your Workplace with the Right HR Software
No matter how much you love your business, just passion and hard work aren’t enough. You need to strengthen the foundation of your empire. You need to invest in your company culture. And for company culture to exist, you have to focus on your employee’s satisfaction.
Choosing the right HR software is the key to improving employee experience. The software you choose will not just free your employees from time-consuming and resource-draining responsibilities, it will also enhance your business operations and increase positivity in your workplace culture.
Want to find out how Engagedly can help you streamline and smoothen the HR process for your business? Book a live demo with us.
The success of your business partners has a great impact on the success of your own business. And contrary to what you may think, their performance is well within your control. Learn what performance management can do and then apply the knowledge to your own business through these tricks for successful partner management.
The importance of successful performance management
There’s a reason performance management has become an integral part of business. It involves setting goals, gathering data and analyzing that data to improve future performance. And with that kind of effort, the potential for success is much greater than it is otherwise.
In fact, businesses with successful performance management systems routinely outperform their competitors. According to Betterworks, companies that have implemented changes in the way they provide performance feedback have a 24 percent higher success rate than those that stick to traditional models.
But of course, not every performance management system is either cost-effective or viable. A study conducted by Gartner shows us exactly how easy it can be to make the wrong moves. For example, the average time managers spend on work related to performance management is 210 hours a year.
So how do you develop a performance management system that will help you make the most out of your partnerships?
There are a few tricks you can employ to make sure your performance management system is the one that will bring you the best possible results.
Performance management can start even before you partner with another business. After all, one of the major elements of success, in any field of work, is being able to plan ahead. So instead of focusing on your existing partners, why not increase your chances of success by making sure you only choose the partners that are a great fit for your business?
How do you do that? You gather all the necessary information on the prospective partner and you ask yourself a few questions regarding your potential partnership. A business that would be a great fit for you will:
Share your business’ target audience
Be okay with your terms and processes
Boast a stable business model
Be technically equipped to deliver results
Share your business’ values
Maybe it’s not necessary for the potential partner to check all the boxes, but it’s a great thing to strive for. And the more boxes they check, the more successful your collaboration will be and the less work you’ll have managing their performance.
Offering incentives & training programs
When you think about performance management, the first thing that comes to mind are yearly reviews. The employee or the partner has already done the work and now it’s time for you to evaluate it. But you don’t need to limit yourself to a purely reactionary way of doing things when there are plenty of actions you can take as well.
Of course, here we’re talking about incentive programs. These make for an excellent way to steer your partners into the right direction even before they’ve done anything. Instead of waiting a year to tell them they should be achieving better results, incentivize them to excel right from the start.
But a quality incentive program will do you no good if your partners aren’t trained to meet your requirements. Luckily, there are partner training programs that allow you to onboard and train all your partners in a way that’s highly efficient and even lowers your operational costs. Using this type of software is yet another way to be proactive about your performance management.
Constantly checking the progress
To make the most out of your performance management system, you need to come to terms with the fact that conducting yearly reviews simply doesn’t work. It’s an outdated system that many Forbes 500 companies have stopped using.
What should you do instead? When developing your performance management system, you should aim for implementing continuous performance evaluation. The exact process will, of course, depend on your business. But to give a few examples, this could mean anything from evaluating performance whenever necessary or possible, to measure it at the end of every individual project or campaign.
Why does this make for a better approach? It’s in line with the latest advances in the way project management, in general, is done. We’re talking about the so-called agile methodology, which has proven itself a lot more efficient than traditional project management. It’s been argued that this is simply because this methodology is aimed at breaking processes up into shorter phases and getting feedback as soon as they’re complete. As a result, there are fewer deviations from the end goal.
Of course, checking the progress your partners are making can only result in true success if you keep them in the loop. So if you want your performance management system to work, you need to be able to explain it to your partners, and informing them about it should be part of your process.
To be able to explain your evaluation process, it needs to be structured. You need to know what events trigger evaluation, how the process is done and which members of your team are responsible for it. But what’s more important than anything, you need to be able to explain to your partners exactly what they need to do to pass the process with flying colors.
This is where the concept of SMART goals can prove extremely helpful. SMART goals is an acronym that stands for goals that are:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Timely
And if the expectations you set for your partners check all the above boxes, there will be no uncertainties as to what they need to do to achieve a successful collaboration with you.
Consistent feedback and rewards
If you want your partners to perform as you need them to, it’s important to keep them engaged. One aspect of this is providing regular and consistent feedback. The other aspect is to reward them whenever they do something right. After all, a partner that doesn’t feel like they’re out of the loop and one that feels appreciated will almost surely become a valuable asset to your company.
Conclusion
There’s a lot of good that a quality performance management can do for your business. From choosing your partners wisely to keeping them constantly engaged, a smart, structured, and transparent system brings you closer to making the most out of your partnerships.
Want to know how Engagedly can help enhance your organization’s performance management? Fix a quick demo with our experts.
Lianna Arakelyan is a content writer at Kademi.co, with a knack for B2B programs, such as channel incentive programs, partner training and onboarding programs and not only. She is extreme in her work, with a deep goal of always being updated on online and offline marketing and technology news of the world.
COVID-19 and the subsequent restrictions have forced a lot of companies to take their entire workforce almost entirely online – focussing much more on work from home than coming to the office and spending their day in a cubicle. In the absence of a personal touch and most business being conducted through Zoom, it becomes slightly difficult to build a developed business culture for a remote workforce, but not impossible. In this article, we discuss several performance management tools that can help you do so.
Performance Management – Why Do We Need It?
For teams that did not work from home or remotely in the past, the sudden shift to a WFH culture can be quite overwhelming. Different people react differently to such changes: while some employees might actually thrive in this environment and become more productive because of the lack of distractions (you’re not bumping into someone every 15 minutes at the water cooler), others might find themselves burnt out.
Working from home also brings with it a lack of personal connection – for those whose jobs revolve around interacting with people, productivity might take a hit. Additionally, people often feel the need to overcompensate for how long they’re working – they’re so desperate to be seen as someone who’s not slacking off that it often leads to them overworking and suffering from fatigue.
Organizations have taken to adopting a variety of mechanisms to ensure that even in the virtual world, their workforce can still enjoy a high level of engagement. One such idea is the Swedish custom of Fika – daily meetings where people take 15-20 minutes out of their day to sit with the rest of the team and drink coffee while talking about anything outside of work. It could be Netflix shows that they might have seen to their vacation plans – it allows them to destress for a while before getting back to work.
Another idea is the use of virtual pubs across different time zones – this can be a wonderful place for employees to hangout and interact with different team members. Additionally, it can allow for the humanization of management in the eyes of the employees, leading to more close-knit and collaborative teams within the organization.
Working across Time Zones – Find the Rhythm
Most organizations work across a variety of different time zones, and in such cases, finding the right organizational rhythm can be quite challenging – especially when working from home. Different cultures can have their personal lives structured differently – maybe a single parent can’t take meetings during lunch because they have to feed their family, or maybe their sleep cycle has changed.
In such cases, communication becomes the key – and it can ensure that no one is overworking. By letting others in the team know what time slots employees are and aren’t available in, they can ensure that meetings can be set according to their convenience. This responsibility also falls on the shoulders of the managers, who have to ensure that meetings are being held in a way that does not interfere with the personal work rhythms of the employees.
Collaborative Tools and Performance Management
Because of the shift towards remote working, organizations have also seen an increase in their demand for tools that can allow them to manage everything more effectively. For example, most companies use Slack for their internal messaging needs, often relying on platforms like Zoom or WebEx for meeting needs. A particularly interesting step that organizations sometimes take is having a “camera-in” policy in their meetings. Under this, unless an employee has a specific reason for not wanting their camera on, they are encouraged to turn their camera on in meetings, which allows for greater personalization.
Besides this, other tools can also be used. For example, organizations can use tools like Trello, Asana, or some other Monday alternative for their project management., and GSuite products like GDocs and Sheets for sharing documents across the firm.
The Future of WFH – Balancing Tech With Employee Engagement
It is hard to say when organizations will confidently choose to go back to working from office, and how employees would react to that. A school of thought is that the WFH culture would become much more prominent, leading to a healthy balance of technology and human interactions.
What some firms have already done is allow employees to work from home almost the entire week, and have one day where they have to come into the office. However, this day is then reserved for tasks that are best done in person, such as white boarding or brainstorming. Such organizations then see the future of the office as being more of a social environment than a place where people sit and work in isolation.
Employee Recognition in the WFH Culture
Employee recognition is a major part of how organizations ensure that their workforce is motivated and feels valued – and it can significantly impact employee morale. In the WFH era, employee recognition also becomes more challenging, since you cannot really have conferences where you recognize impressive achievements made by employees.
Therefore, a better solution has to be found. One thing that has been done recently is to make it more of a personal event for the employees than a professional one – for example, hiring an Animal Farm to take the office around a farm (virtually) and show them all the different animals, and then using this opportunity to applaud and recognize employees in front of their families and friends instead of simply their peers.
Want to know how Engagedly can help enhance your remote workforce? Book a live demo with us.
Although talent analytics has existed for several years and top management realizes its potential, only a few firms have completely adopted the approach. According to a study by Deloitte, only 4% of businesses have predictive talent analytics capabilities, 14% have some type of talent analytics program in place, and 60% of businesses intend to develop a talent analytics strategy.
To implement a talent analytics strategy, what is required for an organization is a complete understanding of talent analytics and the means through which the data can be put to productive use.
To help you get started, we will explain what Talent Analytics is, what sorth2 of data you should gather, and the advantages of using talent analytics data.
Talent analytics provide insight into both the prospective applicant pool and your existing employees.With a talent analytics platform, you can form credentialed strategies concerning the recruitment process; identify prospective candidates whose skills can boost your company’s productivity, and conduct assessments of existing team members to ascertain their skill gaps.
Historically, talent analytics has been around for quite some time and goes by a few different names, including:
Human resource analytics
Workforce analytics
Human capital analytics
People analytics
Why is Talent Analytics Important?
By using talent analytics data analysis, you will get insights into employee-related issues like performance assessment, hiring, teamwork, and leadership.
Based on the data obtained, you can build a plan for identifying top performers at your company; get an understanding of employees’ work satisfaction levels, and develop employee retention strategies.These insights can help to understand the capabilities of current and prospective employees, as well as their shortcomings and how to improve them.
What Type of Data do You Require for Talent Analytics?
For analytics to be useful and assist recruiters in making smarter recruiting choices, talent acquisition teams must know what kind of talent data they should gather. Below are the four types of data you need for talent analytics:
Data from job portals
Tracking data from job websites will provide you with more insight into the performance of your advertisements. You will get a deeper understanding of how many people are applying for a job; which positions attract the most applications, and what types of devices do candidates use to apply for jobs?
Data from social media
Social media is an excellent tool to engage with younger prospects, but you must monitor data to see whether your recruiting plan is successful. For instance: Which social media outlets have the most impact? Which social networking platform produces the most qualified candidates? How many candidates are generated by each channel? What is your cost per acquisition?
Data related to CRM (Candidate Relationship Management)
CRM data may assist you to monitor different forms of data associated with candidate applications, such as application abandonment rate and the number of prospects in your pipeline and talent pools. It would also offer information on how long candidates spend on each step of the application process; the time to hire; hiring cost; the referral rate, etc.
Recruitment analytics data
Recruitment analytics will assist you to gather data that offers you knowledge of:
Hiring insights: Why prospects drop off, and which aspects of the process need adjustments.
Operational insights: Determine the efficiency of your recruiting process and pinpoint any bottlenecks.
Personality insights: What sorts of applicants apply for your available positions, and how do they stand when compared to your top performers?
Candidate experience insights: Are candidates with higher experience willing to apply for the job?
Examining the advantages of talent acquisition analytics
Utilizing data analytics in your talent acquisition approach has a multitude of significant advantages. Here are the four most important advantages of talent acquisition analytics:
Once you have targeted the exact talents and traits you are looking for in a candidate, you can utilize data to determine where would you get in touch with such applicants (certain social media sites may assist you with this). You can then publish your job advertising according to the requirements. You may even tailor the wording of the ad or job description to match the personality of the applicants you’re seeking.
