Performance reviews, if done correctly, can lead towards a high-performance culture. By giving employees a common purpose, clear expectations, capability, and commitment and building this culture across the organization, employees have a clear insight into where the company is headed, their role in making this happen, what it will take to happen, and what’s in it for them if it does.
An employee’s direct manager has the most insight into and employee’s day to day performance and are most involved in performance reviews, making them a key player when it comes to driving employee engagement. Some ways they can use the performance review to help foster a more engaged workforce include a focus on performance views and showing employees show they contribute to the overall success of the company.
LinkedIn shares that managers who received feedback on their strengths showed 8.9% greater profitability. Regular feedback to these managers, specifically focusing on their strengths, contribute to this increase – and to a lower turnover rate (14.9% lower). From this study and many others like it, a great point is raised that your performance review should not only point out and lead to discussions about where an employee is struggling, but should also highlight and work on developing an employee’s strengths.
Just be careful – if your performance review process is viewed as your employees as unfair or lacking value, the results can be negative. Holding off on providing employees with feedback until the review cycle and not giving them meaningful feedback in a timely manner is one example, while another is giving seemingly arbitrary ratings that aren’t in line with the feedback you’ve been giving your employees throughout the year. Make sure that your managers are trained in how to get the most of the performance review instead of forcing them to comply to a bell curve. We’ve compiled a list of reasons why employees might not see value in the performance review and what you can do to combat these ideas and increase engagement. We also can offer alternatives to some practices that contribute to these negative perceptions.
While performance reviews are often looking at measuring how an employee has done in the past, remember that they can also be a good tool to motivate employees towards continuing to do well or to improve in the future. Take the opportunity to provide meaningful (and timely) feedback to your employees and combine these with training opportunities when needed to help make sure your employees are seeing the value and to keep them engaged.
One piece to creating a successful employee engagement is having events in your company. Events, big or small create a sense of bonding between coworkers. They help establish relationships, which can lead to a sense of belonging to the company. Each company has their own way of bringing unity within the company. Below is a list of different types of events that your company is already doing or could maybe start to liven things up.
“A little Party never hurt nobody”
Different types of events:
Holiday parties- Oh the holidays! How they bring about such a wonderful, happy time. That happy time can create quite a positive mood with office employees especially when it comes to holiday parties. Having a holiday party is good about bringing unity and a good time outside the office. But make sure to keep a limit and don’t have the event get to out of control.
Fitness Classes- Fitness classes that the company provides, such as yoga or boot camps show another side of your coworkers. It’s a place where everyone can let off some steam before going back to work. And is a great added benefit or incentive if the company is willing to provide this outlet for their employees.
Happy Hour- an easy after work get together where everyone can go and enjoy a quick drink or some appetizers before heading home. It’s a nice way to end a work day. Some companies let employees leave a little earlier to attend, or some have the means to be able to have the happy hour in the office break room or a conference room, so employees don’t have to go far and can just head home.
Team building – Team building shows coworkers in a different light. Depending what the activities are for the day, usually they are exercises that show we need to rely on each other to get the job done. For example: Some companies have team building exercises at Escape rooms because everyone in their room is working together to get out before the time is out. Other teams do outdoor activities or go bowling to just create a relaxed environment outside of the office that also creates time for conversation besides work. Having an activity to bond about or talk about makes it easier to engage in those types on conversations as well.
Some other honorable mentions are attending Conferences with your team members and Employee Appreciation Day. The goal and benefit of all these activities is to create bonding experiences with coworkers outside of work in a more relaxed setting so that they feel a part of a community. What are other events that your company could put on to build your employees up?
Being an employee, the first thing you will think of when considering staying or changing your job is the WIIFM approach. This basically stands for, as a job seeker, “what’s in it for me” to take this new role, whether it is an internal or external role. Job seekers can have different priorities in terms of key motivators. Keeping this in mind, what is the key motivator to retain employees?
There are a lots of different reasons as to what helps retain an employee, which we will delve into in this blog series, but the key/driving factor is Career Development. Career Development deals with the progression of an employee in their career. This is something that, “over the past two decades organizations have encouraged their employees to be career self-reliant. They’ve been telling employees to ‘take charge’ of their own careers and not rely on the organization to provide guidance”.
While this works to some extent, the changing expectations of employees in the workplace requires greater collaboration. While I do believe that employees must take charge, the organization/company needs to help facilitate the process by providing clarity and opportunity.
There are different motivating factors to help retain employees that relate to their career development, such as:
Higher income as they grow in a role at their company
Growth opportunities in titles with the company
And a new one, when the employee feels appropriate to move
In the Harvard Business Review, they found “New research conducted by CEB, a Washington-based best-practice insight and technology company, looks not just at why workers quit but also at the timing of the decision or the when. “We’ve learned that what really affects people is their sense of how they’re doing compared with other people in their peer group, or with where they thought they would be at a certain point in life,” says Brian Kropp, who heads CEB’s HR practice. “We’ve learned to focus on moments that allow people to make these comparisons.” (https://hbr.org/2016/09/why-people-quit-their-jobs)
With today’s technology becoming more advanced and with social media connecting more people together either personally or professionally, it is hard to retain employees when they feel that they should be moving forward when different life events occur (either a birthday, an anniversary, the pressure from others that they see). This goes back to the earlier statement about the “what’s in it for me” mentality that drives employees to the different choices they make in their career. Below is a list of ways that I believe companies can work with their employees even during these times and remind them what they can do to stay.
