During the holidays, one of my good friends from Germany visited me with her boyfriend, Elger.  At 33, Elger is one of the youngest Chief of Detectives in Germany.  He’s an amazing guy—black-belt in Judo, fluent in Russian and German, and pretty good at English for someone new to the language.  He served on the German narcotics beat for two years, and while here in the states he could easily spot drug dealers hanging out by public transit stations.   
 
In Germany, the police force is a civil service job.  Elger has 106 direct reports.  I asked him how he did performance reviews for that many people, and he told me that it was a labor intensive process that required the assistance of his secretary.  Of course, I had to tell him about SuccessFactors’ software—that it has a writing assistant with “starter” text so that he and his secretary wouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel 106 times.  And it even has a proxy feature, so that he can delegate the writing of performance reviews in case he’s too busy fighting crime.  And our application is available in German.

If you feel like a general commanding an army of direct reports, SuccessFactors has the right on-demand artillery to help you align, develop, motivate, and maintain your high-performance workforce.

The seeds of an interesting conversation are planting themselves here with this post called "So that’s why my peformance reviews sound like they were written by a robot" and here at systematicHR (especially in the notes by our good friend regina.)

The topic, in regina’s words: "technology can be an enabler of creating an engaged culture but for me it is doubtful that when a mgr. can pick phrases about perf from a database that this will create engagement. This kind of stuff keeps managers and employees detached vs. engaged."

Since this discussion was spurred by a CFO magazine article that is talking about our client Kimberly-Clark, I thought I’d get out in front here and try to give a little background on this. So I spoke with Randy Reynolds, our senior director of product management to try to get some of our thinking about the nature of pre-defined phrases (aka robot reviews). Here’s what Randy had to say:

Using our pre-written review text or coaching text is in many cases the best feedback some employees have ever received from a manager.  Certainly, all employees would like to receive well-thought out specific feedback written only for them by their managers.  The reality is that managers often don’t take the time to do this.  In the absence of automated tools, they resort to meaningless phrases like “Max did a great job on the ACME project”; or “keep up the good work”; or “writing skills could use improvement”.  In some cases automated text that has been selected by a manager – not a robot, is better than no feedback at all. 

From a best-practice standpoint, we recommend using the automated text as a thought starter, not necessarily as the verbatim feedback that should be given to an employee.  People often find that editing a written document is easier than starting from scratch.  That is how we recommend using our writing tools.  Start with a pre-written sentence that roughly conveys the feedback you want to provide.  Add specific examples of positive or negative behavior that supports the pre-written text.  This shows the employee that you have taken the time to provide specific feedback while gaining a short-cut through the use of the automated text.

Bottom line, every bit of feedback is important and valuable to employees and not every manager has the skills to construct meaningful feedback.  Automated writing tools help bridge this gap.

In this way, these tools do truly support engagement by helping to provide feedback in places it would not ordinarily be found. Some well-chosen feedback, even if pre-defined, is most certainly better than poorly constructed feedback or no feedback at all.

Over the weekend, Newsday – a NY newspaper – published an article called "Hey, boss, improve those performance reviews" that quoted some of the stories that have been submitted to our Worst Review contest. The article is about some of the reasons reviews are often so poorly given and poorly received and talks about some ways we can make the whole experience a little better.

Some tips from the article: 

Nothing in the review should be a surprise. That means bosses have to give more frequent feedback and hop on problems as they happen. Hard to do with so many other obligations? Of course, but remember what Stephen Covey says in his legendary book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People": You’re far better off making time for issues that are important but not urgent – so they don’t go on to become urgent.

As for those whiny, self-aggrandizing, argumentative employees – the ones supervisors want to avoid – you might consider what Paul Baard, a professor of communications and media management in the graduate business school of Fordham University, has to say: Draining as it may seem, your regular feedback can actually wear down those challenging types – he calls it "systematic desensitization."

Learn language that elicits constructive responses. As Baard says, "People don’t like to be ’should’ upon." You could tell someone he really annoys his colleagues – or, you could say: "Bill, you’re tremendous in sales. And I want to help you be that strong in interpersonal relations."

Loosen up when appropriate. With today’s pressures, you may have misread a person’s contribution – and if she comes up with examples proving you wrong, "you should not be too proud to admit having made a judgment error," Baard says.

Also, remember that it’s not just about the employee’s compliance. Sometimes see where you might bend a little. Boyle says that if an employee is consistently late, she looks to adjust the person’s start time. "I tend to be flexible."

Interesting report from AMI Research showing that On-demand HR applications are taking off among small and medium sized businesses. There’s a very strong case to be made for software as a service (SaaS) use among SMBs – low upfront costs, easy implementations, high configurability, super-quick time to real value and so forth. We released a couple of completely new products recently to serve these markets – Professional Edition and Manager’s Edition. I’ll spare you the commercial (you can click on the links if you’re interested).