2. Eliminate prejudice
Data does not care about an applicant’s age, gender, or color; but, on the other hand, humans may make some biased decisions, based on these characteristics.
Based on the existing knowledge associated with social events, attitudes, cultures, stereotypes, and emotional responses, our brains may develop unconscious biases. Using facts and statistics as a basis for your judgment can prevent prejudice in recruiting.
3. Predict applicant success
Organizations may utilize analytics to forecast the future performance of job applicants.
Using talent analytics, businesses may determine the characteristics of a competent employee and create a candidate profile to match it. Thus, while making hiring decisions, they might seek comparable qualities, education, and experience.
4. Customize employee benefits
Talent analytics helps you to make smart decisions based on a candidate’s personality and preferences.
The overall aim would be to turn employees productive and efficient. For instance, you may encourage outstanding prospects to join your team by aligning perks to their specific beliefs, personality, and habits.
Another instance would be that a job applicant with an introverted personality who may prefer a calm place to work may welcome the possibility to work from home once a week. Not only will this appeal to the prospect, but it will also help optimize their potential as an employee and boost employee happiness.
While managing the recruiting process, talent analytics goes beyond ordinary data by providing information on various sources, such as hires, onboarding, retention, cost, and even candidate relationship management (CRM).
For a speedy, effective, and fair recruiting process, you must give equal significance to the types of data you should gather. Different types of data from a wide variety of sources are crucial to a recruiting team because it allows them to begin crafting a recruitment plan that delves further into when, where, and how they should invest their efforts in filling vacancies with the finest available individuals.
Want to know how you can recruit and retain top talent in an era of The Great Resignation? Book a live demo with us.
According to the Dominican University of California, it’s mentioned that 42% of personnel achieve all their goals once they plan by writing down all their plans and goals to achieve. If you are a business owner, setting goals for your employees is essential. You want them to be happy, motivated, and productive – and you need to set development goals for them. Developing your employees is a vital aspect of business growth. It ensures that they stay up-to-date with the latest changes and developments. However, setting the right employee development goals can be difficult.
How to Set Employee Development Goals
It is important to set up employee goals that are both realistic and motivating. Don’t offer them goals that are unachievable or that are easily attainable. This can solely make them upset or put an excessive amount of pressure on them. Instead, set goals that can be measured and achieved with the resources you have, and make sure they are clear to everyone involved in employee development. Make a plan for development with milestones and due dates so that everyone knows where they are and what they need to do. Encourage your employees by giving them rewards for their progress along the way.
1. Set goals that are both achievable and motivating
According to Gail Matthews’ goals research, those who set achievable plans for their daily tasks achieve 40% more as compared to those who don’t set any goals. So, creating achievable goals for employees can be a challenge, but it is essential for your team’s productivity. When creating plans, make sure that they are specific, measurable, relevant to the job, and time-bound. Try not to set too many ambitious targets at once if one falls short of expectation. Begin by setting smaller objectives to help employees improve their skill set or develop new ones. Every accomplishment feels like progress instead of just one step towards the goal.
How to set up smart goals
When you set SMART goals for employees, you want them to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Specific: Your goals need to be clear enough so that employees understand what they need to accomplish to meet the stated objectives.
Measurable: Goals should be quantifiable so that both you and the employee can track progress over time. Measurable goals will help ensure both parties are aware of where each party stands and whether or not there is room for improvement.
Achievable: Goals must be challenging yet achievable to not discourage workers from trying their best. For instance, an employee might become verbal or physically abusive towards themselves or others due to a goal being too difficult (or impossible). In such cases, it may no longer qualify as an achievable goal at that point.
Relevant: All business goals must be relevant to the organization’s mission statement to stand any chance of success. If a goal is unrelated or irrelevant (for example, giving raises based on performance rather than job satisfaction), it’s likely to fail to fulfill its purpose, either within the organization.
2. Set measurable goals
Employers need to set measurable goals for their employees to maintain a personal and professional work-life balance. This helps employees feel appreciated and motivated while also ensuring that they meet the company’s expectations.
Setting clear objectives can be tricky, but using the SMART method of goal setting can help make the process easier. Setting smart goals can be a difficult task, but with the right tips, it can be a breeze.
Here are a few tips to help you get started:
1. Define your goal
Before you can set any smart goals, you first need to know what you’re trying to achieve. Make sure your goal is specific and measurable, so you can track your progress.
2. Break your goal down into smaller chunks
Once you know what you want, it’s time to break it down into more manageable pieces. Creating smaller goals will help you stay motivated and focused, and it’ll make achieving your overall goal easier.
3. Set a deadline
Having a date by which you want to achieve your goal will help keep you on track. Not only will this give you something to aim for, but it’ll also spur you on when the going gets tough.
4. Reward yourself
Besides setting tough deadlines and breaking down daunting goals into bite-sized chunks, rewarding yourself for reaching milestones can also be a motivating factor in achieving success with smart goals. Sacrificing time for hobbies or spending time with loved ones can all contribute to achievement of these tasks!
5. Keep a journal
Keeping a journal can be helpful in both tracking your progress and staying motivated. It allows you to reflect on your successes and challenges, as well as keep track of any advice or tips you may have learned along the way.
3. Create a developmental roadmap with milestones and deadlines
A developmental roadmap can be an excellent tool for ensuring that employees are on track and meet goals set forth by the company. It should include milestones and deadlines for when employees should reach specific objectives and pointers about what to do if they fall behind schedule or miss their targets. By establishing clear expectations from the beginning, you will help your team stay focused and motivated while also avoiding any unnecessary drama or conflict later on. A developmental roadmap can also serve as a valuable point for future reference.
4. Encourage your employees by rewarding their achievements along the way
Encouraging your employees is an essential part of cultivating a positive work environment. When you reward them for their achievements, they are valued and appreciated. These rewards will encourage them to continue working hard.
There are numerous ways to recognize your employees. Some popular methods include giving bonuses, granting promotions or raises, providing flexible work hours or telecommuting options, and creating a fun and engaging workplace culture.
Work can be closely done with employees who fall short
The management of underperformers can be challenging, but it’s possible to ensure their productivity and success. Here’s what you can do:
The first step is to try to figure out why employees act the way they do. Once you know what they want, it’s easier to talk to them about the problem.
Most of the time, an employee’s bad attitude or lack of motivation is caused by things outside of their job, like family problems, rather than problems at work. In these cases, counseling or other help is needed to get past these internal problems.
Once the root causes have been fixed and the employee is back on track, it’s important to work closely with them so that both sides can benefit from the relationship.
Make regular assessments – It is important to check on how employees are doing regularly to make sure they reach their goals. You can measure productivity in many ways, such as through reviews, checklists, interviews, or surveys. It’s also helpful to get feedback often so that the quality of the work can be improved. If you have a problem, you need to fix it right away. This will help keep problems from getting worse and make the workplace a better place to be.
5. Align employee development and career goal
Increasingly, employees are working towards career-aligned individual development goals (INDGs). INDG planning provides an organization and employees with clarity about what the future holds and where members see themselves within that context with better alignment between employee objectives and company strategy. INDG implementation also ensures that individuals are continuously learning and developing to keep up with industry changes, ensuring they remain effective on the job.
OKRs and Employee Engagement
Setting goals will increase employee engagement and support people to focus on the most important things. It is one of the most difficult conditions to turn dreams into action. As you are all aware, OKRs are not flawless, as HR specialists have already demonstrated.
The machine of a unified employer uses OKRs. They are the most important objectives for businesses to increase employee engagement. Their main goal is to motivate employees to achieve their objectives. New goals should be set by using a top-down approach that also works with maintaining performances and indicators of defining their goals once, which is only one of the many things they intended to do.
OKRs will support their goal-setting efforts, which may hold them to a high standard of accountability, by:
Conducting interviews with each employee to identify areas for improvement in the achievement of their goals and areas they are working on.
Focusing on lowering the new highest turnover rate from 20% to 5% to address the issue of employee engagement.
Setting development objectives for employees requires considering their total accomplishments, work responsibilities, company values, and organizational culture. Moreover, setting development milestones is a useful strategy for monitoring a person’s progress and ensuring they are on course to realize their full potential.
Want to know how to use Engagedly for performance management and employee development in the COVID era? Book a live demo with us.
Being an HR professional, your foremost duty is to maintain a healthy atmosphere at the workplace and look after your employees’ well-being to work in an appropriate atmosphere. But HR also has to deal with workplace complaints or employee complaints. Many people are guilty of ignoring problems and hoping they go away. But is ignorance the best solution? Ignoring workplace complaints often further damages a business and demotivates your team. As an employer, it’s essential that you resolve any issues quickly and with efficiency.
Supervisors must take steps to protect themselves, the employee complaining, and those affected if it’s about another person. The working atmosphere impacts badly with an unhappy employee, and business productivity also hampers a lot.
An employer or HR professional must maintain a certain professional rapport in their working environments. This opens the door for other employees in an organization to express their problems freely, which leads to a transparent and happy working atmosphere.
In this article, we will discuss some of the common employee complaints and how to handle them.
Types of Employee Complaints and How to Handle Them
We can broadly categorize the employee complaints into three parts, as mentioned below:
1. Workplace Conflicts
Employee complaints can quickly turn a great company into a mountain of troubles, but you can jump-start your way to a more relaxed workplace by addressing all the gripes as and when they happen. These problems occur due to misunderstandings; business leaders often forget that employees have the same rights, and need to be provided with a relaxed and stress-free atmosphere.
How to handle workplace complaints
Employee complaints can quickly besiege a successful business. When this happens, it’s important to prioritize all issues along with the HR team immediately so as not to let any problems fester and grow into something too big that could damage the integrity of your company over time. A manager or business leader must hear what your team has to say, as regularly connecting with team members makes your employees feel comfortable and happy.
2. Pay Disparities and Low Pay
Wage or pay discrimination occurs when employees are paid less than their peers because of protected qualities. Gender, color, age, and religion are examples. These factors, however, cannot be the reasons why a business chooses to pay people less. For instance, salary discrimination would occur if a woman is paid less than a man for the same job and in the same job role.
If a new employee complains about unfair pay, you’ll need to respond immediately to set the record straight. Often, this will not include a pay raise; however, if the information comes from specific outside sources, it becomes pretty clear that you need to address this immediately and inform the employee that there has been an error in the records.
An employer needs to make sure to treat employees fairly, from paychecks to vacations. Ensure your employees know that they can come to you with questions and ensure their ‘fair’ treatment.
If an employee feels their wage is unfair, it’s vital for you as a business owner or immediate supervisor to respond in the most effective way possible. Your response could vary depending on how old the employee is in the system, prior experience, the roles and responsibilities, and the specialized skill and experience in that job role.
The explanation and employee satisfaction should reflect in such a way that the employee feels valued in the organization. Most importantly, they should see good career growth for themself.
3. Insufficient Vacation or Leave Structure
Complaints regarding insufficient vacation and high workload often come from the employees who have to constantly engage in their work due to an increase in workload and unavailability of a support workforce.
Some employees within the same organization often have to take an increased workload. On the other hand, some employees have less work and get frequent vacations. These differences lead to employee dissatisfaction and workplace complaints. However, using workload management tools can help in spotting such issues early.
How to handle it properly
If your team members complain about their workload, first find out why. You may be able to do something about that or at least, provide them with sound advice and guidance on how they can deal with it daily. If you let the conversation stay focused on their workload, then you’ll never actually get around to finding out what’s causing the problem in the first place.
The objective is to engage the individual, listen to their problem, try to find a solution that does not directly address their concern, and see what occurs. Tell them about the importance of the job role and if any changes can be done, proceed with it.
Where employees can complain?
In case of any workplace complaints, the employee needs to address the issue with the respective HR. Alternatively, they can handle the grievance or be subject to the separate grievance redressal portal of the organization.
Here are some grievance procedures that you can use:
Informal discussion with the management
When an employee logs in a complaint, the immediate supervisor should schedule a meeting with the employee. Sometimes a casual discussion resolves problems instantly. And with a free conversation, both employee and management can reach a similar platform where a manager can explain and address employee grievances, and employees feel satisfied with the effective resolution.
