Setting clear expectations is a simple yet effective way to keep everyone on the same page. If you’re having trouble with employee engagement or even turnover, perhaps it’s time to rethink team expectations. How expectations are communicated can make a massive difference in productivity for all team members.

In this episode of The Learning Xchange, Matthew Brown discusses the importance of setting clear expectations. Schoox’s VP of Learning and Brand Success highlights just how important it is that each team member knows exactly what’s expected of them. He draws on his personal experience of what happens when expectations are not clearly defined. 

Listen to this episode of The Learning Xchange below, or keep reading to learn more about the importance of clear expectations.

Why clear expectations are so important

Setting clear expectations in the workplace is vital for several reasons. The first is that it ensures everyone is on the same page. Everyone knows what to do, when, and how. This can reduce a great deal of confusion, miscommunication, and frustration.

Clearly defined job roles, responsibilities, processes, and goals are crucial to helping anyone achieve the best in their job role.

Another reason why clear expectations are important is that it improves employee engagement. Employees who aren’t sure what to do or why they’re doing it won’t feel as engaged or motivated as they could be.

A further reason why clear expectations are so important is that they foster a spirit of openness and transparency in any team. This might not sound like a priority for a manager who has business targets to meet, but it can go a long way toward increasing productivity.

With more engaged and focused employees who are clear on their role, this can only mean good things for the company.

A common mistake that business leaders make

The idea of setting clear expectations in a business may seem obvious at first. It may, in fact, already be part of your onboarding process for new hires.

However, what this does not take into account is changing expectations and developments in the business. When a team undergoes big changes, expectations need to be revisited for everyone.

For example, perhaps you started working for an organization with clear goals and expectations. However, organizational changes could mean you’re required to report to someone new. Suppose the company failed to set clear expectations with the new manager or leader. In that case, it could impact your performance review as mismatched expectations leave room for confusion, frustration, and even disappointment.

Different ways to set and maintain clear expectations

See the importance of one-to-one conversations

If you find yourself in a similar scenario, where the manager and employee have completely different ideas of the role, take it as a lesson.

One-to-one conversations are so important when it comes to setting expectations and goals plainly for both parties to see.

To avoid miscommunications about this, it’s good to have regular catchups with your team on a one-to-one basis. During these catchups, it’s important to redefine company goals and expectations (whether they have changed or not).

Ask what you need from other people

For non-managers, one of the most important things you can do is establish what you need from other people to do your job effectively.

That’s where setting an expectation becomes a two-way thing. It’s not just about the manager telling an employee what to do. It’s also the employee’s job to assess what they need from the manager to do it.

If you are the manager, this expectation must be communicated to the employee as well.

Acknowledge when things need to change

If your team runs into this problem of miscommunication, how you move forward is crucial. Rather than point the blame, people on all sides should acknowledge the problem and learn from it.

If you are a manager, it’s important to take it as a learning experience on how to better communicate your needs with employees. Employees should also take it as a chance to learn how to communicate what they need to do the job.

Setting goals and expectations sound simple in principle, but it’s very easy to let slip. Changes in company structure, management, new hires, and promotions can greatly skew perceptions of power and expectations.

The best solution is to have regular, open communication with all employees about the role and the team as a whole. Part of a manager’s job here is to make the conversation open and comfortable for the employee to speak honestly. Only through being open will real change and improvement come.

Thank you for reading this podcast episode summary. For more from The Learning Exchange, find all of the episodes so far on your favorite podcast app or website. Please subscribe to show us your support!

The post How to Set and Maintain Clear Expectations for Your Team appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

We’re so excited to bring to you our brand-new weekly podcast, hosted by Matthew Brown, VP of Learning and Brand Success at Schoox.

The Learning Xchange is a podcast that focuses on the ever-changing landscape of online learning and talent management. It is a place where L&D and HR practitioners and leaders can enjoy an “Xchange” of ideas, explore innovations in learning, and gain insights from others who share the same passion for improving and influencing the future of learning and development.