From the report’s press release:

According to Sau Lam, Research Analyst at AMI-Partners, “Several factors are fueling this trend. Traditional on-premise HR applications are often too costly, time-consuming and resource-intensive for most SMBs to deploy and manage. Full-service HR outsourcing can also be too expensive. Plus, it requires that customers sacrifice visibility and control. Web-based solutions can potentially provide SMBs with a more viable option for servicing their HR needs,” Ms Lam continued. “At the same time, SMB HR needs are growing. They need to automate operations to meet increasing regulatory requirements, and compete more effectively to maintain a dwindling supply of skilled personnel in a shrinking labor force.”

Much has been made about the Internet as a force of democratization, and that’s true even in the world of enterprise software. As a former small business owner, I loved SaaS applications becuase they gave me functionality that similar sized competitors could only dream of. In that way, they lent a real competitive advantage. That advantage is especially true with HR software.

Workforce performance management is, in some ways, more impactful in smaller companies in which there is less margin for error. Good HR applications can reduce administrative burdens that can bog you down. They can also provide the benefits of goal alignment and performance management processes that make sure everyone is pulling together and that the company is getting the most out of its employees and vice versa.

As a followup to a previous post on forced ranking, I thought you’d like to see this article at workforce.com. It reprints an appendix from Dick Grote’s new book called Forced Ranking: Making Performance Management Work.

It’s a memo from a CEO to his company explaining the benefits of an upcoming forced ranking process and how it will work. It’s easy to see how communicating this well can remove some of the fear from the process and highlight the win-win aspects of the initiative.

Our little contest is covered over at FC Now by Kevin Ohannessian. Kevin also comes through with his own thoughts on why the performance review process is "along the lines of a trip to the DMV."  He’s not wrong – so many of us treat annual reviews as a chore to get through (though probably not as smelly as the DMV) instead of an opportunity for reflection and improvement.

Watson Wyatt released a study today which shows that while employers are leveraging best practices when designing their performance management programs, they are falling short in the implementation of those programs.

From the study’s summary:

In designing their performance management programs, most employers have adopted best practices — including providing a formal yearly review (98 percent), helping poor performers improve (96 percent) and offering coaching and feedback (91 percent) — but they have been less successful in implementing them. For example, while 92 percent of programs are designed to link pay to performance, only 79 percent of employers say that managers at their organization are moderately or greatly effective at it. Employees see even more room for improvement with only 52 percent indicating that their managers tie pay to performance.

The best program in the world can’t reach it’s potential if it’s not intelligently put into place. It’s software’s achilles heel and another reason why you’ve got to be really careful when choosing a performance management partner. The best package will not mean anything if people don’t understand it, have a hard time using it, or it simply doesn’t work right. At SuccessFactors, we have an entire professional services team dedicated only to implementing our applications and ensuring our customer’s success.

One suggested remedy from Watson Wyatt: training.

Only 36 percent of organizations have a formal training program to enhance managers’ ability to manage rewards. However, managers at companies that offer such a program are more effective at providing coaching and feedback, providing formal periodic performance discussions and helping poor performers improve.

The Leadership Now blog talks about what can only be deemed a terrifically bad 360 process at a fortune 500 company. Don Blohowiak recounts the sad tale of a manager with so many 360’s to do, he and his team basically submit a boilerplate response to everyone. To boot, HR uses the 360’s to help determine bonuses – and doesn’t make that known to people who only find out after the fact.

There are a lot of disturbing things here, but one on which I have a comment. The number of 360 reviews is an issue at many companies. It is without question difficult to provide valuable feedback in each and every one when there are so many to get through (and work to do besides). But the only value in the process is in the customized, specific feedback the 360’s are supposed to facilitate. When the process degrades to boilerplate responses, it’s really not worth doing.

Recently, we at SuccessFactors went through our own 360. We, of course, used our own application to conduct them and, with 360’s, managers can have the ability to add or reject proposed reviewers to help keep the process manageable. Reviewers also have the chance to refuse to conduct a 360 if they feel they are not appropriate, or they simply have too many to do.

Once the process was complete, the manager, a "coach" from within the company and the employee sat down to review the results. This provided the opportunity to make sure that everything was clear agreed upon and also provided the foundation for an individual development plan. These few tactics helped to keep the process valuable for us. I’m sure there are other techniques as well.

What strategies have you used to keep 360’s manageable and valuable? 

Regina at Bnet’s HR’s Brand New Experience blog thinks we should be having a best review contest in addition to a worst review contest. I like the angle, and she’s got a post about her best review ever. I’d like to get a "comforting basket," the night before my review,  too! Some good ideas for conducting a c-level review, perhaps.

Through the miracle of Tivo, I just caught "The Office" on NBC.  If you don’t watch it, you should – it’s a brilliant commentary on the nature of working for a company. Anyway, this episode found the good folks at Dunder Mifflin talking about performance reviews and I thought you might get a giggle out of this quote:

It’s Performance Review day, company wide. Last year, my performance review started with Michael asking me what my hopes and dreams were, and it ended with him telling me he could bench press 190 pounds. So, I don’t really know what to expect.

It’s that special time of year again, and everyone’s thinking about them. Or dreading them, as the case may be. Well, if you need a place to vent, you should take a look at worstreview.com, a contest we’re sponsoring to find the worst performance review story ever. Have a gander, tell a story, maybe even win a prize. It’ll be a hoot.