Real-Time Manager Feedback: Popularity, Benefits and Risks.      

According to a recent survey by Accenture Strategy, 45% of the 2,100 respondents indicated that their organizations had moved from annual feedback to ongoing performance feedback for their employees in the past five years.  This is a huge shift.

If effectively implemented, ongoing feedback offers the potential for significant benefits for employees and the organizations they work for including:

• Increasing employee engagement and performance
• Satisfying millennials’ strong desire for frequent feedback
• Improving organizational agility

Unfortunately, as the volume and frequency of ongoing feedback approaches “real-time,” the risk for problems with the feedback recipient increase dramatically. This is especially true for feedback delivered electronically to the employee by email or app the instant manager feedback is captured. Social media and email have also provided many lessons about the potential downsides of unmanaged, instantaneous message delivery.

Most seasoned Human Resource Professionals have had the opportunity to deal with the aftermath of employees who have received manager feedback that was poorly constructed and/or delivered.  The employee is often surprised, angry, and more disengaged than before the feedback was delivered.  In the worst case, the feedback can also be damaging to the organization, exposing it to potential legal action for harassment or other offenses.

Continuous Performance Management with Smart Delivery: Benefits Maximized – Risks Minimized

Continuous Performance Management is a specific form of ongoing feedback, with a focus on enabling frequent, structured “check-in” meetings between managers and employees about goals and performance.  Check-in meetings provide an opportunity for managers to share performance feedback when it is relevant to the employee, and actionable.

Accurate, high quality feedback is essential to effective check-in meetings.  Enabling employee performance feedback to be captured instantly, whenever and wherever the performance is observed or the manager thinks of it, ensures that the feedback is most accurate and not forgotten.

Allowing managers to send appropriate feedback instantaneously to their assigned employees is consistent with Continuous Performance Management principles.  For example, a brief “thank you” or “job well done” may best be delivered electronically by email or app while the employee would most appreciate it, especially if the manager isn’t able to deliver the message in-person at that time.

By contrast, manager feedback that is developmental should almost always be discussed face-to-face in a check-in meeting.  This provides the opportunity for employee to understand the concern in detail and work with the manager to create an action plan to avoid similar problems in the future.

Problematic manager feedback with ineffective developmental content, inappropriate language, or worse should never be delivered to the employee.  Instead, a Human Resource Professional should coach the manager so that he can provide constructive feedback to his assigned employees.

The key to avoiding problematic feedback and maximixing the effectiveness of developmental feedback is to automatically identify and intercept only feedback that requires review by a Human Resource Professional to determine if further action is required (such as fine-tuning the content of developmental feedback to make it most effective), while allowing all other feedback to flow normally to the recipient as directed by the feedback creator.

By queuing only feedback that meets the specified criteria, administration by Human Resource Professionals to review, edit and approve or reject feedback is minimized.  When feedback is queued for review, Smart Delivery specifies the criteria that caused it to be queued, so the Human Resource Professional instantly knows what to look for when the feedback is reviewed.

I’m David Yeaple, VP of Business Development and Product Management at SnapEval, LLC. I’d love to get your feedback about this blog, our products, or anything else related to employee performance management. You can reach me at dyeaple@SnapEval.com or +1 585-414-5000.

How SnapEval 2.0 Continuous Performance Management Software Started…     

In 2012, Mike Pinch, co-founder of SnapEval, LLC, conceived the idea for SnapEval Continuous Performance Management software. The inspiration came from the annual struggle faced by managers when completing performance reviews for their employees. Often, little to no documentation of performance throughout the year resulted in reviews that primarily focused on recent months or notable events from earlier in the year. Recognizing the need to capture feedback in real-time, Mike realized the necessity for an app. With no existing solution available, SnapEval Continuous Performance Management software was born.

SnapEval 1.0 was released as a mobile app in September 2013 and customers quickly identified the value of aggregating managers’ feedback to track performance levels and trends across the organization.  SnapEval 1.0 Enterprise Edition with a cloud-based enterprise dashboard was launched in January 2014.  I joined SnapEval as co-founder in June 2014.

