From fixed appraisals to flexible ‘agile’ performance management

Over the past few years, more and more people have been talking about agile performance management, with a simultaneous move away from the fixed, more formulaic appraisals we were all so familiar with.

But is this transition right for you at this moment in time?

It won’t come as much of a surprise that people have been frustrated or irritated with performance appraisal processes for decades. Both managers and employees have given numerous reasons, but a viable alternative has been a long time coming.

The changing landscape: demands for flexibility and adaptability

So what’s changing? What’s driven the current change? Well, the modern world now demands flexibility and adaptability in all areas of the workplace. Jobs come and go, tasks come and go often at lightning speed, an ever more diverse workplace means that traditional staff management approaches are being challenged and marketplace/economic issues and pressures keep us all permanently on our toes.

As a result, we need a way to manage and develop staff that’s fit for our rapidly changing and evolving organisations. We need something that is flexible, adaptable … something agile!

Here’s a quote that perhaps sets the tone for agile performance management:

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence…”

Benefits of agile performance management

Some reports suggest that by ‘going agile’ there is the potential to make improvements of up to 30% from the outcome you’re currently getting from the more traditional performance management process.

But for us at Jaluch, it’s not just about what comes out of the process itself, agile can be used to modernise your working practices, bring in energy, create better focus for training and development opportunities, increase employee engagement, improve communication, aid retention etc.

Agility/adaptability/flexibility and all the other words you can find for these things in a thesaurus, can become the foundation for your organisational culture, rather than just another name for your performance review process.

At Jaluch, we’ve been supporting organisations wanting to jump on board with agile and develop new performance management processes that are valuable to and valued by managers and employees alike. Please do ask us if you would like us to share some of our experiences, or take a look at our agile performance management training. But if you first want to consider a bit more …

The ‘old style’ performance appraisal process

It’s fair to say that traditional performance appraisals are not loved, quite the opposite, by everyone involved!

The ‘old style’ performance appraisal process:

• Centres around the annual appraisal and annual/6 monthly feedback.
• Focusses on an evaluation of performance over the previous 6/12 month period, often with a link into pay reviews/bonuses.
• Allows management to set goals to be accomplished over a 6 monthly/12 monthly time-frame.
• Is time and paperwork heavy.

Criticisms of the ‘old style’ performance appraisal process:

• KPI’s/goals not aligning with strategic goals – and sometimes having no correlation whatsoever with strategic goals.
• The ‘recency’ effect – with managers focussing on the employee’s most recent performance, rather than assessing all performance across the review period.
• Fixed goals are still used even where both the manager and employee consider them no longer achievable or relevant.
• All too often very little good quality communication occurs between appraisals.
• Appraisals are seen by many as overly formal, often negative or focussed on the wrong things and often little more than an irritating and pointless admin task.
• How L&D discussions and commitments seldom have reach beyond the appraisal meeting.
• The important – and sometimes sensitive – discussions are often avoided with a tendency instead to focus on easier discussion points.

Moving to agile

Agile performance management is quite different from this traditional approach. It’s forward-looking, involves regular communication, often includes 360-degree feedback and tends to prioritise employee growth and development.

Key components of agile performance management:

• Regular check-ins and two-way communication.
• Continuous constructive feedback, including 360-degree feedback, or crowd-sourcing (asking a group of people for feedback).
• Consistent employee growth, learning and development, including a focus on coaching.
• Positive recognition by managers and others, including social recognition amongst the team.
• Collaborative goals agreed by employee and manager and changed/adapted as needed.

Why should you consider adopting agile performance management?

Who wouldn’t’ want to be ‘agile’ in today’s world? Don’t be a stick in the mud, be excited by an opportunity for something new, something invigorating!

The data shows that organisations who adopt a more agile approach with more regular (eg monthly or quarterly) check-ups can achieve up to 30% more return from their performance management process.

As a reminder, agile performance management:

• Focuses on flexible individual and team goals which can adapt and change as necessary, ensuring they are always relevant and applicable to ‘today’s’ work.
• Allows an employee to set or collaborate in the setting of their own goals, which results in a far more motivated employee, with a sense of ownership and accountability.
• Focuses on continuous employee growth and development across the year, thereby ensuring not only that employees are more motivated and engaged at work, but that you have both a great skill set and an evolving skill set.

