Change the Narrative of Performance Management from “I have to” to “I want to.”
Webinar Overview: As HR shifts more strategic, changing the outdated ways of performance management is on many professionals’ minds. However, many professionals are met with angst and lack of buy-in from four key stakeholders when trying to make a change in their organization. This session will empower the internal champion with resources to help change the narrative of performance management from one of “I have to” to “I want to.” Attendees will understand the perspectives of the four key stakeholders: C-level, Managers, other HR Team Members, and Employees. Resources and actionable tips will then be provided to directly address these pain points, assisting with the change management process and ability to start creating a performance culture. Learning Objectives: How to build the case for a better performance management program for your organization. Best practices to implement a new HR program that avoids headaches and wins the hearts of your stakeholders Success metrics to evaluate how well an HR initiative impacts an organization – an ROI calculator Download Slides [pdf-embedder url=”https://workdove.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/HRdotcom-Webinar-v070919.pdf” title=”HRdotcom Webinar – v070919″]
Insider: Melissa Phillippi on the Evolution of Performance Management
Melissa Phillippi, President and Co-founder of Performance Culture Inc. and Daniel Williams Senior Editor at MGMA discuss the evolution of performance management and the impact it is having on workplaces all around the globe. Key Discussion Points The trillion dollar impact on organizations annually from voluntary turnover. The importance of top-down alignment from leadership to front line workers. Too many direct reports leads managers to become administrators, not coaches. How to avoid larger issues by addressing conflict and expectations along the way through the use of check-ins. The challenges change management presents and ways to overcome the challenges. Transcript Daniel Williams 0:00 Hello, and welcome to the MGMA insider podcast. I’m Daniel Williams. Today I’m talking with Melissa, Phillippi President and co-founder of Performance Culture. Melissa is here today to talk about performance evaluations in medical practice. Melissa, thanks for joining our podcast today. Melissa Phillippi 0:18 Thank you for letting me be here in this opportunity. I’m excited to share with you a little bit about what we get to do every day helping leaders build better teams for better results. Daniel Williams 0:28 For the purposes of today, I really want to not talk to about the outward focusing patients or clients, but the the internal team, because in a medical practice, there is so much importance placed on the processes, how things are done, but there’s also the coaching and the management side of it. And you recently wrote an article for MGMA that examined how often managers should meet with employees about performance. And I wanted to talk to you about that. Is there a one size fits all answer? Or what is the right mix there on how often that communication should take place? Melissa Phillippi 1:14 That’s a great question. I’m really happy to talk about that. And I get that question. What everybody should feel good about is that is a very common question across the spectrum across industry sectors, you name it, we’re all trying to figure this out. And it does, it is helpful to kind of discuss this. Let me step back one, one moment, though, when you talked about switching from the external to the internal. And I know, you know, this, but the reason why it’s a good transition is because we know that if we take care of our people, they will take care of the patients, right? And if we’re modeling the way and we’re leading the way when it comes to core values, and you know, proper care, and, you know, just taking care of our people, and letting them feel valued and respected, that they’re going to do the same thing for the patient. If we’re not doing for them, we’re expecting them to do for the patient. And that’s really backward, right? That’s not a recipe for success. So by checking in on a regular basis now, what is that regular basis, we’ll talk about that. We’re starting to, you know, build momentum towards that relationship and these expectations and this accountability structure that is going to impact the patient experience. What is there a one size fits all? No, there’s not everything is actually not even one size fits all for a particular industry, or even the company itself. So for example, in our system, our performance management system, you actually can change the cadence, the frequency throughout the year. So not only might it be different from one manager to another, as far as what are the needs in order for that employee and that manager relationship to be as healthy and as successful as possible? You can also be changing the cadence and the frequency and the setting and the structure throughout the year. Because how much do we know that as behaviors change and life changes and things like that occurring your life, there’s going to be times where you’re gonna need to meet more frequently. And there’s going to be times where maybe you can go a little bit further in between having a more structured process. So there, there’s not a one size fits all answer. And a lot of times, I just want to encourage people to lean on the good sense that you have, when it comes to relationships, if we expect to have an authentic, healthy relationship with our spouses or loved ones, our family members, and only really sit down once a year or even a couple of times a year and have an authentic relationship, that that’s really asinine, right? We’re not going to have a healthy relationship. I don’t know why we think that that same human interaction is going to somehow work on that lack of frequency. And within managers and employees, people don’t care how much you know, until you know how much you care. Right. So I had to have a way to build up that relational collateral with my employee, if we’re only sitting down and being intentional about that person’s success, where their meeting goes, where they’re where they may be getting off track a little bit and what kind of help they might need, what their morale kind of level is, if I’m only doing that a few times a year, then that’s really not enough. So even though there’s not a one size fits all, I did an article submit some rules of thumb. And that is at least monthly, if at all possible for a manager and employee relationship. So and this is not to replace the informal when you’re checking in in the office saying hello. In the I’m in the south, we say how’s your mama, you know, so, you know, those things are good that that builds that relational, relational collateral. But the purpose of a check-in is to take a pause. And actually, let’s talk a little more intentionally about your professional development, and what you’re needing to be successful. And frankly, how are
How to Combat Rater Bias in Performance Reviews
One necessary factor that must exist for employees to be merely “satisfied” is that they feel valued and rewarded fairly. If employees sense rater bias exists and do not feel rewarded fairly, their productivity may drop to 77%, versus 100% for satisfied employees.