In this first episode we focus on performance reviews, and specifically competency-based performance reviews.

Hit play on the player below to listen to the podcast episode.

Or, read on to find out more.

Performance reviews are a necessary part of any business

Typically, most businesses kick off their annual review process around September/October and facilitate the whole cycle through to December.

When done right, a performance review acts as a formal assessment of an employee’s demonstration of knowledge, skills, and capabilities. Managers identify the employee’s strengths and weaknesses and clarify expectations of the employee in their given role.

Despite their necessity, performance reviews can strike fear and panic in the hearts of both employees, managers, and HR departments around the country.

Why? Well, an employee might dread what their manager will say about them. It’s perfectly normal to want to shy away from getting feedback. It’s also nerve-wracking if your performance review directly relates to your annual bonus, pay raise, or promotion decisions. Plus, it’s often a highly administrative, time-consuming process. 

Likewise, managers do not want to spend too much time completing performance reviews for the same reasons.

Finally, HR professionals have a lot more work to do during the performance management process because they play such a key role. Creating a great performance management experience takes a lot of effort.

At Schoox we believe that no one—whether an employee, manager, or HR professional—should dread or fear performance reviews.

A performance review should help to improve employees’ skills and their overall development. This benefits the employee, their manager and team, and the company as a whole.

It’s time to take the confusion and fear out of performance reviews so that managers can create an effective experience and achieve what they set out to accomplish in the first place—improved performance!

How performance reviews usually operate

Performance reviews have not changed much since the early 1990s. We have been using the same processes, for the most part, for over three decades and they tend to look a little something like this:

1. Everyone on the team receives an electronic or paper form to fill out
2. They fill out the form and include their thoughts on the past year (the good, the bad, and the ugly!)
3. They take a deep breath and submit the form to their manager
4. The manager reviews their notes and adds their thoughts and ideas
5. They enter the calibration process (ran by HR) where the results are analyzed further, and rating distribution is considered
6. The final step is compensation distribution, where matters such as bonuses and any possible raises are discussed and delivered

Not all performance reviews will work in the same way. There are variations in the process but, the steps listed above are what most of them will entail.

What do annual performance review forms contain?

When the annual performance review form lands on your desk or in your email inbox, it will typically contain two main sections.

One section focuses on company results such as KPIs, sales, turnover, and engagement. The second section focuses on individual performance. The individual performance section may include core values or certain competencies related to your specific role within the company.

The problem with traditional annual performance reviews is the ‘annual’ part. Remembering what you had for breakfast can be a struggle, never mind recalling what happened over the last 12 months!

The heart of a performance review should focus on driving the right behaviors and the right outcomes. Sure, getting results is important. But your performance review shouldn’t be solely focused on results. Instead, it should focus on whether the path you take to achieve the results is sustainable and ideal for delivering those results. That’s where competency plays a big part in your performance review process.

Why businesses need to leverage a competency-based framework

Many businesses miss out on the opportunity of combining different competencies and sharing them throughout learning and HR.

HR professionals understand that having a competency-based framework that acts as a connecting thread running through the employee experience can help individuals obtain greater performance outcomes. A competency-based framework can also help strengthen the business, yet, very few businesses leverage it and instead take a more haphazard approach.

A massive mistake that many companies make is failing to provide adequate training designed to improve the competencies that were deemed necessary in the recruitment phase. When a business searches for a new hire, they will usually include desired competencies that the ideal hire will possess. If someone applies for the role and they show that they do have the required competencies, the business will hire that person, welcome them to the team, and that’s it. Usually, there is no follow-up training to help the new team member develop those vital skills any further.

Eventually, the annual performance review season comes around, and that’s when a discussion around competencies arises. If you’re lucky, there might even be a conversation around how you can close any performance gaps evident from your review. However, you might be an employee who is left to figure it all out for themselves.

Businesses that lack a competency-based framework will often leave it up to their employees to create a meaningful development plan that tackles the issues presented in the performance review.

