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Re: Request for feedback on planned performance management / online appraisal / 360 degree feedback feature
Hi Sven
We have been implementing Success Factors and Cornerstone Performance and Talent software for over 5 years.
We have 63 Success Factors customers and around 15 Cornerstone.
I'd be glad to get my guys to look at specifications and comment.
Will be in touch.
Regards
Mike
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Re: Request for feedback on planned performance management / online appraisal / 360 degree feedback feature
Hello everybody,
a big +1 for everything that Amir says above. Our clients and prospects will want to do fairly "classic" performance management - though they increasingly refer to it as talent management (to include performance, potential, behaviours, knowledge and skills). But their biggest struggles are to move managers and staff away from "the annual appraisal form" into "performance management being just something that we do all the time".
(so note - lots of flexibilty required to create a "living document" that gets added to over time and then "rated" at points in time that may be more than annually).
Some specific thoughts:
Take a look at Rypple - a really nice tool for rapid feedback and performance management, which I love particularly for its ease of use.
A technical point on your concepts map, Sven: it's usually worth splitting out competencies into knowledge and skills (at least - many models include behaviours/attitude too).
Also, I'd include "workforce planning" as a new box coming below "strategic organisation targets/objectives" at the same level as "cascading departmental targets" whcih then has an arrow heading right, to competency frameworks. In other words - the strategy informs the workforce plan, whcih is (partly) described as the sum total of knowledge/skills/behaviours that we need in the organisation.
I like Amir's ideas about talent management - I wouldn't want to see this limited to a 3x3 though. We'd want to allow the clients to select the axis and the number of boxes (4x4, 5x5 are also used - though we'd caution against more than 4).
Norming processes are a big challenge - manager A has 9 staff, all rated highly. Manager B has 9 staff, rated lower. The Director (who oversees manager A and B) needs some way of checking that the staff reporting to manager A are really better - or perhaps manager A is just more generous with his ratings? This is particularly important where there are consequences of high or low performance (e.g. pay/bonus, promotion etc).
A subset of norming - many organisations will force managers to have fixed distribution. I don't actually like this approach, but if the clients use it, we'd need to accommodate it. By fixed distribution I mean, saying to a manager "you have 20 staff. You can only put 4 of them in the top-right box of a 3x3 grid, and you cannot have more than 15 rated average or above" for example. Two ways of accommodating it - through rating rules, or (probably easier) through giving managers reports of their ratings and allowing them to easily adjust them.
Drag and drop of names onto a talent grid would be VERY powerful for all these norming processes.
Cascading objectives - I think it's really important to make a distinction between cascaded, and aligned.
- Cascading - my manager has an objective, so I have the same objective. Cascading, here, could work in a very similar way to the current competencies processes in Totara.
- Aligned - my manager has an objective, and my objective is aligned to hers. (e.g. her objective is "generate £1m of new revenue" and mine is "generate £250k of revenue).
Plasticine or lego? When getting managers to set objectives for their staff, I find that it's useful to think about 3 approaches (usually, you'd need a combination of all 3l:
- Plasticine - managers have free choice about what objectives to set, and how
- Lego 1 - managers can select from a "bank" of objectives - perhaps with title and content pre-defined but space to change target date for completion, what good outcome looks like
- Lego 2 - managers can select from a bank of objectives but with no scope for changing anything.
Weighting - not all objectives are created equal! If I have 10 objectives, it's useful for me/my manager to idenfify which are the most important ones. A points-weighting system is useful here (all objectives forms have 100 points available to them. 10 objectives of 10 points each, or the first 2 with 30 points, the next 6 with 6 points and the final 2 with 2 points, or whatever). This also gives some way of ensuring that all staff have the same "effort requirement" at a certain level - if I have 2 objectives, and my peer has 4, it's logical that all else being equal I'd spend twice as much time/effort/brainpower on each of mine, as my peer does on each of his. Points-weighting allows this to be tracked.
Balanced scorecard - the ability to create, display, track and report on objectives as part of a balanced scorecard moves the whole process up to a more strategic level, away from HR and into more general organisational performance management, which would be useful.
Hope that's of some help. Of course, happy to discuss further.
Tim @ Think
Re: Request for feedback on planned performance management / online appraisal / 360 degree feedback feature
Sven,
Some great points from Amir already - here's a few observatiions to add to that:
1. Job Roles
There is often a more direct relationship between the Job role and the Behaviours, Competencies, Capabilities & skills than the diagram on P4 suggests. Skills and experience exists perhaps in 2 ways - the skills and experience required of the role and the skills and experience held by the user. We also need to have record of both and as a by-product, this will also enable reporting to identify potential candidates for a new role.