For example, if an employee believes they deserve a promotion but haven’t earned one in several years, a manager can explain what things are required to get the desired result. Managers must acknowledge the grievance and actively listen to employee concerns.
Formal written complaint
Consider creating an employee complaint form. Ensure employees have access to the documents quickly and they also get to the right person assigned to investigate grievances filed by others. If your company already has such a procedure in place, make sure your employees know about it to access it if needed quickly.
Handling Employee Complaints Effectively
Workplace complaints occur very frequently in every organization and every situation has its unique solution, which needs to be actioned immediately. One must handle every issue with attention and precision, and your primary goal should be to resolve complaints informally.
Every company has a concrete grievance policy according to the law. Employees should stay informed of the point of contact if they have a problem, and the process and time restrictions for each action.
Here are some practical steps to handle employee complaints more effectively and smoothly:
Investigate and analyze the complaints properly
Not all problems require a hearing. Generally, it would be best to consider whether the complaint is valid. Check for issues and gather any relevant information. It may not always be necessary, but if the grievance involves other employees, they will need to be informed and given a chance to explain themselves and put forward their bits of evidence.
The HR department should always handle serious complaints. If not, the immediate manager has to look into the problem by themself. Upon receiving the complaint, it has to be addressed accordingly and there may be several approaches depending on the complaint, but they should be consistent each time they originate.
Toinvestigate the complaints effectively, you can follow the following steps:
If there were any witnesses to the incident, speak with them all. Talk with all available witnesses and try to extract the exact information which generates the incident which triggered the employee complaint.
Examine all the evidence. While there could be overwhelming evidence to support one side or the other of a situation, there may still be some evidence that disproves everything seemingly proven. Don’t just take a person’s word for it – ask all those involved precisely what happened and look into every detail of information you receive so as not to spread rumors.
Gather all necessary documentation. Try to collect every document, file, computer information, or any other evidence related to the complaint.
Speak with the initial complainant once more. Revisit with the person who has made the initial complaint and cross-check with him/her for any information missed out on earlier. Also, clarify case of any discrepancies.
Consult with the senior management. After examining all the possible scenarios, you need to check for the company’s grievance redressal policy or seek pieces of advice from your senior management about what actions need to be taken to handle the complaint.
Responding to Complaints Timely and Properly
When dealing with employee complaints, they need to be responded to timely and effectively. Handle any problem on time and accurately by following a few important procedures.
Take the right action in response to the complaint. You need to take any action immediately, wasting no time, be it writing to the higher hierarchy or implementing any policy changes. It’s crucial to take quick action.
Inform the individual of measures taken to address the complaint. It’s necessary to keep the plaintiff informed of all actions and proceedings. In case of any other issue, give details about the resolution procedure.
If the criticism was unjustified, inform the person who filed the complaint. If the complaint does not qualify according to the work rules, inform the employee about the correct procedure and company policy, and always maintain a compassionate view to not feel bad. Take this for future learnings.
Continue normally and move forward. After resolving the complaint, move on and focus less on the complaint.
Take a note of the complaint for your future reference. If you notice a pattern of the same complaint or the same person making another complaint, take a note for your future reference.
Managers’ best practices for an employee complaint
Here are some best practices, which can be a handful for every manager in handling workplace complaints and trying to convince their down-line to maintain the company work rules.
1. Provide an employee handbook to all the employees
When you hire a new employee, please give them the company handbook to read before joining the team and taking on their role. Also, ensure that they sign a declaration, stating that they have received and read through it within a particular time frame after starting employment with your company.
It’s important to remember that an employee can use the employee handbook as a reference point while maintaining company guidelines and company work rules. Keep these guidelines at the ready in case of disputes and have them updated every year.
2. Hold regular meetings with the employees throughout the year
One of the most effective ways to prevent employees from filing grievances is by building positive and welcoming relationships with them. This will lessen the chances of them getting frustrated and having to file grievances.
If you meet your employees at least once a week, bi-monthly, or even once every quarter, there’s a greater possibility that you’ll be able to deal with any grievances before it escalates into serious issues.
3. Conduct frequent workplace training for managers and employees
Consistent workplace training to teach employees how to communicate more favorably with one another or even establish deeper relationships would help the entire organization. It may also be beneficial to arrange training directly related to your employee’s job responsibilities, but this also allows them to remain confident in their abilities and may foster progress in their jobs.
Conclusion
A grievance procedure may be necessary because it allows employees to express their workplace complaints to a manager or upper hierarchy. This allows all employees to have an opportunity to bring about workplace harmony by being themselves in a safe, happy, and collaborative workplace.
The proper operation of a grievance management system requires adequate records, experience, and equal treatment of all parties. However, some special conditions may exist, in which the processes require a more advanced modified approach, as mentioned earlier. A company’s HR has the right to make changes when needed according to the situation.
Maintaining a transparent relationship among the employees, their co-workers, and management reduces the need for grievance management. Furthermore, it develops mutual understanding, avoids workplace conflicts, and creates a clear road map toward the employee and organizational development.
Do you want to know how Engagedly can help you with employee management? Book a live demo with us.
There’s a new kind of performance management on the block: “social performance management.”
Successful performance management requires effective goal-setting, team collaboration, recognition, engagement, and frequent feedback. Traditional performance management systems miss out on these drivers, which can lead to low morale among employees, and thereby poor organizational performance.
Most companies have realized that their performance management (PM) systems don’t really work anymore. And they are increasingly looking at new ways of measuring an employee’s performance. One of those ways is social performance management.
The challenges of the recent shift to a hybrid work setup have aggravated the need to adopt a modern and more collaborative social performance management system (SPM). Such a system can fulfill the needs of advanced performance tracking as well as the social commerce needs of employees.
Seeing the numerous benefits, many organizations are now switching from traditional annual performance review systems to continuous and social performance management tools.
In this article, we will explore the intricacies of a social performance management system and some of its important features.
What is Social Performance Management?
Social performance management or SPM is a spin on traditional social media. On traditional social media, you are able to convey information quickly and also receive a response quickly. You can talk to literally anybody, create interest groups and also state opinions.
A system which is geared towards or created with SPM in mind allows employees to do the same thing. The only thing that changes is the context in which they do it. In SPM systems, employees can share opinions, thoughts, ideas with everyone in an organization. There’s no hierarchy that separates employees and managers and leaders. They can request for feedback and also receive feedback, in real-time. Managers or employees do not need to wait till the year ends before asking for or giving feedback.
And here is the best part of an SPM system. Its users can be anywhere and still communicate with one and other successfully. Employees in different corners of the world can interact with each other as if they were facing each across a desk.
Organizations are slowly but surely adopting SPM systems because they have realized that the very concept of PM is outdated. Some of the organizations which have adopted SPM systems are HubSpot, Mozilla, Hootsuite, etc.
Engagedly – Performance Management Redefined
Engagedly’s main goal is to drive employee engagement. And you cannot drive employee engagement if your PM system gives neither employees nor managers any say in the process. Here’s how Engagedly’s SPM system can help with feedback, peer recognition, and communication.
Feedback – Continuous and Two-Way
In order for feedback to be effective, it needs to be a continuous process. Traditional PM systems have a convoluted feedback process that is of usually no help. They can be frustrating, delayed and insufficient. Not the kind of process that improves employee engagement. Moreover, it does not provide any channel of communication to discuss important issues.
Engagedly’s feedback process is easy. With a few button clicks, you can either give or ask for feedback. It is immediate and therefore, more helpful than feedback which arrives long after the task has been completed. Any team member can ask for feedback from their colleagues and manager. The feature helps in getting quick feedback on the performance and other aspects of work.
Communication among all the employees of an organization is vital. Not just among peers. Leaders cannot be closed off from employees, and employees should not have to think of leaders as mysterious, inscrutable figures.
Good communication can drive engagement and increase productivity. Engagedly’s communication feature is simple and easy to use. Similar to Facebook, you can post a status which team members can comment upon and like. Another striking use of this feature is that you can ask your fellow colleagues for help, share ideas, or even share knowledge!
The feature can also be used to impart knowledge to the whole organizaton or share an organization-wide post regarding important updates or changes. This way, you can always keep communicating with your workforce.
Peer Recognition
One of the most important aspects of employee engagement is recognizing employees who have done good work and commending them for it. Our peer recognition feature makes recognizing an employee or a colleague a breeze. You can share a public social post and tag your team members or colleagues there and thank them for their support, or give a shout out for their exemplary support or skills. The feature also helps other teams to recognize the skills by liking and commenting on the post.
Looking forward to redefine your performance management system? Talk to our experts for a free demo.
COVID-19 has created a tough and complicated environment for Human Resource Management (HRM) professionals. After Covid-19, HRM was placed in an uncertain position where they needed to devise inventive methods to simplify their organization’s operations and assist their people in coping with this unusual crisis. This is where attending HR events would prove helpful for the HR department of a company.
HR events provide a platform for inventive HR leaders, HR professionals, business experts, and workforce analytics to collaborate and develop a great business strategy to address the many complicated difficulties that affect companies at all levels. HRM can meet experts and other HR professionals, and discuss how to deal with a large-scale shift in the way people work in hybrid or remote working environments.
Benefits of Attending HR Events
Some benefits that HR leaders and business leaders would reap by attending HR events are :
Opportunities and learning: HR conferences provide opportunities for professional development and understanding of the top HR trends of the year. The participants will also receive an insight into recruiting practices, and emerging HR strategies and technologies.
Challenges: Participants will have a better understanding of how to deal with the challenges of working in a multicultural environment.
A chance to meet field experts: These events allow professionals to meet field experts. In addition, thought leaders and experts will share their experiences and advice to the trainees and Human Resources professionals; especially, regarding essential aspects of HRM such as talent acquisition and employee engagement.
Develop a professional network: HR events enable professionals to interact with peers and develop a professional network.
Build your CV: Many HR conferences award certificates to participants on completion of the conference. These new skills and accreditations can boost your CV.
Some of the major HR events you cannot afford to miss are discussed below. They would provide you with an opportunity to meet with high-profile business experts and HR leaders. Importantly, they would render an in-depth understanding of the latest HR technologies to streamline HR-based processes.
1. The State of Employee Well-being 2022
Date: 1 June to 2 June
Price: Free
Why should you attend:
This event will focus on employees’ well-being and how employers can keep employees motivated and engaged post-COVID. Experts will talk about the effects of the pandemic and how these can be overcome, especially in terms of workplace security and the mental health of employees. Essential areas pertaining to HRM such as the development of high-potential employees and the culture of transparency will also be covered.
You can register for the event here.
2. SHRM Annual Conference & Expo 2022
Date: 12 June to 15 June
Price: The price for a pass to an in-person conference is $1,950 for members and $2,450 for non-members. The price for a virtual pass is $1,295 for members and $1,550 for non-members.
Why should you attend:
This is one of the world’s largest HR conferences, with more than 200 sessions; 500+ exhibiting companies, and thousands of successful, smart, and ambitious HR professionals to network with. This is a four-day conference with peer-to-peer connections, customized learning, corporate and HR leader lectures, productivity HR courses, and hands-on learning workshops. You will also be exposed to ideas related to crucial HR topics, such as strategic HR practices, leadership, inclusion and diversity, workplace culture, and recruitment and retention.
SHRM Annual Conference event registration can be done here.
3. Gartner Data & Analytics Summit
Date: 25 July to 26 July
Price: AU$ 2,975 + GST for early-bird tickets, AU$ 3,475 + GST for standard tickets, and AU$2,850 + GST for the public sector
Why should you attend:
At this event, leading reporting and analytics subject matter experts and corporate leaders will share their insights about the biggest challenges that data analytics leaders confront as they build robust, innovative, and agile organizations of the future. You will have the opportunity to interact with thought leaders and learn to simplify business processes with advanced data analytics capabilities in a dynamic and complex world. From the perspective of data analytics, this HR conference focuses primarily on corporate strategy, the most recent innovations, and entrepreneurship.
Event registration can be done here.