Three reasons why businesses are not making the change

The first reason businesses are reluctant to change annual performance reviews is because they see compensation as the finish line. Without using the yearly performance review to help guide the decision process around compensation distribution, businesses are at a loss for an alternative answer.

The second reason is that change takes time and creating a new annual performance review process is a lot of work.

Finally, many businesses do not have enough determination to make a change. A lot of them will say, “if it’s not broken, why fix it?”

Why businesses need to change their annual performance reviews

Workplace dynamics have changed. Younger generations grew up in a different world, and they have different expectations than generations that came before them. Older generations are accustomed to the way things have always been. However, younger generations are not afraid to question the status quo. Their desires, needs, and expectations have evolved, and unfortunately, many businesses have not evolved with them.

Younger generations are not driven by compensation to the same degree as generations before. Instead, what drives younger generations is the desire to be a better human and ultimately make the world a better place. Technology powers their lives from morning until night. If they have a question, they Google it. If they want to learn something new, they watch YouTube videos.

So, what does all of this mean for businesses?

If you want to keep employees happy and engaged, you need to make sure that they feel like they have a purpose.

How to keep younger generations happy at work

Put the employee in the center of the discussion. Take time to walk in their shoes and try to see things from their perspective. What are their needs, wants, strengths, weaknesses, and fears?

For years, businesses focused on the business needs of the employees. Companies set expectations and consider how well an employee performs based on these expectations. But, is it time to ask what employees need from the business?

Do you know what your employees need? Do you know what motivates them? Do you know what skills they possess outside of their specific job function?

Take an inventory of what is available within your team. Let employees’ voices be heard and don’t silence them. You should know where employees are the strongest and most confident. It would help if you understood how to create experiences that bring out the best in your employees.

One of the easiest ways to figure all of these things out is to carry out a periodic survey. A survey is a simple way to gather important information about your employees, and it is very time-efficient.

Continuous learning—the constant expansion of skills through learning and increasing knowledge—is crucial if you want employees to stay loyal, engaged, and happy in their roles. Employees usually get some training during their first few weeks on the job. Then, learning experiences start to fade and reduce until there’s very little to no training. This situation gets worse when most of the employees take the same training. The one-size-fits-all approach to training is where many businesses go wrong because not everybody learns the same way.

How to identify training gaps and build a foundation of competencies

You don’t have to spend a lot of time or resources designing tons of new training. Instead, break the process into smaller pieces and tackle the problem one piece at a time. First, consider your existing training offering. Is it extensive or limited? Can employees go through the training at their own pace, or are they pushed to take the training when you tell them?

It’s fair to offer both options. However, if you have limited training for employees, your highest performers are at risk of running out of content, and therefore, they fail to reach their full potential.

Take a full inventory of what the business needs from employees. Ask what the business needs to be good at to be successful. Once you have this information, connect it to the required competencies, skills, behaviors, and attitudes to make it happen. With this, you create the first layer of the foundation.

Next, identify what employees need and want from the business. Combining both of these objectives will help you identify areas where the company lacks content to bridge specific gaps.

Remember, training doesn’t have to be formal. Training can be in the form of a video, a blog post, a 30-minute e-learning course, an interactive seminar, and so on. Your main goal here is to build a foundation that allows you to support your employees’ potential while also focusing on what you need from them today.

Make sure that your learning offerings are rooted in a foundation of competencies. Younger generations are not motivated by compensations as much as they are motivated by a business’s commitment to developing employees.

In conclusion

Annual performance reviews are critical. However, it’s equally vital that you create an environment where your employees are fully supported and continue to learn new things, improve their skills, and become better people.

When done right, performance reviews help employees understand their strengths and weaknesses—ideally this should be done through a competency-based framework. Many will want to do better and strengthen those weaknesses through training activities, and it’s important that they have the option and training available to do so.

Do you want to learn more about competency-based performance management?

Watch our on-demand webinar: Handling Performance Reviews During Business Unusual.