2. Strategic Goals
In an ideal wiorld, we would wantn to have line of sight up and down the organisation on goals to ensure they align. In practice, orgs who want to cascade goals down the organisation often don't agree the corporate goals in time to cascade them so Objective/Goal setting has to happen in isolation. Processes needs to allow for that.
3. Informal Discussions & Reviews
In many orgs, monthly 1-1's are a formal part of the appraisal process and will need to be captured.
4. Performance Improvement Plan
There will be a need to enable mutiple Development or Learning Plans as another part of the process will often require a separate and specific plan to deal with immediate perfromance shortfalls in a shorter timescale.
5. Performance Status
May need to have the ability to select from different scales or have this configurable by tenant in a multi-tenancy environment
6. Appraisal process
The process I have used at both of my previous employers was similar in that it started with a self appraisal, went for manager comment, back to me for my comments on the managers view and finally off to managers manager for final comment. There will be many variations on this which we will need to accomodate.
7. Retain data between interim assessments
Where an organisation uses quarterly/half yearly interim assessments, the data in the appraisal (both Objective/goal related and freeform text) needs to carry through to the next appraisal. A big complaint of the last system I used was the inability to pull through the previous information.
8. PM as a standalone system
There are a lot of systems out there which exist because of the limitations of some of the LMS's to deal with the flixibility of process and ultimately, the user experience. Some customers simply be replacing such tools.
One area I believe PM often fails is that it is treated as a process rather than an ongoing event. Collecting evidence of competency/behavious etc needs to be possible outside of the PM process. Whilst we already have the option of Mahara, I quiote like the approach Saba have taken with their "Impressions" tool. This allows the collection of instant feedback at any time with both freeform text and a star rating. The data can ultimately be fed into the PM process and provide valuable additional evidence of what went on in between reviews. I am adding a screen shot of the simple UI they have for this.
Final thoughts - if we get this right, the data will be there to support the development of other plugins such as devleoping a 3x3 Talent grid or using the rating data for Budget modelling (one of the key things that happens as a result of the annual appraisal!)
Kind regards,
Andy
Re: Request for feedback on planned performance management / online appraisal / 360 degree feedback feature
Sounds good. Lots to read here so sorry for any repeats. A few things from my perspective:
- Perf. Mgmt best-practices: following these is not a bad thing so don't be afraid to keep it simple and just deploy a better and more effective tool than other current solutions.
- 9box: we, too, utilize a 9box as a pivot between a Performance Rating scale and a Development Transition scale (i.e. whether you are suited to your current role or ready to move on/up). I agree it is out-of-scope here, but ensure data can sure easily exported to be taken over to a Talent Mgmt software.
- Job Roles: defining all individual roles in a large organization will be hard; competencies, capabilities, skills, and certain goals/targets could be mostly derived from a more generic Job "Template" (common job levels of roles in each business function).
- Goals: Allow mix of company goals, dept. goals, facility goals, etc. (derived from Job Template or hierarchy) PLUS your individual goals; need to be able to easily differentiate between them.
- Goal type: specify type of goal (e.g. development goal, performance goal, etc.) and a different rating scale for each type.
- Goal definition/structure: help enforce SMART goals with specific fields (sounds like Form builder will accommodate!)
- Cascading goals: alignment between your goals and organizational/dept. goals is responsibility of the individual and manager (and not the system, so much). Maybe design something to help an individual find what the org/dept goals are? How theirs fit? Which parent goal it belongs to? (STRG-002)
- Hierarchy management: Will links be from one role to another OR from an individual to another OR both ("both" is difficult to maintain). Do allow for as many links as needed.
- Appraisal overlap: our performance year runs 15 months (as financial results weigh into rating and these aren't ready by 31Dec). Thus, there is an overlap (sounds like workflow engine can accommodate)
- Appraisal change or hand-off: consider when someone changes roles mid-year.
- Self-assessment style: we also do self-assessments, then seek manager comment/approval (sounds like Workflow builder will accommodate)
- Dev/Learning Plan integration: we currently export our Development Objectives (form other system) for import into Totara, which creates a Learning Plan where each objective can have courses aligned to it; so, it is possible!
- Metrics: big help for managers to see team status/compliance (in terms of WF or goal due dates); same for local or divisional HR folks
- Print: nice, printable format of entire form to take to face-to-face meeting.