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:

1. 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.

2. 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.  

3. 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:

• Reframe the performance management system to incorporate the individual human into and at the center of the design.

• 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:

  • Individual talent, skills experience - pre-hire, point of hire, project basis, ongoing, annually.

  • Individual perceptions to yield ownership and empowerment of what they uniquely bring to a role, project, team or customer deliverable.

• 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.

• 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:

1. Over time this human centered design would yield empowerment and position the organization to shift to an increased individual owned and driven performance plan.

2. 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.

3. Human centered design would shift the focus onto people and off of the predominate focus on roles or jobs.

4. 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.

5. 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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? 
5. 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:

1. CHANGE has proven successful with other internal endeavors,
2. Where an openness to TIME by a few ‘ambassadors’ as well as those that participate, can be allocated across 180 days, and
3. 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:

1. 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,

2. Weekly, bi weekly, monthly updates and tips should go out to the entire organization as this transition takes place,

3. Set up a discussion board where people can voice concern, advice, opinions and have these actively answered,

4. 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,

5. Consistently get manager and employee feedback on the process and perceptions of impact.

Suggestions for overcoming the challenge of TIME #2:

1. Set a flexible road map to help manage goals and action plan to role out this new approach,

2. 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:

1. 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,

2. Give trainers a platform where they can communicate and compare often with each other,

3. Trainings start off with small changes and increase in depth as time goes one to help ease employees into this new approach,

4. 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!