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Strategies And Tools For Improving Employee Performance
Strategies And Tools For Improving Employee Performance

Each employee within a company has the power to boost a company's success. For better or worse, the inverse is also true: Each employee has the power to drag down productivity and the organization's bottom line. Business leaders have become increasingly focused on finding strategies to improve the performance of employees to better serve and delight customers. At some point, each business leader needs to devise a high-functioning HR performance improvement plan that gets results. If you're struggling to develop an action plan for non-performing employees, it's probably time to take a deeper look at the issue to discover the right performance improvement plan (PIP) for your organization. Keep reading to learn how a PIP can help streamline your employee performance improvement process. What Is an Employee Performance Improvement Plan? A PIP can become a powerful tool to help struggling employees succeed or let ambivalent employees go for immediate issues and any thereafter. You might think of it as an on-the-spot, essential performance evaluation.  When you and your managers become painfully aware of a recurring or worsening employee performance issue, you must resolve the issue quickly and effectively. More employers today are relying on performance improvement plans, which are formal template documents that feature details regarding the specifics of your employee's performance issues. Further, it gives you the opportunity to create a clear list of goals that the poorly performing employee needs to succeed and a timeline to allow him or her to reach those goals. A performance improvement plan isn't always (nor should it be) a negative experience for an employee. Many employers also use it to help driven employees determine and plan professional goals and create measurable steps to achieve those goals.  How to Determine If Employees Should Face a Performance Improvement Plan Here are key steps to take to determine whether a PIP is warranted for your troublesome employee:Analyze the various possible factors regarding if the employee is not doing his or her job or meeting your organization's standards. Remove external factors, such as an unclear job description or requirements, miscommunicated professional standards, or issues and incompatibilities with management and co-workers.Once you go through these steps to conduct evaluations, you should move forward with a performance improvement process. What Are the Benefits Your Organization Might Experience With a Performance Improvement Plan? Employee turnover is expensive. You probably want to avoid termination and searching for a new employee. A performance improvement plan can help you correct a poor attitude, behavior or performance. Your employee might be experiencing personal turmoil. A PIP can help this individual see that his or her performance and productivity are failing. Your employee gets the chance to course-correct, and you keep a quality employee on board and avoid needing to invest in a recruiting mission. What Are the Components and Requirements That Comprise a Performance Improvement Plan? Performance improvement plans include numerous steps that your employee needs to follow to improve his or her work performance. That said, it helps for you to understand and follow some integral steps:Meet with and discuss the performance issue with the employee, letting him or her know you want him or her to succeed. Create achievable goals, such as hitting a certain sales figure or contributing input during team meetings, according to a set timeline. Maintain communications with the employee during the PIP process, providing accolades for improvement and questioning any lack thereof. Ask if the individual needs additional training or other assistance to facilitate his or her success. Evaluate the outcome when the deadline arrives. Make this meeting a discussion regarding how the employee feels about the process and outcome. Prepare to continue the improvement process. If you feel the employee is unlikely to succeed, you might consider an alternative solution, such as a transfer, demotion or termination.What Steps Do You Need to Take to Create the Improvement Plan? When determining that an employee is continually experiencing issues meeting deadlines, cooperating with team members, or providing customer satisfaction, it's time to create a performance improvement plan. Here are some actions to take at that point:Review the employee's job description and expected performance. Analyze the times when the employee has fallen short and any notable circumstances surrounding the issue. Consider what might help the employee succeed, thereby creating a path to improved positivity and productivity.When Is the