Building a Performance Culture for Nonprofit Organizations
Nonprofits are uniquely positioned to impact their communities and the world for good, leaving a legacy of transformed lives. However, this impact is lessened when an increasing amount of labor hours has to be allocated toward fundraising and contract compliance. Nonprofits are often reliant upon government funds, which are usually inadequate for the total program expense and often come with compliance requirements. Nonprofits everywhere are doing their part to operate leaner by seeking additional private or unrestricted dollars. With the amount of time and energy spent on merely procuring and renewing the funds required to operate nonprofit programs, leadership often finds little time is left for the most essential component of a program’s success and continuance – the effectiveness and growth of talent. That’s where Performance Culture comes in, and how we’re doing our part to advance the mission and vision of nonprofit organizations, something we’re honored to support. Jeanette Whitman-Lee, VP of Human Resources at Educational Alliance, has been a client of Performance Culture for over a year and cites “an efficiency improvement in departments of 10% just in the first year of launch and a 20% reduction in overall Agency assessments by external government agencies providing oversight of funding usage.” Whitman-Lee continues, “For Educational Alliance, a qualitative leap has been the ability to use Performance Culture to develop a common internal language that links mission and core values to behavioral standards of performance delivery across all strata of the Agency.” Nonprofit organizations know that it’s not just what they provide that matters; it’s also “how” their teams provide it. Behaviors define the culture of the organization rather than a stated mission. These behaviors are also the key motivators for your community, grantors, and philanthropic partners to support your organization. When teams are rowing the boat in the same direction, you reach results faster and enjoy the experience of getting where you want to be. Building a performance culture helps nonprofit organizations gain additional efficacy across all program initiatives, freeing up more resources to do what they do best, and what our global community needs them to do. We are excited to continue partnering with non-profits helping leaders build better teams that achieve better results! Continue reading about the benefits of creating a performance culture by downloading the Better Teams | Better Results Whitepaper for Non-Profits [maxbutton id=”1″]
Coaching Culture for Healthcare Organizations
Performance Culture has helped managers in healthcare organizations improve the way they coach and engage their team members. This has enabled the HR Department and Senior Leaders to develop a coaching culture that improves focus, accountability and team chemistry. Our software is easy to implement and managers find it easy to use. This makes our platform ideal for smaller healthcare organizations. Most of our customers have between 50 and 1,000 employees. The system creates email reminders for team members to check-in and allows managers to quickly respond with recognition and coaching feedback. This is important because managers in healthcare organizations are stretched for time. Our software features include: Performance Check-Ins Self Assessments 360 Degree Feedback 9 box grid Goal Management (Cascading and Agile) Engagement Surveys Rich Data Analytics and Reports HRIS Integration Coaching Videos and a Light Learning Management System In addition to our software, we provide onboarding consultation, performance management training and a coaching program for managers. If you would like to learn more about how we are helping healthcare organizations, please contact us to schedule a call or free demo.
