Hack:
Humanized Performance
Identify the value that each human brings to a role or function through an individualized approach. To truly value humans at the individual level as asset to organization. True value includes link to balance sheet potentially and certainly to financials (revenue creation, return on talent to organization performance, as ideas) but also to organizational social responsibility for future employment brand, commitment to greater global good, and total well-being.
We cannot achieve this long term if we do not truly value humans as individuals today. Today employees are frequently handled as a commodity, a resource that can be replaced, reduced, and managed. Frequently HR, the function of this resource, rolls into the CFO because humans are the greatest cost to the organization. Because of this singular focus on the expense side, this resource, these humans can easily be cut, replaced, or managed to do more for same value which equals cost.
Start with the individual with every decision, from the point of hire to the empowerment of performance:
1. Placement: Objective talent selection through scientific assessments, self-assessments and consistent development reviews to ensure a talent-to-role and talent-to-potential dashboard for every human,
2. Purpose: Each individual comes with a unique sense of purpose or meaning for the work that they were hired to do and it is through this purpose they can offer the greatest value through productivity, energy, ideation, contribution and retained commitment; incorporation of this individual sense of purpose into the decision-making and support mechanisms helps to better ensure alignement to objectives within the role and design,
3. Performance: Individual value contribution (performance management is the old definition) by starting with the individual with every plan, goal, discussion and measurement of impact and value.
PROBLEM:
As research has shown over the past few decades, it is rare to find someone who enjoys the ‘review’ segment of the performance management process, including managers. The effectiveness and impact of traditional performance management systems have also come into question. Reasons center around infrequency, emphasis areas, opportunity vs. strength, the significant subjectivity that is common across industry, function and organization type and finally rely on a role-based decision-making system vs. a system that is individualized on the human. This last area is the focus of this hack:
Role Based Performance Management systems are typically built with the role as a foundation vs. the individual human:
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Historic systems largely define those in use today, which includes the systems built to support roles. From job descriptions used to match incoming talent to performance systems and others, the requirements of the role is the starting point from which evaluation and decisions are made.
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The individual - talent, experience, skill-set, ‘l’ and 'my sense of purpose' is largely left out of the ‘system’ in order to streamline and standardize the supports for managers and Human Resources that support them.
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The individual's perception, creation, and commitment, is also traditionally left out of this one-size-fits-all system and processes for similar reasons; the perception exists that customization equals complexity to management (largely by HR) and provides too much control or expectations in the hand of the individual.
SOLUTION:
Short-term vision:
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Reframe the performance management system to incorporate the individual human into and at the center of the design.
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Involve individuals in the roles they hold, to provide input about how and where the individual could and should be centered in the performance discussion:
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Individual talent, skills experience - pre-hire, point of hire, project basis, ongoing, annually.
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Individual perceptions to yield ownership and empowerment of what they uniquely bring to a role, project, team or customer deliverable.
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Introduce objectivity into the organization through various learning methods and interactions to ensure understanding and begin to shift thinking by managers. Wherever a decision is made about a human in an organization - screen, interview, hire, develop, perform, promote, and remove, ensure 70% of the criteria used in the decision is objective.
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Define this individual-based focus as ‘Individual Value Contribution’.
Long-term vision:
HR will need to be redefined around a more individualized focus, empowering and supporting managers and individuals to learn, apply and systemize this more objective but individual approach and to ensure system support for tracking and reporting. These human support systems and structures will allow individual value to grow and thrive fostering an engaged, connected, productive, loyal, innovative work environment that continuously adds value to the org and help it operate more efficiently and ultimately build a foundation for a human centric organization that can clearly delineate the value to the organizations, by humans.
PRACTICAL IMPACT:
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Over time this human centered design would yield empowerment and position the organization to shift to an increased individual owned and driven performance plan.
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Organizations would be accountable to ‘names’ instead of just roles from the point of recruitment, to hiring, to development, to promotion, to retirement or to fire-ment.
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Human centered design would shift the focus onto people and off of the predominate focus on roles or jobs.
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Individual expectations, which are cited the most important of all engagement criteria (Gallup 1998 and others) would be clearly outlined at every human touch-point through a co-design process.
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Value creation at the individual level can be achieved, as combining individual designed work goals for performance with objective self, team and manager inputs can, over time, be integrated into the organization’s value.
CHALLENGES:
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Change/Integration - Employees and specifically managers could be resistant if information is not clear and shared in a transparent manner. Also if they lack the resources and support to start implementing this shift in a more individual centered performance management approach could falter.
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Time - Making this type of shift will not come overnight. It will take time and commitment from all levels of employees to embed this type of performance approach into the strategy and culture. Willingness and openness to learning and shifting along the journey will be imperative for its success.