4. HR Connect 2022
Schedule: Preconference- 12 October
Main Conference: 13 to 14 October
Price: $1,199
Why should you attend:
At the HR Connect 2022 event, you’ll learn how to adapt and tackle the most pressing HR challenges, explore compliance, recruiting, corporate culture, and learn how to update your personnel management methods to engage and retain remote and hybrid employees. At this engaging live conference, you will also learn:
Keeping up with evolving employment regulations.
The key to maintaining diverse employees of various skill levels and developing professional skills for optimal company performance.
Accepting setbacks, and learning and improving from failures.
The biggest cause of employee burnout and effective stress management techniques.
How to effectively help employees, who are also the providers for their families.
Ways to improve the productivity and creativity of your employees.
HR Connect 2022 event registration can be done here.
5. The State of Human Experience in the Workplace 2022
Date: 17 August
Price: Free
Why should you attend:
At this event, you’ll discover how to establish metrics such as KPIs for the contemporary employee experience. The event will also focus on presentations on a range of challenges pertaining to human interactions, particularly the experiences that employees and other stakeholders have in today’s workplace and how these impact employee performance, retention, and engagement. You’ll also learn how to improve your recruiting process and what HR strategies you can use, such as employee engagement, compensation and benefits, and business culture.
The State of Human Experience in the Workplace event registration can be done here.
6. Creating a Culture of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Conference
Date: 21 September
Price: $195
Why should you attend:
During this virtual conference, you will learn about the latest best practices for building a common language and understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and how to develop a clear DEI strategy in which your entire workforce can participate. You may earn credits from HRCI, SHRM, and HCI by attending this session.
Price: $103.95 – $2,625 (varying from tickets to tickets and accommodation prices)
Why should you attend:
This conference specifically targets human resource professionals working in the public sector from all around Western Canada so that they can explore the unique challenges that HR faces in this industry. You may attend both keynotes and active breakout sessions to acquire insight and inspiration for your career. Erik van Vulpen, founder of Analytics in HR, will also give a virtual presentation on this occasion.
You can register for the Western Cities HR Conference here.
8. Supporting Workplace Wellness & Wellbeing
Date: 19 October
Price:
A 1-day virtual conference pass costs $195;
Engage Your People Virtual Series costs $495; and
2022 All Access Virtual Conference Pass costs $1,895
Why should you attend:
As a result of virtual and flexible work arrangements, organizations must go beyond surface-level health initiatives. Attend this session to discover how to effectively help your employees in times of unrest, stress, financial, and other difficulties. You will also discover the most up-to-date information on how to develop a working culture that places the emotional and physical wellness of workers at the forefront.
At this event, you would also learn how to provide adaptable resources for mental and physical health concerns, develop a culture in which employees are encouraged at times of personal difficulty, and maintain a proactive stance in the face of workforce difficulties that might affect your company. Other benefits include:
You’ll have the opportunity to network virtually with your colleagues and speakers.
Accessibility to a digital resource center for thirty days after the conference, including recordings of keynote speeches and slides from presentations.
Acquire 4 HRCI General credits, 4 SHRM Professional Development Credits, 4 HCI credits, and 3 ATD recertification credits.
Price: Early bird tickets are $1,695 and regular tickets are $1,995 (exclusively for members of the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans).
Why should you attend:
At this event, you can connect with over 5,000 HR professionals and have access to the views of 150 industry leaders on employee pay. Also, you will get practical knowledge about tried-and-true methods that you may adopt in your organization. You will get to learn the latest developments in the industry so that when it comes to investing, you are fully conversant with the pros and cons of it. The main focus of the HR conference will be on administration, fiduciary responsibility, health and welfare, a comprehensive overview of employee benefits and challenges, investments, and pensions, public plans, apprenticeship, training, and education, fund professionals—accountants, and fund advisors—attorneys.
10. Agile Leadership Development Conference
Date: 16 November
Price: $195 for a one-day virtual conference
Why should you attend:
At this event, you can learn how to deal with the shortage of skilled professionals while minimizing the risks to your company. Understand how to create successful leadership development programs by attending this virtual HR conference hosted by the Human Capital Institute. You will also get to learn to identify the relevant metrics, develop a culture of openness, and make sure that your leadership development activities are consistent with your succession objectives.
Registration for the Agile Leadership Development Conference can be done here.
Participating in these virtual or in-person HR conferences might be the smartest move you could make this year, as the emphasis of these conferences will fall on the problems encountered by HR professionals in the context of the new normal and other persistent workforce concerns.
In addition, you will get first-hand experience of the most recent HR technology, such as Engagedly, which acts as a platform for connecting with employees and understanding the many challenges they face. This type of technology can also expedite the resolution of their difficulties, boost productivity, and ensure employee retention.
Do you want to know how Engagedly can be the right performance management software for remote workplaces? Book a live demo with us.
Moving from traditional paper-based performance reviews to web based performance appraisal system can feel like a stressful experience. It is mainly because you are moving away from something that you know about to something that is new to you.
A team comprises of different types of people. And it is their cumulative effort that drives high performance. Some employees are more shy than others, and it makes them uncomfortable sharing their views openly. Even then, their contributions are equally important and they must be taken into consideration while making decisions. Shy employees have their own set of talents and skills, and it depends largely upon the efforts of a manager to help them grow.
Annual performance reviews are outdated. They do not provide clarity regarding an employee’s performance, moreover they can lead to disgruntled and unproductive workforce. But still many organizations are using them to conduct yearly performance evaluations. A research conducted by Gallup found that 86% of employees do not feel that their reviews provide fair picture of their performance.
In this article, we will discuss some reasons for ditching your annual performance reviews and adopt a continuous evaluation performance evaluation system.
Problems With Annual Performance Reviews
Here are some reasons why progressive organizations are letting go of their annual performance review systems and adopting a more systematic, structured, and continuous process.
1. It’s Annual
Yes, one of the problems with conducting the annual performance review is that it is annual. An entire performance review just once a year. Therefore, annual performance reviews are rightly hard to sustain. To cram an entire year’s work into a two page report or a 15 minute session seems impossible and not feasible, yet, that is how it happens, which of course leads to more issues.
An annual performance review will work when in the time leading up to the review the manager has been constantly checking in with the employees, has been offering feedback etc. When all of that doesn’t happen, and all a manager has is a day or so to prepare for the process, it is understandable that the review process might proceed in a less than favorable manner. It is easier to carry out a performance review twice a year instead of just once. It reduces the burden placed upon the manager as well as the HR and it also allows the process to be more organic, thereby reducing the chance of the entire performance review process failing.
2. It’s Not Managed Well
This is unfortunately true of most performance review processes at organizations. Organizations see the process as important but they don’t know how to make sure that is a valuable to both the employee and the manager. Performance reviews might begin at the end of the financial year, but a good performance review process has already begun much before that.
In order to make sure that the performance review process is valuable to both the employee and the manager, from the beginning, managers need to set goals and objectives, revisit those goals and objectives monthly, conduct feedback sessions frequently, and have some method to track an employee’s progress. That is how a performance review becomes valuable. Otherwise it is just another process that we carry out in an organization.
3. They Disengage Employees From Work
Rather than providing any benefit to employees, annual performance reviews can dissuade them from the path of productivity. An ideal performance evaluation system should engage and motivate employees to work and stay productive, but an inaccurate review can do a lot of harm to them.
Recency bias is one of the culprits that lets managers assess their team members based on their most recent interaction with them. With limited time available for managers to review all their employees, it becomes apparent that they are unable to take an employee’s annual progress into consideration.
4. Interlinking Salary Hike To Performance Reviews
Often, performance reviews are linked to salary hikes, which makes the process more stressful for both employees and managers. Every employee wants to get a salary hike, but it depends on a manager’s assessment of their contribution to the organization. If managers are able to accurately gauge the performance of employees and provide them with positive reviews, they will feel motivated. Otherwise, they may end up fretting and becoming disengaged from work.
5. Inefficient Performance Evaluation Systems
The traditional performance review systems used by organizations lack continuous feedback, check-ins, and goal tracking features, which makes them inept for conducting a fair and accurate review. With the changing demands of businesses, customer personalization, and changes in working setups, such systems have become even more incompetent. The only solution available to organizations is to switch to a progressive and continuous performance management system.
Engagedly’s powerful and employee-centric performance management system allows real-time evaluation of employees and offers actionable insights to managers to develop their workforce. Its other useful features, such as 360-degree feedback, OKRs, and learning and development, aid in the overall growth and development of employees. Additionally, it helps in conducting quick surveys to understand the pulse of employees and offers interactive dashboards for quick interpretation of data.
Your business is full of talented, hard-working employees. But it’s not enough that they can perform well as individuals.
They have to be able to work in efficient, productive teams.
And in some ways, that’s getting harder. Your team might have remote or hybrid members — you could even be in completely different time zones.
With the right tools and techniques, any team can be high-performing. This article gives you the tips you need to improve team performance.
Why is Team Performance Important?
Team performance is related to job performance. Research shows that team members who are highly engaged in their work and motivated by the mission of their organization tend to produce higher quality, more innovative products than those who are disengaged or uninvolved.
Types Of Teams In The Workplace
Hybrid and Remote Teams
The days of everyone coming to the office every day are over for most teams. While many employees only started working from home in 2020 as a safety measure, most don’t want to go back full-time.
75.6% of employees want to work from home at least one day per week. 33.3% want to work from home five days per week. And employers are allowing it.
Source: hbr.org
Only 4% of employers have communicated that they expect employees to return full-time. 19.7% have no clear plans,
Another 64.5% will allow some degree of remote work.
That creates a new challenge: teams have to work smoothly and efficiently despite not being in the same room.
Cross-Functional Teams
Cross-functional teams are made up of people with different skill sets and expertise.
They’re often set up temporarily to work on a specific project. For example, a cross-functional team working on a product launch could include employees from product development, marketing, sales, and finance.
They bring a range of perspectives together, which fosters innovation and creativity, and they allow organizations to tackle more complex projects. But there are downsides.
Ineffective communication and misaligned goals in cross-functional teams can lead to issues in coordination, project management, and project delivery. Implementing team management best practices can help cross-functional teams perform better.
Qualities Of An Effective Team
How do you evaluate your team’s performance? We’ll talk about choosing specific metrics of success in a bit, but in general, a high-performing team will have these qualities:
Clear Goals
The best teams can meet or exceed the goals that are set for them. They know exactly what’s expected, and they get it done.
Efficiency
High-performing teams don’t waste time. They get a lot done by operating as efficiently as possible.
If a team is inefficient, it doesn’t necessarily mean the team members aren’t working hard enough. Sometimes, a team’s performance is hampered by outdated tools or processes that need to be reevaluated.
Motivation
The team members of an efficient team are motivated to do their best.
This usually comes from a sense of ownership in the team’s work. Team members feel positive about being a part of the team and are driven to achieve team goals.
6 Tips for Improving Team Performance
Team performance improvements often come from working smarter, not harder. These six strategies can be applied to any team to improve performance.
1. Set Clear Expectations
Teams can’t succeed if they don’t know what success looks like. Your team members should understand their goals and roles, as well as how they’ll be evaluated. Use the below suggestions to set clear expectations in the team.
Use KPIs for measuring the team’s performance
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are quantifiable measures of performance. They’re the numbers that tell you how you’re doing on your goals.
Your team’s KPIs should include a combination of individual goals and team objectives. For example, a customer service team could track the total number of tickets the team resolved and measure the customer satisfaction ratings of each team member.
Reports and dashboards make KPIs much more useful. Team members should know how to check in on their progress and see how the team is doing.
Roles Within Teams
Each member of the team must have an understanding of their role. Unclear communication about who’s responsible for a task can lead to duplicated or unfinished work.
Work management software that can ensure that there’s no confusion about who’s supposed to do what.
Performance Review Process
In addition to knowing what they’re supposed to do, team members should understand how their achievements will be evaluated. Are there incentives for doing well? What metrics affect the likelihood that they’ll get a raise?
If employees don’t understand how their KPI numbers translate into real-life rewards, they’ll be less motivated to perform well.
2. Automate and Streamline Team Processes
Even the best team will fail if it has inefficient processes. So assign the processes according to the team’s calibre to improve the productivity of the entire team.