Creating a Framework for your Organization’s Core Values
While many organizations have written Core Values, most do not have a framework to recognize, coach, and evaluate employees on these values. Without this framework, the Core Values are just eloquent statements used for marketing purposes (e.g., look at the About Us section of any corporate website). However, when companies recognize, coach and evaluate employees on workplace behaviors that support its Core Values, the values truly become part of a company’s culture. To create this framework you must begin by defining expectations for each Core Value. For example, what behaviors would someone need to constantly display to meet these expectations? What behaviors are needed to rate each Core Value highly? When you break down your Core Values by answering these two questions, your team members will start to understand what they mean and how they apply. Case Study Our company helped a community hospital implement the Performance Culture System and part of our scope included facilitating a leadership session to define expectations for its Core Values. The hospital’s seven Core Values were: Hospitality; Joy; Justice; Quality; Respect; Stewardship; and Teamwork. Before we began the session I asked the most senior levels (C-Level) to hold off on their comments to allow middle-level leaders to voice their thoughts without being influenced. We started the session by simply asking what the hospital’s Core Values meant to them. The responses ranged from being very specific (i.e., Quality metrics the hospital must report on) to definitions found via online dictionaries from Google searches. Ideally, the team would have referenced common expectations specific to the hospital but to be fair, this seldom happens. Through our dialogue, the team agreed on how each Core Value should be defined. With this consensus, I asked the team to describe what meeting or exceeding expectations looked like. This is where the conversation became really interesting because values like quality and hospitality require different expectations when coaching employees in different departments. From a clinical perspective (i.e., nurses and doctors), quality was about the right diagnosis and treatment. The hospitality value was about seeing the patients and visitors as customers versus patients. From a facility maintenance perspective (i.e., making sure the hospital didn’t lose power or was very clean), quality was about power reliability and sanitation. The hospitality value was similar to the clinical perspective but different in terms of patient interactions. For example, how patients were treated in the lobby versus how patients were treated during clinical care. After the team agreed on the different perspectives, we tackled what success looked like for each position (i.e., meeting expectations versus exceptional performance). The outcome produced the following expectations: 1. Hospitality — You are welcome here Meets Expectations: Accommodate. Always put on the friendly face. Always greet. Genuine. Customer service. Treat others the way they want to be treated. Creating a hospitable environment. Exceptional Performance: Cherry on top, the little extra. You are a “hostess”-going out of your way to accommodate (walking people to where they need to go, ask if they need extra accommodations, help with doors, make sure they aren’t alone) 2. Joy –Lasting happiness in a changing world Meets Expectations: Being positive, open-minded, open to change, showing joy in everyday work, living passion and purpose, not expressing negativity Exceptional Performance: You are doing things to help other people be more joyful. Making changes or suggestions to become even more joyful or create an environment for more joy 3. Justice — For the powerless empowers us all Meets Expectations: Being fair and equitable to all. Nonjudgmental. Empowering peers and patients to make decisions. Exceptional Performance: Taking initiative to make things better. Speaking up. 4. Quality — A meaningful presence in our community Meets Expectations: Achieving good outcomes. Following procedures and protocols. Good intent. Quality work that people can depend on. Exceptional Performance: Engaged and participating in improvement efforts. Genuine interest in improving patient health, not just going through the motions or doing the minimum. 5. Respect — Given and received creates peace Meets Expectations: Treat others as you want to be treated. Listening to and understanding other’s ideas. Not participating in water cooler talk. Exceptional Performance: Taking initiative to help other people from being disrespectful in a positive way. Stopping water cooler talk. Praising and reinforcing positive behavior. 6. Stewardship — All things great and small Meets Expectations: Making good use and taking good care of our resources. Exceptional Performance: Actively engaging in utilizing resources more effectively. 7. Teamwork — Many hearts one goal Meets Expectations: Participating, accountability, open to change, positive attitude, ability to align, support the direction of the organization. Exceptional Performance: Ability to sacrifice biases for the good of the whole. Participating in change and process improvement. Being sought out to be on teams. Helping people be included as part of the team. Getting to these common definitions was not difficult. It only required a facilitated conversation to get everyone on the same page. The leadership team now had a framework to recognize, coach and evaluate team members on the hospital’s Core Values. After our session, the leaders were asked to communicate what these Core Values really meant to the organization. This set clear expectations for all. To make these values stick, managers were asked to give frequent feedback to their team members. The feedback insured employees were recognized for displaying behaviors that supported the Core Values as well as “course correcting” individuals whose actions were not in line with expectations. What gets rewarded gets repeated. What is tolerated becomes accepted. Managers must make sure they keep both of these statements in mind when coaching employees. We must make time to recognize employees for positive contributions. We must also make time to address negative behaviors, otherwise, these negative behaviors may informally change your Core Values and workplace culture. Learn more about WorkDove’s Performance Management Software today! Clear expectations and frequent feedback has really made an impact on the hospital’s culture, but there is still room to improve. Embracing your Core Values as part of
Using Compensation to Engage Employees
Do you currently have a pay-for-performance culture? You may say, “Yeah, sure I believe we compensate our employees fairly”. However, only 21% of employees feel they are paid fairly, compared to 43% of employers, leaving a 22% gap. Compensation is an exchange of value, not just money. If your employees feel underpaid or undervalued they will look for a new job. The question is, do you know the worth of your organization’s greatest asset, your employees? In my case, my manager knows my strengths. She takes the time to evaluate my performance and behaviors not only during my performance review but also through 1 on 1 meetings, each week. This helps keep us aligned on my goals and development, plus I feel valued when she takes the time to be intentional with me. Continuous feedback is critical. This is why we created our performance check-in feature. Check-ins allow employees to answer timely and specific questions regarding their progress, needs, and morale. Managers can quickly review and respond, ensuring alignment and proper focus is maintained. Another way to gather continuous feedback is through the use of our 360 feedback tool. Our clients love this feature because it not only allows them to gather feedback internally but also, externally, from vendors or clients of their own. Now a more holistic view of your employee’s strengths and weaknesses emerge, allowing you to coach them more specifically and objectively. Learn more about WorkDove’s Performance Management Software today! When employees have specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely (SMART) performance objectives paired with well-defined core values, pay can then easily be attributed to healthy, high performers. Remember, reliable data is important, so how does your pay compare to the market? Your strongest contributors (stars) should receive the highest pay. An easy way to determine this is with the use of our performance-values matrix. Employee engagement and fair compensation not only affects workplace satisfaction but also company performance. Organizations with highly engaged employees are 200% more productive than the average organization in the US¹. A true pay-for-performance culture can help you achieve the results you want for your business by creating a great workplace. ¹Gallup’s 2017 State of the Workplace.