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Training - Whether it is for a pilot program or rolling out this system to the entire organization, consistent training on how to appropriately conduct and best utilize this system is key to guiding increased performance.
- Support - Individiuals to find their own goals and sense of purpose; this is a different way to approach their work and role; encourgement and environmenta to think like an individual at work?
- Alignment - Each organization will need to 'check in' on their purpose - their reason for being (the mission, vision and values) to best guide the ways in which this individual approach will integrate or complement the overall organizational strategy, mission, and goals. This does not mean dictation at the individual level, it indicates clarity by which the individuals can connect and align themselves.
FIRST STEPS:
In order to incorporate this individual-focused principle into an organization, it is our belief that the above challenges must be considered and where there is a division or unit in which the following conditions exist:
- CHANGE has proven successful with other internal endeavors,
- Where an openness to TIME by a few ‘ambassadors’ as well as those that participate, can be allocated across 180 days, and
- TRAINING initially of the selected team(s) to clearly outline the defining elements for the purposes of entering an experiment in ‘adaptability’.
Suggestions for overcoming the challenge of CHANGE #1:
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Try pilot programs in one or two departments that already showcase some of these behaviors to build a template for the rest of the organization to follow and become interested in once some of the kinks are worked out,
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Weekly, bi weekly, monthly updates and tips should go out to the entire organization as this transition takes place,
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Set up a discussion board where people can voice concern, advice, opinions and have these actively answered,
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Trial and error. Choose metrics/measure that you think will be beneficial to individual performance identification, tracking, and goal setting. Test them, observe the outcomes and see if they provide valuable information. If so keep them, if not, choose others to test,
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Consistently get manager and employee feedback on the process and perceptions of impact.
Suggestions for overcoming the challenge of TIME #2:
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Set a flexible road map to help manage goals and action plan to role out this new approach,
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Choose key stakeholders throughout the organization to be accountable for helping the entire organization meet these goals/next steps as well as communicating any roadblocks and potential shifts along the way.
Suggestions for overcoming challenge of TRAINING #3:
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Start with a team that has a strong manager and where his/her manager is ready to 'sponsor' time and tracking; utilize their successful involvement as a way to cascade training into the organization,
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Give trainers a platform where they can communicate and compare often with each other,
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Trainings start off with small changes and increase in depth as time goes one to help ease employees into this new approach,
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Go to resources available for everyone in the organization so there is an up-to-date and reliable source to go to in case something is forgotten or misunderstood in traditional training.
Success of a pilot is determinate upon the leader of the division or unit truly applying the principles in an adaptable, open and co-created manner. Optimally this assumes a supporting role by HR and buy-in by an executive sponsor. While this could be achieved after the pilot, it is our experience that getting this on the ‘radar’ of top executives not only ups the stakes which can be a good thing, but also creates the initial shift required to incorporate such an approach organization wide. If approval is unlikely, the pilot could still become a success case with VP or Divisional leadership support.
Validation will be dependent upon clear documentation at the individual level of all aspects in which individualization was incorporated and applied and in which objectivity in decision-making for and about humans took place. This is a key role for HR to design and oversee. The data collected here should be across 6 months in order to ‘show’ the value propositions met and the ways in which individualization was created. The entire success of the shifts in these two principles should run the course of a year to create a comparison to the previous annual role-based, one-size-fits-all, largely subjective system.
Long-term, such a shift would require increase in or better use of technology to support individual application of the system, assuming an individual-lead system.
There are many ways we envision by which an organization could incorporate and pilot the implementation of this indvidualizing performance 'practice' and we will be encouraged to hear about ideas that reach beyond our experience and planning!
We have reframed our focus on 'individual value contribution' and built our hack on the individual-based system for performance. We will give it another edit/look over before Monday but would welcome any thoughts or feedback about where this can be even stronger and more clear!
Hi Stephanie and team! Thanks so much for submitting this hack. As you community guide assigned to this team, I thought I'd share a few of my comments and thoughts in the hope that it might help as you continue to develop this hack over the next few weeks.
FIrst off, I'd say you've chosen to tackle quite a challenge--reinventing the performance management process. I'd love the angle you've taken--a human centered approach to performance management that is more about the person, their talents, experience etc. than a traditional role-based performance management process. This piece of the hack I think you do a wonderful job of explaining, including addressing some of the key challenges and how an organization might tackle them.
I also especially like the way you've positioned the long term objective of the hack-- to truly value humans at an individual level as assets to the organization. This seems like a key factor in terms of increasing the adaptability of the organization.