No one wants to do things the slow way, but it’s really easy for inefficiencies to become standard if you don’t regularly evaluate and optimize the way you do things.
Sometimes, an inefficient process is just how things have always been done. A team member has painstakingly created the same excel report every Monday for years, and no one has taken the time to find a better method.
Sometimes it’s because you have tools that don’t work together. For example, did you know that the average organization uses ten different sales technology tools? Switching between them for different tasks is a big waste of time.
A sales CRM solution can bring all of your customer relationship processes together and automate the repetitive parts of the job.
Talk to your team members about which manual processes are taking up the most time. Are there modifications that could save the invaluable time of the team? Better yet, could the process be automated?
3. Respect your Team’s Time
Have you ever had to attend an unproductive meeting that could have been an email?
Of course you have. We all have.
Pointless meetings are one of the biggest time sucks in the workplace. 44% of professionals say that poorly organized meetings are keeping them from doing their real work.
By using a meeting scheduler, you can manage your time and meetings in an effective manner. The tool enables your customers to view available time-slots in your calendar and book meetings accordingly, to avoid any conflicts.
And all that wasted time means wasted money. In fact, 34% of professionals consider unnecessary meetings to be the biggest cost to their organization.
Source: Zippia.com
Team leaders have a responsibility to communicate information efficiently. A meeting isn’t always the best way to go. That meeting could be an email, but we have an even better idea — that meeting could be a conversation on your work management platform.
4. Foster Transparency
In a successful team, every team member trusts every other team member to do their part. There’s a group dynamic of openness and honesty.
You can improve transparency at the team level by doing the following:
Provide Visibility Into What the Team Is Doing
Anyone working on a project should have complete information about it. When a team member can only see their own piece of the puzzle, decision-making and problem-solving are impacted.
Project management software can ensure that everyone on the team knows what other team members are doing.
That level of visibility also holds team members accountable. Knowing that your coworkers can see how much you’re contributing to the project is motivational.
Offer Insights Through Reports and Dashboards
Ideally, team members should have visibility of each other’s tasks.
Using a solution with sophisticated reporting and dashboard software gives the whole team insights into progress and performance.
Encourage Feedback
Encourage everyone on the team to speak their mind. If they have feedback about the way the team is managed or how a process is done, be open to hearing it.
Team leaders should also give constructive feedback to direct reports. That improves team performance while letting team members know that you’ll be honest with them.
5. Reward Success
Everyone loves to be rewarded for their hard work. Whether it’s a monetary bonus or simple recognition, team members are motivated by incentives.
Most businesses only reward individual achievements.
No matter how many talented individuals you have on a work team, the team will only be successful if those individuals work well together. As per Deloitte, only 28% of organizations give performance rewards based on team metrics. 39% use individual metrics, and 55% use individual performance reviews.
Choose a team goal that everyone can work on together and let the team know that there’ll be a reward if they meet it.
6. Choose the Right Tools
It’s easy to talk about things like improving accountability or streamlining processes.
But if you don’t have the right team software solutions, it’s impossible to actually do it.
For example, you might feel strongly about the importance of team communication, but some of that communication is going to get lost in disorganized email inboxes if you don’t have a better tool to manage your emails.
Communication
Have a question about a task’s status?
Don’t send an email or use a separate messaging app. That’s how you end up with five different disjointed conversations around the same issue.
Communication happens where the work happens. A good communication platform is especially important if you have hybrid or virtual teams or if team members come from a variety of departments. Moreover, good communication during meetings is equally as important. To facilitate this, you could use a meeting note app
Transparency
A good project management platform provides visibility into what everyone on the team is doing. Project information, deadlines, files, and conversations are all easy to find.
Reports and dashboards let team members visualize the group’s progress and achievements. This kind of visibility also makes reporting to stakeholders on project statuses simpler.
Process Automation
You don’t have to be a tech wiz to automate workflows.Save time by automating mundane tasks like status updates and email notifications. Or get fancy with multi-step automation recipes that streamline entire workflows.
Conclusion
By following the six tips above, any team can improve performance without adding extra work.
Remember that team development is an ongoing process. Meet with your team regularly to openly discuss any frustrations they have or inefficiencies they’ve discovered.
One of the biggest things you can do to improve team performance is to use the right tools. Discuss with your team the tools that can add more value to their work and help solve challenges. However, you may want the assistance of a third party with such a new pair of eyes to understand what more you may add to your team, so be sure to look out for staff augmentation services that can help you boost your overall productivity.
Do you want to know how Engagedly can help you with Real-Time Performance Management? Book a live demo with us.
Earlier, it was viewed as a system where managers would assess the performance of their employees annually based on some specific parameters. The system had a series of flaws that would lead to inaccurate measurement of performance and eventual disengagement and dissatisfaction among employees.
On the flip side, the modern approach to performance management is highly focused on the development and growth of employees. It is a continuous and ongoing set of processes that helps to identify, examine, measure, and improve the performance of employees. Other than focusing on employees’ personal and professional development, it provides great insights into the untapped potential of employees and identifies the blindspots that are a hurdle to organizational development.
There are a multitude of reasons why companies like Accenture, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and GE have ditched their traditional command-and-control management systems for people-focused and growth-oriented performance management. Organizations that are highly invested in the performance of their workforce have higher ROI, lower employee turnover, are more innovative, and are better at problem-solving. They are able to sail through turbulent times without compromising on their work quality.
This article will talk at length about the intricacies of performance management and will unpack details about the following:
Performance management is crucial for the success of any business. It helps align the resources in the right direction and ensures higher growth potential. It encompasses a set of processes that continuously measure employees’ performance and build a communication channel between managers and employees to accomplish the strategic objectives of the organization.
Performance management plays an important role in every industry. It helps create an environment where employees are motivated to be better at their jobs by offering them regular feedback and resources to improve their skills.
Furthermore, it is a periodic and systematic process that helps align individual goals to organizational goals, and therefore key decisions like appraisals, promotions, and bonuses are linked to it.
All the major parameters of organizational and individual success are linked to performance management in the following ways:
Helps in setting goals that are inclined to organizational objectives
Provides regular feedback to team members
Acts as a medium of communication to discuss issues, opportunities, threats, and progress of projects
Offers learning and development opportunities, and reward and recognition based on individual performance
Creates performance standards for employees
It is critically important to note that performance management is not a one-size-fits-all approach for every organization.
Even though it is a corporate tool that helps solve challenges related to productivity, performance, retention, and engagement, every organization needs to redesign or customize performance management as per their business requirements to get optimum results.
Another common misconception about performance management is relating it to traditional performance appraisals that were limited in scope, as they did not include clear goal setting and frequent feedback mechanisms.
Why Is Performance Management Important?
The changing global business environment, the rapidly evolving technical landscape, changing customer preferences, challenges with global supply chain management, and employees’ expectations from employers are the chief factors that will define the success of an organization in the coming years.
The below image provides a clear understanding of changing employees’ expectations and values at work in the post-pandemic world.
The recent developments in the market, The Great Resignation, and IT automation are adding to the predicaments of human resource managers. Finding the right talent and retaining potential employees is getting tougher every day. On top of that, organizations are still reeling under the economic stress of the pandemic.
The following image highlights some of the challenges that HR leaders need to be prepared for.
Source: home.KPMG (New challenges perceived by HR leaders, 2021)
The situation does not seem to get easier anytime soon. So, how do organizations manage their most valuable resources in turbulent times? This is where performance management becomes indispensable to an organization’s sustainability and growth.
By leveraging different components of performance management, organizations can not only retain their employees but also be prepared for unprecedented changes in their business. Furthermore, they can create a differentiated brand position for themselves and attract new talent easily.
To remain competitive in the current business environment, it is imperative to focus on building a systematic, goal-centered, and employee-centric performance management system.
What Are The Key Components of Performance Management?
Performance management is responsible for the creation of a growth-driven, engaging, and productive environment. A well-thought-out, innovative, and strategically laid-out performance management system can boost performance and lead to the development of a dynamic and highly skilled workforce. In order for performance management to bring effective results, organizations need to incorporate its components into every process and ensure compliance.
The different components of performance management goal setting, ongoing communication through frequent feedback, performance reviews, rewarding good performance, creating improvement plans, and learning and development help to make it a vital tool for organizational development.
What Are The Benefits Of Effective Performance Management?
Performance management is a multi-faceted tool that helps in the overall development of employees and, thereby, achieves organizational objectives. By working at the individual and team level, performance management helps in identifying blindspots in employee productivity and development that are a barrier to the achievement of company goals. Furthermore, it supports management in reducing employee turnover, getting higher ROI, enhancing employee engagement and productivity, and building a more diverse and inclusive culture.
Source: Profit.co
The benefits of performance management are not just limited to the organization, but spread across all the stakeholders. It plays a crucial role in increasing the organizational efficiency by:
Creating an open channel of communication between managers and employees
Building trust, integrity, and loyalty in employees
Aligning individual goals with organizational objectives
Providing the right resources to employees for growth and development
Helping in goal setting and making employees accountable for their progress in the organization
Offering visibility to employees for their efforts and ensuring that employees understand the impact of their efforts on organizational success
Reducing conflicts between team members
Offering a platform for self-assessment, learning, performance review, and discussions
Providing open feedback to employees on their skills, competencies, progress, and future development
Checking the readiness of employees to undertake more responsible positions
Creating personalized development plans for employees
Motivating low-performing employees through coaching and mentoring
Principles Of Performance Management
Performance management is a vast process. It requires collaboration from multiple levels to be successful. It is an integrated approach that touches both vertical and horizontal segments of the organization. To ensure the success of performance management, human resource leaders must adhere to some fundamental principles that serve as supporting pillars to the overall process.
The process is founded on the following principles of performance management:
Without incorporating its basic tenets, performance management will not be fruitful in the long run.
Performance Management Best Practices
Following the disruptions caused by the pandemic, many HR processes, including performance management, have started to gravitate toward becoming strategic business contributors to the organization. The concept of performance management has been redefined by the leaders, and it now encompasses the series of changes brought in by the radical developments in the business environment.
Performance management has metamorphosed into a real-time goal setting and employee development tool that overlooks different aspects of employee and organizational performance. As organizations are now juggling between remote and hybrid work setups, it is important for them to keep a tab on the overall performance of their employees.
Human resource managers must incorporate certain best practices to enhance the performance of their remote and hybrid teams. These include:
UsingOKR methodology (Objectives And Key Results) for goal setting, tracking, analyzing, and improving performance
Redesigning employee KPIs and goals as per the work setup
SettingSMART(specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based) goals for employees
What Are The Problems With Performance Management?
A survey by Deloitte highlights that only 8% of organizations derive high value from their performance management processes, while 58% find it ineffective in delivering results.
Despite numerous developments in the field of HR management and strategies, there are certain problems that are a huge barrier to implementing effective performance management in organizations. If left unchecked, these problems can cascade into the system and result in conflicts among employees and leaders, low performance, underachievement of organizational goals, and low customer retention and acquisition. On the employee front, ineffective performance management can lead to demotivation, disengagement, lack of trust, and high turnover.
Some of the major problems with performance management:
A performance management system is a collaborative approach between employees and management to frequently review the performance of employees and provide them with constructive feedback.
It entails planning, monitoring, and reviewing the performance to achieve short and long-term organizational goals and also provide a growth trajectory to employees for their overall development.
To ensure higher performance and achievement of objectives, organizations develop a series of activities that help employees understand their strengths and weaknesses and offer them learning opportunities to nurture their skills.
But what’s the purpose?
It’s multifold and it touches upon individual, team, and organizational productivity, goal goal-setting methodologies. Further, it helps in creating frequent check-ins and feedback processes, learning and development, and rewarding employees for exemplary performance.
Types Of Performance Management Systems
A performance management system acts as a guiding light that helps organizations stay committed to their mission and vision by constantly monitoring the performance of employees and offering support wherever required so as to not stray from the optimal path.
There are different types of performance management systems available at the disposal of organizations. Some of the most commonly used ones are:
Based on the business requirements, organizational culture, and goals, organizations can select the ones that help them achieve better results. However, many organizations are now making a shift to OKRs and 360 degrees because of the numerous benefits they offer.