The post How to Create Competency-Based Performance Reviews appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

As discussed in part one of this article, there are three actions you can take to improve the effectiveness of performance management in the current environment:

1. Identify areas you can control inside your organization to adapt to the changes outside
2. Consider a strategic “reset” by assessing the disruption caused by the pandemic and using the lessons learned to your advantage
3. Assess which human capital elements to disrupt so they align with your continuous change processes

Why disrupt? Because disruption provides opportunities to reevaluate and improve existing processes. Companies that are still using old-school performance management processes should use the disruption from the pandemic as an opportunity to modernize performance management.

As a result, performance, learning, and business goals can be combined, aligned, and continuous to build a successful, agile company.

Leverage the Natural Connection Between Performance and Learning

With constantly changing business objectives, organizations need the right resources to quickly respond. Two resources that can improve a company’s performance management faster than any other are HR and L&D. In most cases, HR handles performance management while L&D handles ongoing learning and development.

Connecting the two enables a continuous cycle of identifying, addressing, and reassessing the skills, competencies, and behaviors needed to align to business objectives. Thus, companies can address their needs through talent development while still meeting business goals.

Making the decision for HR and L&D to join forces could mean the difference between your business moving ahead in a pandemic or falling behind.

Shared Responsibility = Shared Accountability for Success

Performance management processes that have a disconnect between HR and L&D continue to be used but are rarely effective. In Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends survey, the data reflects a growing view that, just as “DevOps” combined software development and IT operations to allow for better success, the responsibility for L&D should also be shared.

Thirty-eight percent of respondents felt that L&D and the business should share responsibility for learning, and 48% of respondents who said learning at their organization was not currently positioned for success also felt it should be shared.

Shared responsibility means that performance management and its processes work in unison with learning and development to create a continuous cycle of identifying and addressing knowledge gaps.

This helps businesses keep up with shifting goals, which is critical during a pandemic when businesses are at the mercy of the latest news, guidelines, and mandates.

Businesses are having to reskill or upskill their entire workforce to effectively adapt to changing needs. The performance management process and learning experience become significantly more effective when HR and L&D work together. It can help you create a culture of continuous learning and agility in the face of change.

Take Advantage of Technology, Especially Now

Performance management, when combined with L&D, is most effective when organizations embrace advances in technology. Technology helps companies fast-track their ability to reassess skills, competencies, and behaviors they need as business objectives shift.

Along with a well-crafted competency framework to help with your company’s “reset” strategy, having access to insightful workforce data is key.

One of the trends highlighted in Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends report was about the spotlight COVID-19 is placing on the need for insightful workforce data.

It recommended that organizations leverage the power of technology to access this critical information, by:

• Identifying the top questions that you should ask to get the insights you need
• Challenging yourself on whether you’ve been asking the right questions all along
• Determining whether you have the resources in place to use the data in a way that accurately perceives the state of the organization and workforce

Using technology that provides these valuable insights means companies can rapidly reassess where they stand regarding skills and competencies during a crisis and pivot as needed.

The benefits are threefold: Managers would be better equipped to lead through change, employees would have the know-how to confidently perform their jobs, and organizations would have a reliable system in place to successfully navigate change.

Would you like to learn more about making your performance management process more effective? Watch our on-demand webinar: Handling Performance Reviews During Business Unusual.

The post Performance Management in a Pandemic: Using Disruption to Boost Effectiveness appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

This article is the first of two parts that focuses on laying the groundwork for how companies can effectively manage performance in a way that both aligns with shifting business objectives and keeps up with the changing skills, competencies, and behaviors employees need to meet those objectives.

The Challenges of Uncertainty in Performance Management

It goes without saying that aligning performance management to business objectives and goal setting during COVID-19 is like trying to shoot a moving target. For instance, how many times have you heard the following questions?

• “How will we handle performance reviews this year?”
• “How can we set goals if we can’t pin down future business plans?”
• “What will 2021 even look like?”

