Category: Performance Management

Performance Management covers the topics of goal-setting, employee to manager feedback, goal alignment, coaching, evaluation (assessment), and issues such as bonus setting, the use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), forced ranking (limiting the number of high performers), calibration (conducting talent reviews to normalize ratings), and performance improvement plans. Many of these practices are regulated in some countries and often must be reviewed by labor unions.

Hyper-Growth Through Efficiency: Theme For The New Era

With all the mixed messages in the latest election, one rings loudly for leaders: the US Government must become more efficient. US voters did not seem impressed with the billions spent on the Chips and Infrastructure acts: they want lower taxes and more accountable government.

As Elon Musk explains, reducing costs is an exercise ... Read more»

Can AI Do Performance Reviews? Rippling Says Yes.

This week Rippling, a fast-growing mid-market HR Tech company, introduced a fascinating product called Talent Signal. This product reads work output data from Github (for engineers), Salesforce and Gong (for sales people), and Zendesk (for service reps) and uses AI to analyze their performance.

How does it work? The system uses several inputs. With ... Read more»

Microsoft Releases Viva Goals: Performance Management Is Sexy Again

One of the most frustrating, tired, and archaic HR practices is performance management. Most of us have had horror stories with our “performance appraisals,” leading HR leaders to try to reinvent performance management all the time.

We went from top-down cascading goals in the early 2000s to Continuous Performance Management in 2010 to new discussions ... Read more»

Microsoft Acquires Ally: Expands Viva Into Employee Goal Management

As I talked about in Ten New Truths for HR Tech, Microsoft is upsetting the entire work-tech market. Not only is Viva on the agenda for every HR and IT department we talk with, Microsoft is doubling down. Today Microsoft announced plans to acquire Ally.io, a fast-growing OKR goal management platform with more ... Read more»

The Tale Of Performance Management Tools: 15Five, Lattice, BetterWorks, And More…

The market for online performance management software has been fascinating. For more than a decade vendors have been building new tools to enable goal management, check-ins, feedback, and alignment. And now we’ve added surveys and feedback to the mix.

This week 15Five, one of the fastest-growing vendors, announced the acquisition of Emplify, a leading ... Read more»

performance management

Performance Management In The Pandemic: Becoming Your Best-Self

We’re in a tumultuous business cycle and everyone is concerned about performance: the performance of our company, our teams, and ourselves. 

And in the midst of this pandemic, we are ever more concerned with wellbeing, resilience, and growth. How can we best stay productive at home (or at work) when there are so many uncertainties?... Read more»

Glint And LinkedIn Learning Get Married: What A Great Couple

In November of 2018, LinkedIn acquired Glint, an emerging leader in employee engagement and survey technology. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and now the romance has paid off. Glint and LinkedIn Learning have gotten married.

Let me try to explain.

Glint is a fast-growing company in the employee ... Read more»

Performance and Rewards In The Future of Work

There’s no question we’re going to spend a lot of time in 2020 talking about the Future of Work, I’m getting asked about it constantly. 

As I get ready to publish our prescriptions for the year ahead, let me mention the important topic of performance and rewards, because they are essential to the way people ... Read more»

feedback, glint, engagement

Employee Engagement 3.0 – From Feedback to Action

The employee engagement and feedback tools market has been explosive. As I wrote about in Feedback is the Killer App, giving employees the ability to express their opinions has transformed the world of management. CEOs and business leaders everywhere are now evaluated by their ability to keep employees happy.

And there’s good reason for ... Read more»

We Wasted Ten Years Talking About Performance Ratings. The Seven Things We’ve Learned.

I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve had talking with companies about changing their performance management process. Going back to 2015 articles were written by people like Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall (both personal friends), and many others about the need to change year-end ratings, implement regular feedback practices, and reduce the power of ... Read more»

YouEarnedIt Acquires HighGround: Performance Management Market Heats Up

As I described in an article a few weeks ago, innovation in performance management reigns. The annual appraisal is going the way of the dinosaur and almost every company I talk with is focusing on continuous conversations, agile and transparent goals, and new culture-based models for coaching, career development, and skills improvement. The big ... Read more»

Continuous Performance Management: Innovation Reigns

One of the most fundamental and difficult parts of management (and HR) is how we do performance management. As I’ve written about for years, this is a highly strategic process in companies and it has gone through a huge transformation. What used to be an annual year-end appraisal has now become a whole plethora of ... Read more»

Becoming Simply Irresistible Part 2: Supportive Management

As our Simply Irresistible model shows below, there are five essential elements of employee success: meaningful work, supportive management, a humane work environment, growth opportunities, and trust in leadership. In this article (the second of five, you can read the first here), I’ll discuss the issue of management.

Fig 1: Bersin by Deloitte ... Read more»

Making the Matrix Work

Over the last year we’ve been doing a lot of research on organizational design. Our newest research shows that 92% of companies are trying to redesign their teams to increase speed and agility, but only 14% seem to know how. Our conclusion, after many months of work, is that companies have to move away from ... Read more»