How To Get Started With Performance Management?
Whether you are running a startup with a handful of employees or a multinational organization, it is always difficult to align everyone’s vision to achieve overarching goals. Every organization wants to achieve more through continuous improvement, but without a proper framework to support it, it can be extremely challenging to make a mark.
Having a performance management framework to create alignment between organizational and employee goals is the starting point of mastering the art of performance management. When done right, performance management harbingers great results for an organization.
Meticulously analyze the industry and business environment
List your most important organizational goals
Ruminate over the problems you would like to resolve with the help of performance management
Take management’s support in understanding the intricacies of performance management
Analyze the previously available data, if any, to understand what processes did not work well and what improvements can be made
If required, seek external support from leading performance management experts
Technology And Performance Management?
The growing need for innovation, creativity, problem solving, and adaptability is transforming workplaces. Employees’ expectations have changed over the years, and so has the way organizations operate.
The current demands of digitization and agility have led to a fast adaptation of automated performance management systems that can reduce the manual workload of HR managers and optimize the processes.
provide a framework for collaboration between employees and management.
The below image provides an overview of real-time dashboards visible to leaders and managers. With their help, managers are able to keep track of the progress of organizational goals.
By doing away with redundant tasks, HR leaders can focus on important issues and help create a better learning environment for employees.
83% say that the quality of conversations has improved between managers and employees
96% found the process to be simpler than before
Google, Kelly Services, IBM, Cargill, and Juniper are some of the companies that have redefined their performance management systems. They are leveraging technology to create a continuous performance management system. It helps support processes such as feedback management, check-ins, creating better job descriptions, performance reviews, and even learning and development. These companies are now more focused on employee development and engagement rather than annual performance reviews that would give inaccurate results.
Key Takeaways
Performance management is at the heart of every organization. It helps in creating a formidable performance-driven culture that supports higher productivity, engagement, and optimal utilization of resources. Effective performance management systems are one of the key distinguishing parameters of high-performing organizations. By utilizing the various components of performance management effectively, organizations can create a skilled workforce that is ready to take challenges head-on.
Did you know your employees could do a lot more for your business than they actually do? Well, if you didn’t know, the answer is yes. However, you have an important part to play as an employer. Maximizing employee ability doesn’t just happen. You need to motivate your employees to give their best at work. When you fail to do this, employees can easily feel unvalued, which decreases their engagement and ultimately their performance. What’s worse, this can have a detrimental effect on the company’s bottom line.
So, how can you ensure that your employees’ potential is maximized for improved performance? Here, we tip you on 5 things that you can offer your team.
Training and development opportunities
Providing training and development opportunities for employees boosts their potential in several ways. For starters, it bridges the skills gaps. This means that employees gain additional skills to perform their work better and even take on other roles effectively. In addition, it increases motivation and engagement. Employees are more likely to invest in an organization that invests in their career development. Moreover, employees give their best at work when they are highly engaged.
Think of ways to help your employees improve their skills. Assigning projects for experiential learning and offering mentorship programs go a long way. In addition, you can sponsor employees to take up various courses such as PMP certification training, CIPM certification, financial analyst training, sales certification, and SHRM certification, among others.
You may have a highly skilled workforce in place, but if you are not acknowledging their good work, you are impeding their ability to work at full potential. For employees to see that their capabilities matter in the organization, they need to feel and see that it matters to you as well. And, the best way to show them is by recognizing their efforts.
You may be shying away from this, thinking that it is expensive. However, most employees aren’t after glamorous and expensive rewards. A shout-out during the morning meeting, a pat on the back, or a genuine thank-you letter can go a long way. If the budget allows occasional gifts such as lunch vouchers, travel tickets, and things like these, can be a good potential booster.
Flexible working hours
Not everyone is wired to work an 8 to 5 job. Some people are highly productive early in the morning, others in the afternoon, and others late at night. Insisting on having such individuals at their desks the whole day isn’t only demoralizing, but also inhibits their potential. You can consider offering flexible hours for roles that don’t need the employee to be present full time.
Flexible working hours give employees an opportunity to improve their work-life balance. This results in happy and satisfied employees who are willing to work at their best. In addition, employees’ productivity and quality of work go up when they work during the hours that they feel most productive.
Constructive feedback
Giving feedback to your employees is one of the most effective tools for managing employee performance. It helps employees see areas of strength and motivates them to do better. Giving balanced feedback, which means including areas of weaknesses, helps employees improve on those areas.
However, for employee feedback to be effective in increasing potential, it has to be balanced as mentioned. In addition, make it two-way. Have the employees gauge their performance before offering your feedback. Also, ensure that it is objective and timely.
The work environment has a lot to do with how employees perform. Individuals work better in a positive culture that promotes psychological safety, wellbeing, teamwork, mutual respect, compassion, and healthy work relationships. Such an environment boosts morale and increases engagement, which inspires employees to work at their best. To create a positive culture, start encouraging social connections, show empathy and compassion, and be an approachable leader among other steps that make a happy and satisfying work environment.
Conclusion
Unlocking your employees’ full potential is paramount in increasing profits and achieving company growth. In addition, it increases engagement, which is important in reducing employee turnover and building a positive brand. You can enhance employee potential by nurturing your team’s skills, capabilities, and efforts as well as offering incentives that communicate to them that they are a valuable part of the organization. The above tips give you ways that you can do exactly that.
Do you want to know how Engagedly can help you enhance your employees’ potential? Book a live demo with us.
Daisy is an industrial and organizational psychologist who researches to identify solutions to problems that improve the well-being and performance of organizations and their employees. Daisy is also a freelance writer and often writes articles for credible blogs.
Are you looking for inspirational new ways to attract top talent and improve employee retention? The more excellent your benefits program, the happier your employees will be.
Through word of mouth and reputation, you’ll find applicants with the desired employee experience clamoring for a role within your organization. And it doesn’t have to break the bank. Check out our top unique employee benefits ideas for all budgets.
What are employee benefits?
Employee benefits are indirect, non-cash compensation paid by a company to an employee in addition to their salary. They might also be called fringe benefits. Companies recognize that they need to show appreciation, allowing employees to grow and thrive within the business. Benefits might be anything from an employee discount at a store or additional time off.
Many employees apply for jobs because of the offered perks and benefits. Job satisfaction and employee satisfaction are linked; ignoring employee satisfaction will decrease commitment, motivation, and productivity. Discover our creative employee benefits ideas if you believe your employees are your most valuable asset.
Why offer employee benefits?
Only 49% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. Introducing a job perk or two will help improve employee happiness, boost employee morale, and lead to more productive employees.
Essentially, the more you look after employee health, your company will perform better, and this includes everything from creating welcoming company cultures to offering corporate discounts. So, why should business owners offer employee benefit programs?
If you’re looking for a new employee benefits idea for your business, consider the following suggestions.
Health and wellness benefits
A health and wellness program is suitable for your employees’ physical and mental health. It’s an excellent way to encourage physical activity and offer a benefits package simultaneously. Anything from gym memberships to health insurance plans will attract and retain the top talent for your business.
1. Gym membership
Offering a gym membership or corporate discounts at your local gym or leisure center is an excellent perk. Many companies already provide gym memberships, so adding this health benefit to your bonuses will help you compete with the competition.
2. Healthy snacks
Many offices provide free snacks or ice cream lunches. While these fun food options go down well, why not set yourself apart with healthy snacks that encourage your employees to feel good about themselves?
3. Bike to work scheme
A bike-to-work scheme is a wellness benefit that helps your employees while commuting and in their free time. Bikes are expensive. You can offer to reimburse your workers the cost of their bikes if they cycle to work, improving their mental and physical fitness and encouraging sustainable travel and improving employee motivation.
Employee recognition
Employee reward and recognition are crucial for your company. When a worker does something good, you want to reinforce them positively. However, you shouldn’t solely offer performance bonuses or recognition when they do something well — you should continuously recognize their hard work.
4. Monthly awards
Holding regular — whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly — awards is a great way to ensure that you continuously support your employees. Make sure you recognize those who are doing well and those who work hard but often slip under the radar. An excellent way to ensure everyone feels included is to host rewards for years of service, birthday parties, and mistakes of the month awards.
5. New hire welcome packages
Offering desirable welcome packages is an excellent employee perk that will tempt the top talent to join your company. An inclusive introduction, a book with all the details they need to know (including job perks), and personalized company goodies (e.g., a notebook with their name on it or a reusable water bottle) are just a few ideas to put in your welcome box.
Family-friendly
Depending on who works in your company, offering family-friendly job perks is an excellent way to encourage a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere. Whether you add dependents to health insurance, provide extensive maternity and paternity leaves, or hold family BBQs, including your employee’s families in your benefits program is crucial.
6. Maternity and paternity leave
Welcoming a new child is an exciting time; you want to ensure your employees feel supported by their company. Paid parental leave is a massive draw for many job applicants. Under the law, parents are allowed up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave. If you go above and beyond your obligation to offer even just an extra two weeks, your employees will likely feel eternally grateful.
7. Family BBQs
Many employees balk at work socials because it means time away from their families. However, if you host family BBQs, movie nights, or other events open to spouses and kids, you’ll encourage your workers to attend get-togethers and improve office relations.
Big budget
Job perks aren’t always about how much money you can throw at your employee benefits package. While not every company can afford to offer high-budget perks, they’re an excellent way to stay competitive. Of course, if expensive meals and costly benefits are out of your budget, don’t worry.
For instance, a family BBQ doesn’t have to cost a lot but will go a long way to improving your workers’ motivation. However, if you have a bigger budget and wish to spend it on your employees, there are many high-budget rewards and recognition programs you can offer.
8. Company cars
Company cars enable your employees to work more efficiently for you (particularly if they’re moving about) and enjoy the freedom of a vehicle in their personal lives. You might not offer a company car to all your employees, but rather offer a chance for them to rent an electric car for a weekend away from the company.
There are few better ways to encourage your company’s values than to offer community involvement in gifting and rewards. Charitable work promotes a better attitude within the organization while attracting employees who want to work for a company that cares about their community.
9. Volunteering PTO days
Whether you offer volunteer time as part of a company-wide shutdown, organize charity events, or offer volunteer PTO, charity work is an excellent way to encourage employees to give back to their community. You might also arrange to match charity donations too.
Culture benefits
Office perks should benefit your employees and company. If you’re looking for a creative benefit that sets you apart from other companies, consider offering employees cultural days out or events.
10. Flextime
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more companies offer flexible hours or the chance to work from home. It’s convenient and allows employees to do things they usually wouldn’t have the time for, such as doctor’s appointments or cultural events.
For practical reasons, you may need core official work hours or days, but you could encourage a flex schedule on Fridays or in less busy periods.
11. Office Olympics
Holding an office “sports day” is an excellent way to encourage team bonding and get everyone out of the office. You could also join after-work sports clubs or teams to continue the activity beyond the workplace.
12. Relaxed dress code
A relaxed dress code or ‘dress down Fridays’ are good ways to encourage a more casual atmosphere in the office.
13. Pet-friendly office
Inviting employees’ pets to work every day or just one day a month or week will add excitement to the office and offer convenience for pet owners.
Time-off options
No matter how exciting you make your workplace, everyone values time off. You could offer extended paid vacation time to all employees or a reward for commitment to the role.
14. Extended paid vacation
Burn out decreases productivity. Offering extended vacation time will encourage a better work-life balance and promote a healthier attitude to work.
15. Work from home options
Working from home (WFH) is more popular than ever. While it’s not for everyone, most employees appreciate the option to set up a home office. It enables trust and might improve productivity as well as employee communications if your employees work in a comfortable environment.
16. Childcare support
Employees with kids will inevitably need to take a sick day to look after their children. Encouraging child support or offering an onsite nursery is an excellent way to improve employee retention.
Stress relief
83% of US employees develop work-related stress. It almost feels like an inevitable part of modern life. However, the more you can do to relieve workplace stress, the more productive your employees will work and improve their attitudes. Promoting mental health day or offering stress management training is one way to ensure your employees’ happiness.