I think the part I'm having trouble getting my head around is how the objective measurement side of the hack would work. It might just be my lack of deep experience in the HR function. I'm familiar with S.M.A.R.T goals and how they work, but beyond suggesting those, my experience has been that most organizations (and people) have a lot of trouble defining truly objective goals, let alone actually reaching them.
So where I understood the reasons why we would want more objective goals, and why this might help people feel less helpless about the performance management process, I left the hack still not exactly sure how to create more objective goals. If, once you review again, you agree with me, I think there are two paths you could take with this hack:
1) focus it exclusively on the human centered aspect of the performance management process-which is in of itself at pretty radical yet practical idea, at least from my point of view.
2) build out the description of the objective goal setting process a bit so people like me could better understand how one might work with people in the organization to create truly objective goals.
I hope this feedback helps, and thanks so much for submitting a great hack--I look forward to seeing where the team takes it next!
Thank you Chris! We appreciate your feedback and perspective very much!
The human-centered focus is certainly at the heart of our research and hopes for shifting organizational human systems long-term. Objectivity infused and increased across how humans are managed, supported and developed helps to get us there.
We like the idea that we focus on one area and have been working toward the first path that you highlight - and agree that better focus especially on what we also think is fairly bold, should create better clarity for those interested! Thanks again!
From my understanding, the problem of objectivity is at the heart of the human dilemma.
Success that brings satisfaction follows from the choices that we make. There are two, 2 aspects of these choices:
1. The choice of desires or goals, and
2. The choice of the appropriate specifications that describe the goals accurately
The only time these can be fulfilling is when both are objective.
Get the definition of objectivity wrong, and fulfillment becomes a mirage, or at best, a fluke.
It is Immanuel Kant who made the distinction between the personal order, P-O and the natural order, N-O. Although at that time he argued that the N-O cannot be defined, today physics has done a good job of it, through the wave model and the principle of self-containment.
Then, objectivity is when the P-O approximates the N-O within an acceptable tolerance limit.
The duality series in operations research has shored up well as an acceptable outline of the N-O:
1. Maxima
2. Minimax
3. Maximin
4. Minima
Given a goal therefore, the wave model provides an objective basis for deriving SMART Objectives according to the items on the duality series. When this is done correctly, it also satisfies the requirements of self-containment.
This solves the problem with the choice of specifications.
The choice of goals or desires is approached similarly. Simply reconstruct a higher order goal, which is inclusive of the particular desire, as an objective. This is the application of self-containment. It creates a spiral that goes on and on, ad infinitum; with neither a beginning, nor an end.
I agree with you that people ought to be the focus of performance management. Could you look at my hack: http://www.mixhackathon.org/hack/sustainability-index, to see whether it comes near anything you have thought?
Peter,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and comments and for posting your hack!
We agree that objectivity is a crucial way to get us to a point at which we can truly value humans and will keep working on this long term. We also believe that a focus on the human vs. the role will be a good starting point for shifting some mindsets that have been 'groomed' for decades around role, standardization and set skills.
Your perspective on how we create an objective system is intriguing and certainly has depth. I read your post here and your hack and while I am likely trying to read, absorb and reply to too many ideas, I had a difficult time 'seeing' how it might work and understanding how we might connect to where leaders are today. I look forward to any additional thoughts on this you might have! I appreciate that there is shared focus on objectivity!
Stephanie-Sharma,
Greetings!
Two, 2 inputs are required to make the concept work:
1. The appraisal model, and
2. A Knowledge bank
The knowledge bank provides the data base that feeds the appraisal model. It is derived by a systematic reduction of jobs into duties, activities, and then tasks. Then the procedure for the performance at each of these tasks is standardized. The resultant data becomes the basis for employment, appraisal, and skill gaps analysis. The bank is derived by the domain experts in the specific tasks. These are the leaders in the organisation, the 20%ters who do 80% of the work, following Pareto.
The appraisal model is designed to migrate the 80%ters into the team of 20%ters. It motivates teamwork, military style; and feeds the reward model, succession plan, and capacity assessment. It focuses on the personnel, according to their commitment to the bottom line, ethics, and the environment.
The bill of health index, BHI measures organizations, according to their commitment to these principles. It is a simple metric that requires only three, 3 inputs; which are easily accessible in the annual financial report:
1. Total Revenue
2. Value Added, or Cost of Materials
3. Profit before Tax
It is optimum at BHI = 1.43. A value that is greater than this, indicates greed, from profiteering; and waste, in which the human resource, HR is underutilized. Organizations can use this index as the starting point, to establish the concepts presented on my hack: http://lnkd.in/cmanRJ
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