How to Run a Meeting in 3 Steps
I can’t count how many articles and posts there are about “How to Facilitate an Effective Meeting,” yet we so rarely see it done well. Why is this? The only answer I can come up with is that, as human beings tend to do, we overcomplicate matters and look past the obvious answers. We also are quite forgetful, abandoning the lessons we learned and forsaking the discipline of ensuring we execute every best practice, every time. Steps for Learning How to Run a Meeting 1. Prepare for the meeting. I like to shoot from my hip more than I’d like to admit. But a meeting will end up being a waste of time if even one participant is not prepared. That’s right. It’s not just the leader’s job to prepare. If there were agreed upon action items from the last meeting, each participant should be prepared to provide an update on his or her action items. And speaking of action items, as Patrick Lencioni reminds us in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, team members must hold each other accountable for group decisions. Preparation also applies to sending the meeting agenda to participants ahead of time. This is not just for the introverts in your group, though I promise they will be hugely grateful if you follow this practice. Even the most extroverted, caffeinated of us in the room will provide better ideas if we’ve had a chance to mentally process and organize our thoughts beforehand. 2. Have a meeting “Scribe.” You can keep your pen and notebook, or your Evernote, or your One Note, or whatever else you prefer to document your action items on, but there should still be ONE designated scribe recording the group’s agreed upon action items following the simple format of: Who is going to do WHAT by WHEN? Why is this? Ever play the telephone game as a kid? It’s amazing how different we may interpret what we hear in the room, however, if one person is recording using the format stated above, preferably visibly for everyone to see, we decrease the chances of misunderstanding. Another note about recording action items: I have found the key to this begins with recognizing what is, and is not, an action item. How many times have you heard someone comment about an idea, another agree it’s a good one, only for the conversation to quickly turn to other items, leaving an uncertainty around the previous good idea? Was this just a good idea, or is it one we want to execute upon? If so, WHO is going to do WHAT by WHEN? Your meetings will be significantly more effective if someone is skilled at recognizing a possible action item and asking the group to commit to it, save it for later, or abandon it altogether. After the meeting, the Scribe should then share the meeting notes and/or action items with each participant. The Performance Culture System makes it easy to facilitate effective meetings with Agendas: Create a meeting agenda in the cloud and send to participants ahead of time with one-click. During the meeting, the “Scribe” records action items in the “Action Items” section. Go figure. At the conclusion of the meeting, copy the agenda for the next meeting date. Participants can now add topics or notes to discuss at the next meeting, decreasing unnecessary emails throughout the week. 3. Don’t forget the Context. I keep seeing this simple blunder come up. Think about the context of your meeting, especially the day of your meeting. Fridays are typically a terrible day to have a productive, and specifically creative, meeting. Your people have very little juice left at the end of the week and are already starting to mentally shut down. For goodness sake, move your team meeting to Monday or as early in the week as possible. This concept also applies to Check-Ins. The goal of checking in with your direct report is to ensure alignment at the beginning of the week, addressing problems before they occur, not waiting to correct them in your “week in review.” It’s important to pay attention to the personality profiles and motivators of your team. Do some of them highly value personal small talk before diving into the cold, hard facts? If so, consider discussing “Best Things” as the first topic. Each team member takes 1 – 2 minutes to share his or her one best personal and one best work-related thing that happened to him or her recently. This practice builds trust and begins the meeting with a positive atmosphere. And if your windowless office with uncomfortable chairs and no airflow is getting old, try changing the meeting site from time to time. Teammates with a high aesthetic motivator will gladly thank you and be amazingly more productive and engaged. When it comes to facilitating effective meetings, none of these concepts are earth-shattering, but the discipline to follow them consistently is what will transform your waste of an hour into an effective, enjoyable meeting.
5 Techniques for Setting Personal Goals
Let’s face it. Even in a healthy working relationship, coaching someone on their personal goals can feel awkward. Many managers work hard to keep business and personal relationships separate.
It is true that you aren’t tasked with being their friend, however, you are, in fact, tasked with being their coach.
Read on to learn 5 techniques for discussing personal goals during the coaching conversation.