17. Free therapy
Free or subsidized therapy is an excellent job perk that attracts many employees. Therapy is expensive but highly beneficial for your employees’ overall happiness, health, and wellbeing.
18. Mental health awareness
One of the most important steps to improving mental health is encouraging awareness. Many workers feel stress is not a valid excuse for time off. By highlighting the importance of looking after your mental health, your employees will feel happier and healthier.
Invest in talent
Workers want to feel valued beyond their current roles. Offering continuing education, tuition reimbursement, or opportunities for professional development is an excellent way to retain employees.
19. Mentor program
Offering a mentoring program for new employees will help them understand how their careers might progress and motivate them to pursue their goals. If you make it clear that you want to invest in their career and professional progression, they’re more likely to stick with your company than look for work elsewhere.
20. Tuition reimbursement
Investing in your workers’ talent is crucial for your company and your employees’ success. Not only will your workers continue to improve themselves, but their new skills will benefit your company. Subsidizing or reimbursing your employees’ tuition is a great way to encourage learning and attract and retain good employees.
Team building
Team building activities don’t have to be boring corporate exercises or awkward ice breakers. Consider how you can introduce new and exciting team-building fun.
21. Office get-togethers
Regular office get-togethers will improve employee relations, even if it’s just attending happy hours after work. Team meals, theater evenings, or interactive events (such as our sports day idea) are good ways to encourage bonding. The better your team gets on, the more productive and harmonious the workplace.
22. Virtual team building
If your team is still working remotely or you have some employees wishing to work from home, virtual team-building events are more inclusive for remote employees. Whether you hold regular virtual quizzes or remote movie nights, it’s still essential that you create a social atmosphere.
Other employee benefits ideas
Consider the following options if you’re looking for other creative employee benefits beyond financial wellness and holiday parties.
23. Phone discounts
Offering discounts, free phones, or subscriptions are an excellent job perk that doesn’t cost the company too much. It will help retain and attract the top talent.
24. TGIF giveaways
Everyone loves a freebie. Why not offer surprise gifts to a lucky winner each Friday? You don’t have to offer huge prizes, even something small will go a long way to creating a warm environment.
25. Free breakfast
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Offering a complimentary breakfast option is an excellent way to boost your workers’ productivity, encourage an early start, and look after their health.
Summing up
Showing employee appreciation is the best way to boost morale and attract top talent. Offering flexible schedules and office perks will demonstrate your commitment to your workers. You could run a referral program to encourage recommendations and offer benefits to your current workers.
Want to know how Engagedly can help boost employee productivity and performance? Book are free demo with our experts!!
St. Louis, MO, May 27, 2022: Engagedly Inc, a leading solution provider of performance management and employee engagement software, is delighted to receive the HR Tech Awards for the Best Virtual / Hybrid Solution 2022 in Talent Management category announced on 18th May 2022. HR Tech recognized Engagedly as “A solution that enables people to be their best selves at work.”
Engagedly helps organizations digitize their performance management and improve employee engagement. Engagedly’s cloud platform is built to enable your teams, execute your strategies, and engage your employees. It offers an easy-to-use and comprehensive set of features to ensure that people’s reviews are effective and easy, so that employees stay engaged and productive.
“It is exciting to win HR Tech Awards two years in a row. Winning the best hybrid / virtual solution in the talent management category is a testament to how Engagedly has been successfully able to bridge the gap between people and strategy for our clients in #futureofwork.”
– Sri Chellappa, President and Co-Founder at Engagedly Inc.
The HR Tech Awards, powered by Lighthouse Research & Advisory, is to help buyers and employers understand some of the best companies in the industry for technology selection needs. According to Lighthouse Research & Advisory data, more than 5,000 providers exist across the HR technology landscape today, with more entering the space every single day. This year, the HR Tech Awards is recognizing approximately 1% of those firms for their focus on creating solutions that solve problems their customers care about.
“With fragmentation in the talent management space, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by too many tools. Engagedly brings a robust, comprehensive solution to the table that employees actually like to use. One customer gave it the highest praise, citing the platform’s ability to support culture development and evolution over time..”
– Ben Eubanks, Chief Research Officer, Lighthouse Research & Advisory.
Engagedly is a fast-paced growth provider and an award-winning talent management solution provider. Built upon best practices and decades of research, Engagedly’s People + Strategy platform is evolving performance management, development and engagement to drive successful organizational outcomes across the globe. Engagedly’s E3 unified platform combines the power of business strategy execution, talent enablement, and employee engagement with one easy-to-use software solution.
Lighthouse Research & Advisory is a modern, independent analyst firm dedicated to setting the standard for excellence in talent, learning, and HR with practical research and a hands-on approach. By providing compelling research and actionable insights, our team enables HR, learning, and talent leaders to deliver more value to the business. Our research examines competitive practices, cutting-edge technologies, and innovative strategies.
To learn more about Lighthouse Research & Advisory, visit https://lhra.io
Employee happiness is crucial to the success of any organization. Contented and engaged employees are more productive and driven, which may contribute to a positive and successful work environment. Thus, maintaining high employee satisfaction is vital; but, to do so, you must monitor the happiness of your workforce.
Surveys are one of the most practical and successful solutions for measuring employee happiness. Surveys can help you understand the outlook of the employees and how well their performance is aligned with the objectives of the company.
However, having said that, a badly designed survey may be a waste of time and resources for your employees and your HR department. Therefore, it is crucial that you adhere to best practices when conducting surveys in order to improve employee engagement and get relevant data.
What is an Employee Engagement Survey?
A thorough understanding of your employees’ engagement levels is essential for determining whether or not your employees are happy. It would give you a clear idea about their inclination to stay with your company. This is where an employee engagement survey comes in handy. According to a new study of 5,000 U.S. families, just 45 percent of the employees are content with their jobs, indicating a dramatic decline in job satisfaction over the previous two decades.
Employee engagement survey questions can help you to understand a lot about an employee’s outlook; satisfaction; commitment toward his company, and the likelihood of remaining with the company. Further, an employee engagement survey can help to determine employees’ loyalty, enthusiasm, and dedication to their jobs.
It can be used to determine if employees’ opinions about their jobs, corporate culture, and management are in line with the organization’s or department’s objectives.
All top-notch organizations prioritize and give high value to their work culture and employee engagement because highly focused and committed employees help them gain more customers while demotivated and uninvolved employees can lead to a loss of customers and negatively impact business.
Employee engagement surveys are based on certain important metrics. You can use a questionnaire-based survey to elicit responses from employees in order to decide on important metrics to measure employee engagement. The metrics will focus on the following aspects associated with the employees:
Mental and emotional status of your employees
Employees’ degrees of motivation
Alignment of employees’ understanding with your broad strategic objectives and company goals.
Insights into the most effective means of enhancing employee profitability.
An analysis of survey responses, with an eye toward benchmarking across groups.
Employee engagement surveys and research are essential for developing a corporate culture that encourages employee loyalty and dedication. The survey should also capture all essential aspects to improve your workforce’s profitability and create a happy and productive workplace.
Why are employee engagement surveys important?
Performing employee engagement surveys is an effective method for gaining insight into what employees value and what matters to them the most. Continue reading to learn the most compelling reasons employee engagement surveys are so vital from a company’s perspective.
Organization development:
Having a clear understanding of factors like employee happiness, management/leadership performance, and company culture will enable you to set concrete improvement goals.
You will also be able to uncover areas of best practice within your business by assessing employees’ engagement. By evaluating the employees’ engagement data, you may obtain insight into how a certain department is attaining high levels of engagement. Using department-level engagement data, you can implement the same best practices across the firm.
Simply said, feedback from an engagement survey will provide you with valuable, meaningful data that you can use to promote organizational development.
Measure employee commitment:
The main purpose of employee engagement surveys is to determine the degree of employee engagement. You can uncover the level of employee engagement by measuring the major drivers of employee engagement. While there are no universal drivers of employee engagement, the following criteria are often evaluated:
Promotion
Recognition
Future prospects
Compensation
Job role
Training
Workplace culture
Boost employee involvement and commitment:
Once you’ve determined the level of employee engagement, you can develop a strategy to boost it. The information received from the evaluation will enable you to discover organizational engagement strengths and weaknesses. Once you have identified the changes to be made, you may select priorities, assess resources, and develop a timetable for execution. You may design a company-wide engagement strategy or concentrate on specific action areas for each division.
Give your employees a say in their job role:
Employee engagement surveys are vital because they provide a platform for providing their candid inputs. It is a chance to build two-way communication and engage employees in the planning and growth process. By providing them direct access to the management team and allowing them to be part of the planning process, employees feel they are respected and have a stake in the organization.
Performance metrics:
By carrying out employee engagement surveys, you will be able to generate benchmark data, enabling you to compare performances. To elaborate, you may compare your findings to statistics from related industries to get a sense of how your company stacks up against others. In addition, benchmarking enables you to determine if some challenges are unique to your organization or industry-wide.
What types of employee engagement surveys are there?
Employee opinion and satisfaction surveys, and employee engagement surveys, make up the three most popular forms of employee surveys.
Employee opinion and satisfaction surveys: Employee satisfaction and opinion surveys, commonly referred to as climate surveys, gauge employee perspectives, attitudes, and impressions of their firm.
Employee culture survey: The purpose of an employee culture survey is to determine whether employees’ perspectives and values conform with those of the company or specific departments.
Employee engagement surveys: Employee engagement surveys assess employees’ dedication, drive, sense of responsibility, and enthusiasm for their job and company.
Courtesy – Harvard Business Review – Getting the Truth into Workplace Surveys
How often should companies run employee engagement surveys?
Performing an employee engagement survey actually depends on your business; its present status and the goals you’re pursuing. Before deciding on a survey cycle, your Human Resources department must evaluate a myriad of factors before launching a formal feedback program, such as:
The size and demographic makeup of the organization.
How responsive are both the managers and the workforce to the survey inputs?
How does the organization intend to use the feedback?
The lowest levels of employee engagement are related to individuals who are requested to take surveys less than once per year. Surprisingly, even firms that do not conduct any surveys have some levels of employee engagement.
In no way should this mean that you should never conduct a survey of your employees; rather, it emphasizes the significance of developing a thorough listening strategy that seeks useful inputs and feedback from employees continually.
Once your employer has built a listening strategy that emphasizes implementing employees’ inputs, perform surveys four to five times per year for best outcomes.
Add pulse and lifecycle surveys to a yearly employee engagement survey to measure the performance of your HR efforts. Ensure that you take actions based on your findings to increase employee engagement and development.
What are the best practices for running employee engagement surveys?
Given below are some of the best practices you can employ while conducting employee engagement surveys.
Begin the survey with clarity:
A survey must always have a clearly stated purpose. Your employee satisfaction survey questions should measure the attitudes, motives, and views of your employees and help you to determine how they feel about their job and the company.
Hence, before you begin drafting your survey questions, you must have clarity about the following aspects of the survey:
What is the best way to obtain relevant information and insight into employee engagement?
Are you interested in finding out employee contentment levels in your organization, or are you trying to figure out ways to increase it?
What are you attempting to learn or quantify?
Choose a relevant audience:
Once you have clearly defined goals, you may discover that not every employee needs to participate in your survey. Depending on your objectives, it may make more sense to concentrate on a certain group of employees. Whether you want to focus on a certain department, new recruits, or low-level managers, narrowing your survey to a specific group will give you more accurate results.
Be more specific while drafting questions to get relevant answers:
Creating an interesting questionnaire that augers well with everyone is difficult, although surveying the whole organization may first seem simpler. Asking the same set of questions to upper-level managers and team members renders the entire process of surveying employees futile.
Instead, employ highly targeted surveys that will enable you to ask more specific and important questions, hence increasing the relevancy of each survey.
Increase Participation Rates:
Creating an outstanding survey can be challenging, especially when employees do not feel compelled to answer your questions. Without a high participation rate, you would not get accurate and relevant information.
In fact, 29% of employees believe such surveys are useless. With an average response rate of 30%, it is essential that as many employees as possible participate.