Right now, there are simply too many unknowns for businesses to be able to map out a course of action and strategic objectives—ones that, under normal circumstances, would be used to guide the performance management process. So, what is the answer? How should organizations proceed?

Some companies have decided to create quarter-to-quarter and even month-to-month strategic plans because of the uncertainty of the current atmosphere. Regarding performance reviews, some have delayed them until later in the year, choosing to prioritize staff well-being for now, and focus on performance later. Others are continuing as planned, but virtually and with adjustments like changing from a formal grading system to a simpler conversation format. These solutions may work temporarily, but performance management strategies and reviews cannot be put on hold for too long.

Adapting vs. Reacting to Change

There is change, and there is 2020-level change. And then there is 2020-level change in the U.S. Whether you’re in the retail, hospitality, grocery, restaurant, or any other industry, you are likely experiencing a lot of it, and you know that making it through successfully boils down to how well you can adapt to it.

Companies that adapt to change anticipate it, prepare for it, and are willing to bend as needed, whereas those that react to it do quite the opposite. A good analogy is to imagine someone in an ocean surrounded by rough waters. They’re being tossed around by the tide, surprised by each passing wave, and breathlessly fighting to stay afloat. Not the ideal way to respond to change, yet sadly relatable for many companies right now. The goal is to find a way to remain successful no matter the “weather.” But how?

Decide What You Can Control  

There is a saying: “The same boiling water that softens the potato, hardens the egg. It’s about what you are made of, not the circumstances.” Essentially, change is inevitable, and businesses would do well to adapt to it by focusing on internal operations first.

What goes on inside a company—its organizational structure, operations, systems, people, and policies—is what business executives do have control over. For example, they can take a deeper look into the various parts of their company, identify the functions or systems within it that would have the greatest impact on their ability to be “ready for anything,” and once identified, determine the changes that must take place in order to create a thoughtful plan of action. This is how companies can focus internally to change what they can control so they can better adapt to the changes outside of their control.

Consider a Strategic “Reset”

In a recent Gartner article, it was recommended that companies use the lessons they learned from COVID-19 as an opportunity to “reset” their strategies according to three phases:

Phase 1: Respond—Focus on immediate needs to keep things afloat (short duration, often chaotic)

Phase 2: Recover—Make an organized effort to stabilize operations (medium duration)

Phase 3: Renew—Execute strategic, durable plans based on learnings (long duration)

As companies assess the disruption caused by the pandemic while mapping out their “reset” strategies, they should also assess which human capital elements they should disrupt so that they align with their continuous change management processes.

Read more in part two of this article, which focuses more specifically on the roles that HR and L&D play in performance management, the importance of technology, and the role it plays in connecting goals, skills, and learning to deliver a better experience and a more effective performance cycle.

Learn more about making your performance management process more effective in our on-demand webinar: Handling Performance Reviews During Business Unusual.

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The impact of these demands—on recruiting, retention, learning, development, talent strategy, employee productivity, and performance—has left many HR professionals wondering, “What exactly is HR’s value proposition and function?”

The fact remains that—global crisis or not—the HR function continues to include managing those routine yet essential processes: recruiting, hiring, onboarding paperwork, legal compliance, harassment training, and workforce planning, to name a few.

This isn’t the rule, of course. HR leaders in many companies have done an excellent job at up-leveling their teams beyond the administrative processes to a people- and culture-first approach that puts the “human” back into human resources.

Still, there is a prevailing problem I see companies face: The human capital management processes of the past aren’t flexible enough to adapt to the dramatic shifts in the way we need to effectively manage the workforce, deploy learning initiatives, develop talent, and deploy an overall human capital management strategy.

While several of these old processes sit on my top five “time to adapt” list, one that stands out is performance management. HR should connect performance management and learning and here are three reasons why.

Reason #1: Performance management has evolved

Traditionally, performance management is a point-in-time event that happens annually or biannually alongside merit increases.

Over the years, however, studies revealed a new trend: continuous performance management and feedback loops coupled with ongoing learning and development programs are crucial to engage and retain employees while giving HR teams a talent pool to meet changing business needs.