Improvement Plan Needed? You can usually detect when someone is struggling to fit in with the corporate culture. You might also have a gut feeling when someone has checked out and doesn't care about his or her position anymore. Nevertheless, you can't let detection and gut feelings rule your strategic decision-making. Here are some instances when you should implement a performance improvement plan:Your company has taken on the PIP process as a means of dealing with performance issues. Your organization has no detailed prescription in your employee handbook for managing performance issues. You believe your employee is worth the effort that goes into a PIP due to a history of strong performance and a positive attitude. Your employee is experiencing personal challenges, and you want to offer him or her an opportunity to improve.Humantelligence Provides a Highly Effective Three-Step Process Humantelligence will help you improve employee performance without the stress and disruption that sometimes accompanies such a task. We offer a three-step performance improvement plan process that allows you to achieve a high-performing culture where everyone gets the opportunity and encouragement to shine. Our platform is here to help you measure and manage existing employees' performance levels. With our help, you can also hire employees whose attitudes align with your company culture. Our employee performance improvement plan consists of the following:Step One: Our quick and comprehensive culture self-assessment tool was designed to uncover your employees' and prospective employees' work motivators, behaviors, ideal work styles and life priorities. Step Two: Manage and optimize your workplace culture using data meant to culturally align your employees at the team, group, functional, organizational and departmental levels. Your accumulated data can help you understand why teams do or do not perform, and help you find ways to spur them to course-correct. Step Three: Hire effectively by using our talent fit tool and team analytics to find and hire prospects faster, speeding the process by 80%. Our talent management and development tool offers strategies and analytics to help you make the right decisions at every point in the employee improvement process.Ready to turbo-boost employee performance to improve everyone's attitude, confidence, conduct and achievements? Contact Humantelligence today.

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5 Ways to Create a Feedback-Friendly Team Environment & Why It Matters
5 Ways to Create a Feedback-Friendly Team Environment & Why It Matters

Whether good or bad, feedback is one of the best ways for us to know if we’re doing something right or wrong. And while it's a must for a healthy culture, still not every business has guidelines about when or how feedback is provided. A strong feedback culture welcomes feedback and uses it to foster the growth of individuals, teams, and the organization. In a feedback-friendly culture, employee voices are valued. And to become more effective and fulfilled at work, people need a keen understanding of their impact on others and the extent to which they’re achieving their goals. That’s called feedback, and direct feedback is the most efficient way for them to gather this information and learn from it. Typically, this information -- what we like to call intel on our efforts -- comes in three forms: Appreciation...recognition for great work. Appreciation connects and motivates people, and it’s vital since intrinsic motivation is one of the critical factors for higher performance. Coaching for Continuous Improvement...helping someone expand their knowledge, skills and capabilities. Coaching is also an opportunity to address concerns, feelings, or ideas, which helps balance and strengthen relationships. Evaluation...more formally assessing someone against a set of standards, aligning expectations and informing decision-making. Why a Feedback Culture is Important Even people who aren’t interested in or skilled at giving or receiving feedback will participate in the process and improve when they’re working in a feedback-rich environment. On the flip side, even the most ardent and capable of feedback champions will give up if the organizational or team culture doesn’t support their efforts. So in addition to helping your more reserved team members improve, feedback carries with it a slew of benefits. Here are just three of the most important. Feedback Saves Time, Money & Resources It’s estimated that a company of 10,000 employees spends a staggering $35 million a year to conduct performance appraisals. Yet 9 in 10 managers are dissatisfied with how their companies conduct annual performance reviews, and nearly 90 percent HR leaders say the process doesn’t yield accurate information. Moreover, the average manager spends about 210 hours a year on activities related to reviews. That’s more than 26 work days. However, when you supplement performance reviews with ongoing, real-time feedback, you can help ease the pressure and expense of the annual review. When you think about performance reviews, it’s really just an aggregation of all the feedback data an employee should have received throughout the year.  