While there are several methods for increasing response rates, keeping surveys brief is the most effective. Surveys that take more than 7-8 minutes to complete have a 20% abandonment rate.
Offering rewards is another approach to increase involvement. Fuel the competitive spirit of your employees by organizing a contest amongst the employees, working in the various departments or locations of the company.
Rewarding the employees or department with the highest participation rate with a prize will encourage them to take part in future surveys. At the end of the survey, don’t forget to thank participants, as this would make them feel valued.
Assure Confidentiality:
If you want direct and honest responses to your questions, you ensure your employees may complete the survey anonymously. Employees will provide candid feedback and express their true feelings without fear of reprisal or judgment if confidentiality is maintained. Assure your employees that their responses will be kept strictly secret to increase response rates and get honest feedback.
There are many methods for conducting anonymous surveys. You can perform anonymous voting through online software such as Engagedly solution, which allows to conduct employee surveys with neither the survey author nor the administrator able to see employee choices.
Select the appropriate questions:
The nature of your inquiries will impact the nature of the responses you get. While Yes/No questions may be useful, including a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions will be much better.
You need to strike a balance by using the Likert scale type of questions, based on an agree/disagree answer format (agree, strongly agree, neutral, strongly disagree, and disagree) with open-ended questions. Ensure that the survey is both simple to complete and informative.
Using Pulse Surveys:
Adopt a rapid and regular Pulse Survey in lieu of an annual survey that will take an hour to complete. Annual surveys, although being standard and providing more extensive responses, are not the most effective method for measuring employee happiness. Instead, shorter and more frequent Pulse Surveys are more effective.
Despite the newness of pulse surveys, they may give a real-time evaluation of employee happiness over time, making it simpler to identify engagement patterns.
When performing a pulse survey, choose four to ten specific questions depending on your objectives. The questions should include topics related to engagement, happiness, workload, emotions about the firm, and work-life balance, among others.
Conduct the survey on a platform that employees may find easy to understand and use.
Software such as Engagedly is easy to use and allows the employees to reply to the survey questionnaire quickly and without interruptions.
Share the findings with employees:
Lastly, remember to share your findings with your employees! Even if the outcomes are not as expected, it is essential to discuss them with your employees if you want them to feel appreciated and make them believe their ideas matter.
Moreover, openness demonstrates that management is receptive and willing to make required adjustments.
Show the intent on taking action.
Finally, until you take action after the employee engagement survey, conducting the survey is meaningless! The data you unearth must be translated into concrete initiatives that would increase employee happiness in your firm.
Build employee trust in your leadership by concentrating on a few simple improvements that show your willingness to act while crafting a more thorough strategy for the larger challenges.
Conclusion
Conducting an engagement survey should be part of a broader effort to boost morale among employees. The thoroughness with which you execute your engagement survey and solicit responses reflects the rigor with which you approach the overall employee engagement survey process.
You can use a software such as the one offered by Engagedly to conduct Likert scale and Pulse Surveys and to provide feedback to the employees anonymously so that they can work on the areas of weakness. Using software would also encourage more employee participation, as it would be conducted anonymously.
But most significantly, you must transform the insights you unearth into tangible initiatives that increase employee happiness within your firm. Build employee trust in your leadership by concentrating on a few simple improvements that show your willingness to act while crafting a more thorough strategy for the larger challenges.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you manage your hybrid employees better? Request us for a demo.
The performance management system is a process that many companies have been using over some decades now. It has undergone many changes so that managers can get a better understanding of the employees’ productivity and achievements. However, recently, forward-thinking companies have redirected their perspectives and have adopted the Agile Performance Management process. It is reliable and is considered as a best practice for grading the performance of employees and gaining an insight into their contribution toward a company’s progress.
Why did the need for Agile Performance Management arise?
The need for Agile Performance Management arose as workplaces no longer wanted to follow a hierarchical top-down structure and wanted to adopt an open and collaborative work environment wherein employees, managers, and higher management can join forces to achieve the set objectives.
Another reason for the adoption of this process being, employees preferred to develop their own individual objectives, aligned with the company’s objectives. They didn’t prefer the idea of working as per the objective checklist handed over to them.
If you’re one of those companies looking out for gaining an understanding of the Agile Performance Management process, and it’s working and benefits, then this blog post would help you.
Understanding the workings of Agile Performance Management
Agile Performance Management was created for a new era that is more communicative, efficient, and social. It focuses more on frequent employee performance discussions throughout the year as compared to conventional reviews, which are conducted annually or bi-annually.
The unique feature of this is that it incorporates the concept of frequent performance discussions–on a quarterly or mid-yearly basis. This helps in addressing various problems faced by the employees and how they can be guided to overcome the challenges and be aligned with a company objectives.
Another great aspect of Agile Performance Management is that it is based on the process of achieving an objective rather than solely focusing on annual performance ratings and outcomes.
This approach of frequent discussions with the employees and helping them to overcome their barriers helps to cultivate a robust and meaningful relationship among employees and managers.
What factors differentiate Agile Performance Management from a traditional system?
Given below are some factors that differentiate an Agile Performance Management system from a traditional performance management process.
Improves the existing process: Agile Performance Management system scores over a traditional system because of its ability to improve the existing process and help employees to overcome the challenges related to their work.
Frequent discussion to solve problems: Unlike a conventional system that focuses on annual appraisal and midyear review, Agile Performance Management happens quarterly or bi-yearly. As a result, it immediately helps to identify different employees’ issues in a short span and fix them. It saves time and employees can focus on the work, rather than sulking and getting bogged down by existing problems.
Employees usually use the review processes to express their opinions and concerns. Using a traditional performance management system, addressing the concerns of the employees may or may not be only possible during an annual performance review. Till then, employees will have to wait to share their problems with their managers or higher management.
Systematic and meaningful: Another concerning area of a traditional performance management system is that a lot has to be understood in a few sessions that happen once a year. To elaborate, managers have to identify employees’ capability to meet the company’s objectives; employees’ effectiveness in aligning themselves with the company’s goals; their behavior or competencies; their personal development, and their career aspiration – everything in one to two conversations. To achieve these agendas in a single meeting or a string of meetings in two days may not be possible, rendering pressure on the employees and turning the whole activity to be a ‘tick-box’ exercise.
Agile performance management allows the discussions to take place periodically and eliminates rushed discussions that are meaningless.
Flexibility: Since the traditional performance management process is based on fixed outcomes or rigid grading systems, without in-depth analysis, conducted annually, the management may not get a proper understanding of employees’ performance; challenges, and their efforts to meet the objectives.
Compared to this, the Agile Performance Management system focuses on near-term goals, most commonly, monthly or quarterly goals, which ensure that all potential hindrances are eliminated during the manager-employee conversation and employees stay abreast with the shifting priorities of the business.
Interestingly, employees derive larger benefits because of this system as it focuses on employees’ development, and quicker feedback implementation. A completely opposite process takes place in the case of a traditional performance management system, as there is a time gap between the performance review and feedback process.
Almost every employee in the current era does not favor annual performance reviews. Because of the annual performance review, employees’ stress level may increase substantially and companies may witness employee turnover. In fact, companies observed a high percentage of voluntary attrition after annual reviews. Reversely, once they adopted agile performance management, they witnessed a 30 percent decrease in voluntary turnover.
Deloitte’s research indicates that organizations that maintain a collaborative atmosphere are profitable and twice as likely to outperform their competitors.
Implementing the process in a smart way
We advocate the following strategies to set off your Agile Performance Management process to a successful start:
Getting employees to trust the new performance review system: The management should build trust among employees regarding the new performance management process, before replacing the traditional performance management process. For the same, the management should discuss the large scope of the Agile Performance Management System and the wide range of benefits it offers.
Besides, the employees should be made to understand the need for the company to make a transition from the conventional performance management process to Agile Performance Management System. Transparency and frequent discussion to solve the problems of the employees should be emphasized while discussing the benefits of this Process.
Training: Employees cannot be expected to understand the Agile Performance Management system in a day or two, as it requires a total change in the thinking and behavior of the employees. It would be preposterous if a company expects the employees to shift to the new system without any form of training. This is one of the reasons why adequate training should be provided to the managers and the employees while shifting from a traditional performance management system to their Agile performance management process. The training should be comprehensive and should answer all the queries and concerns of the participants.
Setting Goals:
A company’s primary goals should be communicated to the workforce in a detailed and non-hurried manner, an essential step not to be overlooked.
The managers and employees should set quarterly goals and how they would achieve those goals as per the Agile Performance Management system. The goal should be set in such a way that every required step is well defined. The discussion should involve the elaborate techniques to measure the outcomes. Thus, aligned with the goals, employees will have to meet a set target every month.
Managers will play an important role in helping the employees to meet the set target every month. Managers will provide feedback to the employees as when they feel it is necessary. All these action plans ensure the goals set out are relevant, realistic, attainable, and thoroughly understood by employees. If required, the managers can suggest ways such as upgrading existing skills in order to enhance employees’ knowledge and skill set.
Explaining opportunities and career development: Employees will happily accept the Agile Performance Management system if it is going to be beneficial for them and provide new opportunities for career development.
Assessing adoption of this system: Conduct a regular assessment of the new system to understand how well this system has been accepted by the employees. In case there is low adoption, find out the reasons behind it and address the concerns of the employees so that they will embrace it at the earliest.
Why most companies are opting for the Agile Performance Management system?
An Agile Performance Management strategy involves employees in a continuous, year-round process of personal growth. Employees actively take part in developing their abilities in ways that positively affect themselves and the organization.
Meanwhile, a company preserves or enhances its employee capabilities as business requirements evolve. By using the Agile workforce management system, businesses may have employees working toward common goals and boosting productivity. The Agile Performance Management System results in less turnover, increased employee engagement, and higher earnings.
How this system benefits an organization?
Transitioning to an Agile Performance Management system yields substantial advantages on several fronts.
Benefits at the individual level:
At the one-on-one level, Agile Performance Management enhances everyday performance and enables managers to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the employees in real-time. Developing a routine of regular check-ins enables employees to communicate problems and work impediments to their managers, who serve as coaches to assist them in overcoming obstacles. The managers can also provide team members with feedback and instructions aimed at achieving continual improvement.
Reevaluating organizational goals:This system focuses on a frequent reporting and feedback loop process to promote organizational goal awareness. As a result, executives and employees are made aware of OKRs regularly and, over time, everyone knows their goals, resulting in greater employee engagement and productivity.
Benefits at the team level:
At the team level, Agile Performance Management provides team leaders with a more accurate perspective of the team’s capabilities. This makes it possible for the team to shift gears when business objectives change.
Facilitates enhanced team collaboration: With the Agile system in place,managers may concentrate on guiding and instructing employees to complete work on schedule and within budget. Team members become more dependable contributors, which strengthens the team as a whole.
Performance data:
Agile performance management generates significant amounts of performance data at the enterprise level, enabling Human Resources to monitor organizational capabilities. These data help to identify a benchmark of the workforce’s strengths and shortcomings. In fact, they serve as a crucial starting point for building talent strategies and advancing company objectives.
Agile Performance Management takes a company’s productivity to an altogether different level, as employees become self-aware of the required commitments and witness personal development.
Agile Performance Management tools to implement Agile process correctly and easily
Implementing this process necessitates a shift from the old annual reporting approach to a more comprehensive, engaging, and quicker Agile culture. Employing this process incorrectly might pour cold water on the entire effort.
Thus, it makes sense to make use of digitized HR software such as Engagedly solution to ensure the Agile Performance Management process is implemented properly, with no hassles.
Engagedly solution helps managers to track their employees’ progress and milestone achievements and facilitates the exchange of real-time feedback, in line with this process. Also, incorporating Agile training for transitioning to a more dynamic performance management process is pivotal. To guarantee its seamless execution and leverage its benefits effectively, integrating digitized HR software like Engagedly is imperative. This solution empowers managers to navigate the evolving landscape, ensuring streamlined progress tracking, milestone accomplishments, and real-time feedback exchange, thus amplifying the success of Agile Performance Management.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you mange your hybrid employees better? Request us for a demo.
Source: hbr.org
Source: Zippia.com
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Source: Profit.co