Reason #2: L&D teams are the linchpin

Having served in roles across in the restaurant, hospitality, and manufacturing industries, among others, I’ve witnessed how HR, and learning and talent development teams engage while serving their departments and employees.

What I know for sure is that L&D can act as the linchpin to adapt the old performance management process to the new, continuous performance management cycles. L&D has a holistic view of the needs, gaps, and effective programs for divisions, jobs, and roles.

With the right learning management or talent development platform, they can identify the connection between skills and behaviors, and how to deploy them alongside performance management cycles and see the employee experience when it matters most.

Reason #3: It’s simply the right time to integrate learning and performance management

“In an age where continuous learning is essential to drive new skills and behaviors, fewer than half of companies effectively link learning to performance.” This Brandon Hall Group observation hits home because it’s true—but it doesn’t have to be.

So, the question becomes: What keeps HR teams from changing their process?

I’ve found that (1) L&D leaders see the gap, and (2) HR teams are constrained by competing priorities and an increased need to address more strategic, higher-priority areas in addition to their existing functions (payroll, benefits, rewards).

Moving toward a more agile, collaborative, and continuous performance management process requires both teams to recognize this transition as an important priority for future success.

By implementing a continuous cycle of performance and goals management within your organization, HR and L&D teams can:

• Measure the impact of competency and skills
• Support learning effectiveness and impact measurement
• Identify skill, knowledge and competency gaps
• Establish the link between performance review feedback and development to close gaps
• Develop an informed strategy to identify and fill open roles from within

There are many ways to adapt your performance management process to your organization’s changing needs. Most importantly, it’s an opportunity to bridge the divide between HR and learning to deliver a more personalized, effective performance management review cycle.

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Performance management encompasses many different facets—feedback, performance management training, evaluation frequency, how to address performance outcomes, and so on—but it begins with goal setting. How do other organizations approach goal setting? And which approaches are more successful than others? Here is a quick look at the key findings.

Most Common Metric Used to Evaluate Performance

Almost all the study respondents—94% of organizations—used performance goals to evaluate their workforce around topics that include completing tasks, projects, or other deliverables for which they were responsible as part of their role.

Individual(s) Most Likely to Provide Goal Setting Input

• Managers (94%)
• Employees themselves (62%)
• Senior leadership (42%)
• HR function (20%)
• Talent development (8%)

Although only 8% of talent development professionals had input into setting goals, organizations that reported high levels of effectiveness in all areas of performance management were substantially more likely to include talent development in the goal-setting process.

Extent of Employee and Company Goal Alignment

The research study infers that it would be a good practice to align employees’ performance goals with overall business goals. The results indicated that having a strong alignment between the two was significantly linked to top-performing organizations. More than half of the organizations (59%) aligned employees’ goals with the overall organizational strategy to a high or very high extent, showing that this is a fairly common practice among them. Approximately one third (31%) of respondents align employee and organizational goals to a moderate extent, and only 9% aligned them to a small extent or not at all. 

It is important, however, to keep in mind that, depending on the complexity of your business, aligning workforce goals to corporate goals may not be easy, or even the right thing to do. For example, the performance goals of front-line staff may not make sense to align with very top-level corporate goals, in which case, being aligned with departmental goals can serve as a better option.

Other Methods Used to Evaluate Employee Performance

Performance goals may be the most common metric used to evaluate employee performance, but it is not the only metric. In fact, 79% of the organizations in the study measured their employees based on how they demonstrate certain traits or company values, for example, learning, collaboration, excellence, etc. Most respondents measured their staff based on their success in gaining new skills, knowledge, or qualifications, as well as successfully demonstrating proficiency in areas beyond their current level of expertise.

Key Takeaways

• Consider having talent development provide input into setting employees’ goals
• Build strong alignment between employees’ goals and organizational (or at least departmental) goals
• Expand evaluation metrics to include employees’ qualities, values, knowledge, and skills 

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