Better communication of internal opportunities: Senior management knows and hears from their employees and managers what is working and what isn’t working for their team. They can then help build and create opportunities within different departments to help encourage their employees to get other internal responsibilities, while creating a culture that is more unitive with new paths that are similar to the job role employees are currently in or wanting to explore. But make sure that this is a career path the employee will want to take on before assigning. It is very important that managers understand the importance of their role when helping employees understanding their career goals and opportunities. Managers should not only assign tasks that their employees know how to do but assign tasks that will help them grow and could create career advancement.
The value of a 9-box: Learning your employees’ capabilities and recognizing their career development at an early stage is very important to the success of your employees’ careers and to the growth of the company. The 9-box is a valuable tool in not just this stage but as the employee grows in the company because it better measures their strengths and weaknesses while also showing where the employee wants for their career.
Customize your career: With your company create a career that has the balance that you need to lead a healthy lifestyle. For an employee’s personal sanity, companies should work well at creating a work and personal/family life balance that can comply well with the career path and job role that the employee is trying to take.
Set clear employee expectations: By setting clear employee expectations, employees will be less frustrated when planning their career path by having more insight or vision on what is being planned. Also, this will help them assess if they have the right skills set for the position or if they would need further training.
Now you can never be prepared when an employee decides they want to leave, but creating some of these perimeters and benefits that show them what is in it for them will encourage them to stay at the company. Either growing in their role or experiencing other internal roles. As companies, we need to make sure we have the right policies, processes and tools to practice this. So how employee growth and development culture ready are you?
For some companies and for some types of jobs, it is not uncommon that as soon as a job is posted online, applications come flooding in. But what about the times when that isn’t the case? Or when you need a highly specialized hire that may not be looking for a job at this time? This is a perfect opportunity to take a look at other options, and one great resource to pursue is working with external recruiters or recruiting agencies.
LinkedIn has a great list of how staffing firms can help you excel and some of the advantages of working with them. Some of the biggest reasons that companies start working with recruitment agencies include:
When the types of applicants they want are in high-demand and probably already in a job (and possibly not looking at this time).
When they have a hard to fill job that is not getting enough qualified applicants through their normal channels.
When they have already looked on job boards and not located resumes that fit their requirements.
When their company has grown significantly and the current team is overwhelmed with the number of job openings and the time required to fill them.
When you make the move to work with recruiting agencies, there are some considerations you will need to keep in mind in regards to the terms of your agreement as well as the responsibilities and expectations of the external recruiter.
What payments terms does the recruiting agency have? In most cases, this will be based on the hires annual salary and paid after the employee is on the job for a certain number of days. For example, you might end up paying out 20% of the employee’s annual salary to the recruiter after the new hire has been with the company 90 days.
What is the recruiter’s warranty period? Many will offer you a timeframe during which, if the hire doesn’t work out of leaves, they will find you a replacement hire at no cost.
What additional services will the vendor complete for you? Make sure that you work with an agency who, at a minimum, will pre-screen and meet every candidate that they send your way and that they will verify the qualifications before sending to you. Also, depending on the recruiter’s field and specialty, some may offer additional services such as skills testing, background checking, drug screening, etc.
Keep in mind that these things can be negotiated – especially if you are making multiple hires through the same agency. Make sure you discuss and come to agreement on the terms and price. Also, make sure you shop around and thoroughly review each recruiting agency you use. You may end up sending out to multiple agencies, but sometimes you can get competitive pricing if you work exclusively with a single vendor.
Additionally, there are some terms and scenarios you might want to review with a recruiting agency that may or may not be a part of their original agreement.
Do they offer a lock-out period? This would be a time during which the recruiter cannot place your candidate in another position at a different company, necessitating you filling the position again.
At what point do you have to pay for the resume? For example, what if the recruiter sends you a resume for someone that already applied through your website? Or what if the same resume is submitted by multiple recruiters? Make sure this is clearly defined and easy to document.
What happens if the recruiter sends unqualified candidates? This doesn’t seem to be the norm, but it can happen, so make sure you have open lines of communication to address this situation quickly.
With all of this in mind, our last piece of advice is to make sure that everything about the relationship and the resumes you receive and hire is well documented. Take steps to ensure you are able to find and report on the information about the resumes that have been sent your way. Utilizing tools such as applicant tracking solutions and vendor management systems can help ease some of the burden of tracking this manually. Also, having this as a part of your ATS makes it easier to track the resumes sent from recruiting agencies and house them in the same place as external or internal candidates which will help ensure consistency in your own hiring practices.