Better Performance in a Feedback Culture Now, imagine the loss in productivity throughout that year when that employee doesn't receive ongoing intel on his/her efforts throughout the year. When you save it for an annual performance review, you're missing out on opportunities where your employee could have been improving. When employees enjoy their work, understand their goals, and know the values and competencies of the job, performance increases. The link between effective feedback and productivity has been well established. One study found that 69 percent of employees would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized. Continuous feedback helps align goals, clarifies expectations, and motivates employees. It also creates a positive workplace, one dedicated to encouraging people to be better will improve the level of performance and employee engagement. Strengthened Interpersonal Relationships Engaging in open feedback and dialogue with colleagues, recognizing efforts after a job well done, and helping employees meet their goals will help create meaningful workplace relationships. Fostering these types of relationships among employees is a driver both for improved collaboration within and across teams as well as for retention.  Once a foundation of feedback has been set, sustaining it will become easier with each feedback conversation. Here's how the experts say to do it. How to Build a Continuous Feedback Culture To foster an environment of both personal and professional growth, people need to feel safe about giving and receiving feedback. A feedback culture is a fluid, two-way exchange between employees as well as employees and management. The end goal is a safe space where employees feel comfortable voicing their concerns, suggestions, and advancement plans while employers are equally able to express constructive feedback.A healthy feedback culture is one where feedback is the norm rather than a signal that something is wrong. That means when improvements are needed, asking for change won’t come off as awkward or out of the blue for either staff or employers. Instead, you’ll be able to enhance business processes while empowering employees to excel in their roles. Here are some ways you can start embedding a continuous feedback culture into your workplace.Set and reinforce expectations during onboarding, performance reviews, manager 1:1s, town halls, and department meetings for giving, receiving, and using constructive feedback. Train people to focus on the quality of the feedback. It’s worth noting that there is a difference between good and bad feedback. Encouraging people to say "good job" isn't going to improve employee performance or build an effective feedback culture. Building a culture of feedback starts with providing meaningful feedback - that is, feedback that is behavior based (not trait-based), forward looking (instead of backward), objective, continuous, in real-time and direct. Create multiple channels for giving and receiving feedback...like newsletters, email inboxes, surveys, town halls, office hours and more. Some folks like to write it out, while others prefer vocalizing -- be inclusive of how you solicit and provide feedback. Couple feedback with recognition so that employees associate feedback with a positive form of reinforcement. It will help reinforce the kind of behaviors that are helping move the organization. Make it routine. When feedback happens routinely, it becomes expected. Hold employees accountable by incorporating feedback giving and receiving KPIs. Ensure that managers are having regular feedback conversations and check-ins with their direct reports. Moreover, encourage employees to ask and share feedback.As a rule of thumb, more frequent, directionally correct but incomplete feedback outperforms more detailed and accurate but less frequent feedback. This means that consistency and iteration are what makes feedback good. When asking or giving feedback, many refer to the 30/60/90 Feedback Framework. It states that one should receive feedback when a task is 30% complete, again at 60% complete, and finally at 90% complete. Transforming your culture into one built on continuous feedback can propel your teams to approach tasks from a different perspective and find new solutions to your company’s biggest challenges. And the first step in your culture transformation is a team culture mapping, where we’ll help you unlock the behaviors, motivators, and work energizers of your team so you can empower better performance.

