Unlocking High Performance

How to use performance management to engage and empower employees to reach their full potential

Jason Lauritsen

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780749483296
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749483302
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Traditional performance management processes are often ineffective in increasing workforce engagement and fostering a positive employer-employee relationship. The established method of annually scoring employees against a list of static objectives can make employees feel undervalued and frustrated and can hinder, rather than advance, staff development.

Unlocking High Performance shows you how to transform this process to get the best out of your workforce. It presents a new model for performance management based on the three components of planning, cultivation and accountability, and situates this process within the wider aims of promoting work as a healthy relationship between employer and employee rather than a restrictive contract to be complied with.

Unlocking High Performance equips you with the tools needed to create clear expectations and goals, deliver feedback effectively, and to develop a culture of coaching rather than criticism. This book also provides practical guidance on how to identify and remove obstacles, effectively manage underperformance, and how to get buy-in for change. Packed with tips, tools and examples from organizations including Vistaprint, NVIDIA and South Dakota State University, this book provides everything needed to design a performance management process which will improve employee experience, help them reach their full potential, and ultimately deliver exceptional business results.

SECTION 1

Work is broken and employees are paying the price

A friend of mine recently quit his job for a new one. He’d worked for this company for over 20 years of his career. He’d been there so long, it had become part of who he was.

But this transition had been a long time coming. While he enjoyed the work he did for the company, it had been years since he had enjoyed the company itself. Whenever I’d see him, he’d share with me a new story of mistreatment at the hands of his employer.

Sometimes it was personal. Like the third, fourth or fifth time he was passed over for a promotion in favour of someone less experienced from the outside. Or when he was told, again, that he wasn’t eligible for a larger raise because he was at the max of his salary grade.

Other times, all employees were impacted. These injustices ranged from arbitrary cuts of their employee benefits to widespread, seemingly annual layoffs of large numbers of staff. All things my friend attributed to gross mismanagement of the organization.

Despite all of this, he kept showing up to work every day. It was as if he’d grown indifferent to all of it and had become more an observer of his life at work than a participant. He was clearly happiest when he had extended time off from work, so I’d ask him why he didn’t find a new job. He would reply that he ‘should’, but that intention was hollow. It was as if he was stuck and couldn’t even muster the willpower to break free.

Ultimately, an opportunity found him. A former co-worker who had escaped the bonds of his company had landed at a new one that treated employees very differently. They had a role that was a perfect fit for my friend and, almost in spite of himself, he was finally freed from his 20-plus-year tour of duty at a company he largely despised.

Of all the years I’ve known him, it was on those days leading up to the tendering of his resignation that he seemed as happy as I had ever seen him. I think he found more joy in one afternoon sharing a couple of pints of beer with me, dreaming up some brazen ways to tender his resignation, than he had at work in many years.

When I asked him about his new job, he shared with me that for the first several days in the office, it felt really strange. It wasn’t just because he was in a new company for the first time in decades, there was something more essential than that. Eventually, it hit him. People were smiling. They seemed to be happy working there. It had been so long since he’d been in an environment like this at work, that he didn’t recognize it.

So far, my friend is feeling good about his new job and his new company. He wonders why he waited so long to leave.

This story may sound familiar to you. We all know people, probably a lot of people, who are living this same existence. Maybe it was your story.

Most of us have been there, stuck in a job we dislike but having convinced ourselves that we can’t leave. We need that pay cheque or the benefits too much. So, we drift through each day, uncomfortably numb, hoping that someday things might get better.

Our employee engagement crisis

This is what a lack of engagement with work looks and feels like. And, according to Gallup’s 2017 State of the Global Workplace Report, ‘Worldwide, the percentage of adults who work full-time for an employer and are engaged at work – they are highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace – is just 15 per cent’ (Gallup, 2017). This suggests that the other 85 per cent of those full-time employees are having an experience of work something like my friend – showing up each day hoping for something better.

Gallup’s data paints a pretty bleak picture of the workplace. Other data, like that from Aon Hewitt’s 2017 Trends in Global Employee Engagement report, suggest that over 60 per cent of employees worldwide are engaged. (Aon Hewitt, 2017) The disparity of these two numbers highlights the complexity of measuring the employee experience in a reliable way. I think it’s safe to assume that the true number lies somewhere in the middle.