Managers who conduct monthly/quarterly reviews (especially those with many direct reports) can often feel overwhelmed by the time involved in conducting the reviews. The introduction of agile performance management may well involve a radical overhaul of the way in which reviews/meetings are conducted, but will definitely, long term, take considerable pressure off managers’ shoulders.

At Jaluch, we’ve always said that appraisals done well can be highly motivational and effective, but they are better not done at all rather than done badly – poor appraisals can be highly demotivational. If you look around your management team, can you identify who does them well but also who’s known for not being as committed to the process? For our teams to feel they are all given a fair and equal chance at work, we really need managers to be consistent in their management of staff.

Final thoughts…

Consistency and proper training matter

Managers need to be properly trained to ensure that they carry out the performance management process effectively and consistently. Recently, we worked with a business whose managers all attended the training we delivered on the new agile review process, but whose senior team all decided they were above it/too busy for it/too experienced/too something or other based on what other excuses sounded plausible. The result was some seriously disgruntled managers, who put the hard work in for their own team members when it came to review time, but whose own line managers failed to even meet with them, let alone value and appreciate them. Simply not good enough!

A cautionary note on 360-degree feedback

360 degree feedback or crowdsourcing can be really useful if done constructively, but if poorly done, feedback can be viewed as criticism and/or undermining and as a result the employee can become demotivated or even actively withdraw. 360 feedback therefore needs to be carefully implemented and managed. Also, if any individual deliberately or carelessly chooses to use this process in such a way that damages or undermines others, that needs to be quickly and firmly managed.

Making agile your own

Make it your own – agile means agile – adaptable, flexible, continuously changing – so don’t hesitate to create something that works for you – irrespective of what everyone else is doing or says that you should be doing. Also remember that you can update the scheme/process part way through a year or at the end of a year – keep it moving, keep it changing so it always reflects your needs.

Example course content: developing agile supervisors and managers

Why not use this example course agenda, which we use to develop supervisors’ and managers’ skills, to identify what ‘agile’ might look like in your business and where your energies need to be focused? If 360 is not yet right for you, consider adding it a few years down the line. Similarly, if your managers simply aren’t bought into the benefits of day-to-day performance management, perhaps it’s time to focus on where the blockers are.

• What is agile performance management?
• The benefits of making performance management an on-going process
• Less paper, more value – using documentation as a guide, not the focus
• More listening, less talking!
• Identifying your key message – one thing at a time, please!
• Using 360 feedback – opportunities, anxieties and best practice
• Effectively managing sensitive issues
• Giving motivational and constructive feedback without the “ouch”!
• Dealing with an employee “in denial”
• Setting SMART objectives and adapting objectives as you go!
• Assessing development needs without setting unrealistic expectations
• Developing coaching skills to develop your staff

Bringing Agile to life in your team:

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow”

How do you introduce agile performance management?

Agile performance management can be introduced, gradually and gently, or by a more radical overhaul of the current performance management/review (appraisals) system. As we said above, there is not a ‘one size fits all’. As initial suggestion you could run a pilot, which would help you firstly introduce this to the organisation and would also give you meaningful data which will help you prove value and get buy-in from accross the organisation.

If you would like to discuss your current performance management system and support to incorporate some or all of the elements of agile performance management, then please do give us a call and we would be delighted to work with you to find a solution that suits, otherwise take a closer look at our agile performance management training.

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Jaluch is a long-established and widely respected HR and Training provider in the UK.  As an award-winning business we always try to practice what we preach, adapting and flexing our offering to suit every organisation we work with, and in line with whatever the timescales that are thrown at us! We can support you with grievance investigations, disciplinaries, Tribunal claims, and day-to-day staff management issues as well as providing coaching and L&D support. If you’ve not tried us before, perhaps it’s time now! No lengthy or complex contracts – we like all our business relationships straight-forward, transparent and rely on our clients coming back to us year after year because they like what we do, rather than because the paperwork demands they work with us! Go on, give us a call!