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Fit Recruiting: Culture Fit, Culture Add & Diversity of Thought
Fit Recruiting: Culture Fit, Culture Add & Diversity of Thought

Fit Recruiting for Culture In the world of work, there's one thing you can count on...and that's the ongoing proliferation of new phrases or acronyms. New phrases like "culture fit" and "culture add" have taken on multiple meanings and muddied the already cloudy waters of unbiased recruitment practices. To combat that confusion, this article will explore their similarities and their differences, and how using fit recruiting can elevate your recruitment practices and find you the best candidate. The term 'culture fit' has received some criticism. Some companies are even banning the phrase altogether, fearing it emphasizes homogeneity, the very opposite of its intent. At its core, culture fit, or fit recruiting, as Humantelligence defines and uses the term, actually boosts inclusion and diversity within its teams. Finding candidates that align with culture doesn't limit the existing background or experiences to be considered. Here's how we look at culture fit.We assess your current team culture, specifically addressing high and low performers, regardless of their background. Our tool provides insights into Behaviors, Motivators and Ideal Work Energizers (BMW) -- never race, religion, background, socioeconomic status or any other bias-laden factor. With the insights gained from these data points, trends start to emerge. These trends allow hiring managers to hire candidates that will have the traits of their high-performing team members.  If the hiring manager or leadership team determines that the current team is not performing well, or they are on the verge of a transformation, they can use the tool to build an "Ideal Profile" that will reflect the ideal candidates' desired BMW. What we refer to as BMW eliminates outside judgment and preconceived ideas on what the candidate should "look" like.In some instances, companies choose to use this tool for both benchmarking as well as improving overall morale. For example, Ashley Furniture could not have improved their distribution center without a tool that assessed culture fit. They were experiencing high turnover, and while not uncommon in manufacturing, Ashley wanted to better understand what kind of candidates would thrive in this environment. Using culture fit helped Ashley pinpoint their high-performers and continue hiring individuals, driven by a common goal, into a particular, normally high-turnover role.  Even before an interview, where a person can begin to create an unconscious bias, the data can be hard at work finding similarities between candidates and current employees. There is also a threshold which is set by the company. For example, company A may say, "We want potential team members to align with their future boss by 60 percent." But company B might say, "We want a very close match between manager and team member, as this person will assume the manager position in 6 months. We are striving for a 75 percent match." Defining Culture Add Similar to culture fit, culture add is the concept that a new hire should contribute to the culture, or be seen as a supplemental addition who can fill critical gaps. Both terms involve a sense of alignment; however, culture add has become more popular. Regardless, the outcomes when striving for culture add or culture fit will be similar if done properly. Accurately collecting data is key to understanding what culture means for organizations, and any new addition, if chosen intentionally, will "fit" or align with their team and the current value system. Will people of similar backgrounds and experiences gravitate toward one another? Absolutely. This is why hiring new additions need to be driven by data as opposed to a gut feeling. That's where the BMW analysis comes in -- filtering candidates long before the first interview or point of human interaction. This way, biases are dramatically minimized and the overall recruitment process will be quicker, with a more aligned candidate as the final outcome. Fit Recruiting for Diversity of Thought Another common phrase that is often heard within HR and culture conversations is Diversity of Thought. The thinking behind DoT is that a shared mindset or "groupthink" within an organization is negative and creates a shortage of new ideas; particularly from underrepresented groups. True DoT starts with organizations prioritizing diversity in the recruitment process and reinforcing its importance throughout the employee experience. Aside from the obvious benefits surrounding a more diverse and inclusive workforce, Gallup proved that inclusivity and employee engagement are actually linked to profits. It found that employee engagement and gender diversity resulted in 46% to 58% higher financial performance. And while some HR organizations struggle to plead the case for a diversity budget, the ROI is undeniable. Lever, a prominent name in the recruitment space, sites blind resume screenings as a way to combat bias in recruitment. Coupled with this, hiring for culture fit or culture add and utilizing data from behavioral evaluations can create a truly blind screening setting. What all of these concepts do is help recruiters find the best candidate, based on a team's particularly needs, involving the least amount of human error -- that's called fit recruiting and it's admirable goal. Best Practices to Implement Today Let's forget the terms for now. What employees within the organization, as well as those entering through the recruitment process, deserve is a fair and inclusive environment. A more diverse, accepting environment fosters creativity and aids in employee happiness. Teams that emphasize inclusion and belonging are also able to transform more quickly than those that are less diverse. According to Cloverpop, inclusive decision making "can drive meaningful change in months because it focuses on the inclusion of people already employed by organizations, using consistent processes combined with transparent metrics." and inclusive decision making also "leads to better business decisions up to 87% of the time. This means that building diversity into your recruitment processes and, inevitably, your teams, will lead to higher success, employee engagement, and better work overall. If you're interested in learning how Humantelligence can help you elevate your fit recruiting practices, let's connect.

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