That means that less than half of people working each day around the world are engaged. This is alarming. And what’s more alarming is that despite their disagreement about the percentage of employees that are engaged, both Gallup and Aon Hewitt agree that the overall level of engagement isn’t trending in a positive direction. If anything, it appears to be getting worse.

What is most alarming about this trend is that I’ve never met an employee who doesn’t want to be engaged. Regardless of age, experience, level in the company or any other differentiating characteristic, every person I’ve ever had a conversation with about work wants work to be a positive experience.

Many of them have even taken steps of their own accord to try to make that happen. They go out on a limb and try to ask for what they want. They provide their manager with some feedback about what’s not working. They go back to school or pursue certifications to create better opportunities for themselves. They want to be engaged.

So, why the disconnect?

I know from spending nearly a decade as a human resources leader that there are a lot of executives and managers out there who still aren’t convinced that employee engagement has any merit. In their minds, this is all just touchy-feely stuff that has no place at work. As they see it, people should just be happy to have a job.

Somehow, these people who have been charged with the leadership of other people have forgotten what it feels like to be an employee who’s stuck in a bad job or suffering an incompetent (or worse) manager.

Why engagement matters

A number of years ago, I started using a simple exercise to open my management workshops about employee engagement. The goal is to lead participants to a realization of why employee engagement is so important, informed by our own experiences as employees. Here’s how it works.

Think back to a time in your life when you were really in love with your job. Hopefully, you have a recent example to call up in your memory. But maybe it was your very first job out of school. If you’ve worked in your current job for many years, maybe there was a particular time or project that you loved.

Call up the memories of this time in your career. Think about the people you worked with, the work you were doing, and how you remember feeling about work at this point in your career. Now, jot the down the answers to these three questions about this particular time when you were in love with your job:

• How did work make you feel?
• How would you describe the quality of your work? How did it compare to other times in your career?
• How was work affecting your life outside of work? What impact did it have on your personal relationships?

Once you’ve captured these thoughts, you can let go of those memories. It’s now time to travel to another point in your career on the opposite end of the spectrum. Think back now to a low point in your career when you were stuck in a job you really disliked. This can be from any point in your career and, if you are lucky, is in the far distant past.

As before, travel back into your memories to recall the people and experiences of this unfortunate period in your career history. Now jot down your answers to the same three questions:

• How did work make you feel?
• How would you describe the quality of your work? How did it compare to other times in your career?
• How was work affecting your life outside of work? What impact did it have on your personal relationships?

Now compare your responses. What do you notice about the difference between these two experiences? In my workshops, I ask people to discuss and compare their responses in small groups to identify trends and commonalities. Then we share and compare our responses.

What is striking about this exercise is the consistency of the responses regardless of who is in attendance. When people love their job, they feel valued, inspired, appreciated, energized, motivated, and happy. It’s almost entirely positive emotion, even when they were working hard or up against a tough challenge.

When people are stuck in a bad job, they feel unappreciated, frustrated, apathetic, disrespected, or worse. It’s common to hear mention of the ‘sinking feeling in your stomach’ on Sunday night when you know you have to return to that terrible place again in the morning. You can actually see the anguish on some people’s faces as they recall these experiences. The negative emotions are very powerful. And, they clearly impact our quality of work where a similar polarity of responses is common.

The positive emotions we experience from loving our job means we work harder, are more creative, and feel a greater sense of ownership for the impact of our work. We are more likely to volunteer to help out or contribute extra time or effort without promise of reward. On the flip side, when stuck in a bad job, we do just enough to get by and not get fired because we stop caring as much. We start watching the clock and the calendar, counting down to the time when we don’t have to be at work.

It’s in this gap that we see the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• About the author
• Foreword
• Introduction
• SECTION 1 Work is broken and employees are paying the price
• SECTION 2 Performance planning
• SECTION 3 Performance cultivation
• SECTION 4 Performance accountability
• SECTION 5 Building a sustainable and effective performance management system
• Index
• Backcover