As customer deployments grew in size and complexity, it became apparent that a much more flexible, robust and scalable architecture was required.   For example, customers wanted to be able to set goals for departments, teams and individuals, as well as at the organizational level.

Based on feedback from SnapEval customers and conversations with hundreds of HR Professionals, Mike and I outlined the requirements for SnapEval 2.0 in February 2015.  Built from the ground up on the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure and a highly flexible, scalable and secure architecture, SnapEval 2.0 was introduced in October 2015.

We’ve continued to listen to our customers and other HR Professionals as SnapEval 2.0 has evolved over the past year.  Since the release of SnapEval 2.0, we’ve added dozens of innovative features to meet customer needs and delight them!  One key insight has been to enable HR Professionals to proactively coach managers about their feedback to an employee, before the employee receives the feedback.  This innovation was so unique that we secured a provisional patent for it in June 2016.

By the way, our responsiveness to customer requests is legendary.  When a customer requests a major new feature, we socialize it with other customers to make sure that it has broad appeal and will meet the needs of both current and prospective customers.  If it does, we typically implement, test and release it in a few weeks.  If it doesn’t, we work with the customer to see how we can best meet their needs without negatively impacting others.  Minor features are implemented even more quickly.  Customers are delighted!

At the same time, over the past four years, leading organizations have identified that frequent, structured “check-in” meetings between managers and employees about performance and goals increases employee engagement and performance, satisfies millennials’ strong desire for frequent feedback, and improves organizational agility.  These organizations have invested years and millions of dollars in proprietary solutions to capture, manage and share performance feedback for these check-in meetings in their own organizations.

This new performance management process is often called “Continuous Performance Management,” and it is now being used to improve traditional annual performance reviews or replace them altogether!

The original vision for SnapEval 2.0 of enabling managers to instantly capture employee performance feedback on their smartphones perfectly supports the frequent, structured check-in meetings that are at the core of Continuous Performance Management.

And Why It’s Great for You as an HR Professional!

In addition to using input from customers and HR Professionals to develop SnapEval 2.0’s innovative features for Continuous Performance Management, we also listened to their feedback about how they wanted to engage with our company and products.

First, they told us that a 30-day trial wasn’t sufficient time to fully evaluate a performance management product like SnapEval 2.0.  They also told us that there was always a concern that somehow there would be a cost or automatic billing at the end of the 30-day period, even though we never asked for a credit card for the trial.  In response, we developed the FREE 10-User Account for teams.  This enables anyone to create a SnapEval 2.0 account, enroll up to ten of their team members, and use it indefinitely for FREE – without a credit card.  All SnapEval 2.0 features are enabled, there’s no time limitation and there’s no worry about billing or a credit card charge.

Second, they told us that they need to be able to start working with a new product like SnapEval 2.0 immediately, without the complications of enrolling users, setting up goals, or any other configuration details.  To meet this need, we now automatically pre-populate all new SnapEval 2.0 accounts with sample data including users, goal areas, achievement levels and even sample employee feedback.  This means that anyone can begin capturing employee performance feedback within two minutes of creating a new SnapEval 2.0 account.  We also made it extremely simple to replace the sample data with real team members, goal areas and achievement levels.  The sample data can then be automatically eliminated with a single click!

Finally, they told us that they value our responsiveness to questions and requests.  Even though we’ve worked hard to make the process of setting up and managing SnapEval 2.0 a simple, intuitive, self-service experience, we also want you to know that we always welcome any inquiries, comments or suggestions that you may have about our products or company.

Now that you know more about SnapEval, why not sign up for a FREE account for your team?

I’m David Yeaple, VP of Business Development and Product Management at SnapEval, LLC.  I’d love to get your feedback about this blog, our products or anything else related to employee performance management.  You can reach me at dyeaple@SnapEval.com or +1 585-414-5000.