Employers and 56 Million U.S. Workers Aren’t Benefiting from Performance Management for All Types of Employees.

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‘Continuous Performance Management’ is quickly gaining popularity as the term used to describe the process of augmenting or replacing traditional annual performance reviews with frequent manager-employee ‘check-in’ meetings about goals and performance.

Over the past three years, numerous articles and research papers have been published about organizations such as Adobe, Accenture, Deloitte, and Cisco transitioning to Continuous Performance Management.

These documented Continuous Performance Management initiatives have focused almost exclusively on Knowledge and Office Workers rather than Manual Workers. They underscore the benefits that have been realized from this transition including:

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

Turnover rates for managers, professionals, and office workers are generally in the range of 25% to 50%.

Among other problems, high worker turnover rates elevate an organization’s costs for recruiting and training replacement employees, and increase the organization’s exposure to potential legal action resulting from the separation by former employees.

Continuous Performance Management for all types of employees can help in two ways:

• By increasing employee engagement through frequent manager-employee check-in meetings, Continuous Performance Management can help reduce the turnover rate for all employees in an organization, including Manual Workers.
• Because Continuous Performance Management requires employee performance feedback to be captured on an on-going basis in support of frequent check-in meetings, the organization automatically has documentation that can help to minimize the risk of legal action by former employees when separations do occur.

Despite the obvious benefits, today virtually all commercial Continuous Performance Management products focus exclusively on Knowledge and Office workers, and never on the 56 million Manual Workers. Why is this?

Automated Coaching: Many Continuous Performance Management products coach managers with online assessments, help and tools to help with difficult conversations, personality assessments and leadership. It’s difficult for ‘canned’ assessments and tools to effectively coach managers given the diversity of issues that they’re faced with when providing feedback, some of which is specific to the organization or the Manual Worker’s job function.

High Cost and Long-Term Commitments: Many Continuous Performance Management products have setup and configuration fees, require contracts with minimum annual costs, and are simply too expensive for cost-conscious organizations.

Can Continuous Performance Management be implemented in organizations with Manual Workers?

Yes. Properly designed, a state-of-the-art Continuous Performance Management solution can fully support Manual Workers, in addition to Office and Knowledge Workers.

Technology Access and Feedback Capture: In a state-of-the-art Continuous Performance Management solution, Manual Workers aren’t required to access any computing technology or have email accounts to be enrolled into the solution. Instead, supervisors are equipped to instantly capture ‘snapshots’ of performance feedback for workers at any time or place with a mobile app on a smartphone or any web-enabled device. With voice dictation support and a streamlined mobile app workflow, it only takes seconds to capture feedback.

Rather than using canned surveys or prompts to elicit feedback, supervisors are guided to capture feedback based on the worker’s goal areas. This develops a comprehensive view of the employee’s performance and development over time.

Because feedback is captured instantly at the time that the performance is observed or thought of, it’s most accurate and isn’t forgotten. The feedback snapshots are used as the basis for the frequent manager-employee check-in meetings that are the cornerstone of Continuous Performance Management.

FREE or ultra-competitive cost, no setup fees, and no annual contracts: A state-of-the-art Continuous Performance Management solution is completely FREE for teams of up to 10 members (with all features enabled and no time limitation), is less than 8¢ per employee per day for larger teams or entire organizations, and has no setup fees or annual contracts.

Delivering Performance Management for all types of employees that supports Manual Workers isn’t a theoretical exercise at SnapEval. For example, numerous organizations use SnapEval with workers providing services such as commercial grounds keeping and snow removal. In addition to supporting Manual Workers, SnapEval is also used extensively with Knowledge and Office Workers.

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.

Many organizations of all sizes are considering augmenting or replacing traditional annual performance reviews with more continuous feedback management for their employees. The term that is rapidly gaining popularity for this new approach is ‘Continuous Performance Management.’     

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The benefits of these frequent check-in meetings have been widely documented to include:

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

For check-in meetings to be effective, it is essential that both the manager and employee are prepared to discuss the employee’s goals and detailed feedback about the employee’s performance.

Goals: An employee’s goals can include any mix of corporate goals and values, department goals, job function goals, team goals, and individual goals.  Corporate goals and values, department goals, and job function goals tend to be long-term and typically don’t vary over the course of a year.  Team and individual goals may include both long-term and short-term goals, such as a specific project or career development objective.  Goals may be weighted differently depending on their importance to the organization.  All goals and values should be documented and accessible to the employee at any time.  They should be well understood by the employee through ongoing conversations with the manager.

There are four essential components for managers’ feedback in an effective Continuous Feedback Management solution:

• Feedback Quantity
• Feedback Quality
• Feedback Effectiveness
• Feedback Coverage

Let’s look at each of these components and how managers can achieve them.

By enabling feedback to be captured quickly, at the time that it’s observed or thought of, it’s most accurate and isn’t forgotten.

Feedback Quality: To ensure that the quality of the captured feedback is maximized, sometimes expert advice is required to coach managers about the most effective ways to compose feedback or deliver it to an employee.  This can be especially true for developmental feedback.  This coaching should occur proactively, before the feedback is shared with the employee.

No Continuous Feedback Management system offering ‘canned’ advice to managers about effective performance feedback can approach the expertise, organizational awareness, and cultural sensitivity that an organization’s own HR Professional can offer.

A state-of-the-art Continuous Feedback Management solution engages an organization’s own HR Professional by automatically queuing feedback for their review, editing, and approval or rejection.  This allows the HR Professional to proactively coach managers with expert advice when necessary.  The manager can only share the feedback with the employee after it has been released from the queue by an HR Professional.

To minimize administrative overhead, criteria for queuing the feedback can be specified by the organization’s HR Professional.  Example criteria could include the identity of the feedback recipient or creator, the feedback achievement level, or the content of the feedback text note.  This assures that an HR Professional is only required to review feedback that has the potential to be problematic.

Many ‘real-time feedback’ products always share feedback instantly with the employee when it’s captured.

A state-of-the-art Continuous Feedback Management solution enables the manager to instantly share the feedback or defer sharing it to a future point in time, with the flip of a single switch.

Feedback Coverage: Performance feedback is captured in individual snapshots that cover a single goal area or value.  Over time, it is important for managers to capture feedback snapshots across all goal areas and values for each employee.  Like assembling individual photographs into a photo album, feedback snapshots form a comprehensive, accurate assessment of each employee’s performance.

A state-of-the-art Continuous Feedback Management solution includes administrative dashboards and provides a comprehensive view of feedback performance levels and trends. At a glance, heatmaps enable HR Professionals and Managers to ensure that each employee is receiving feedback across all goal areas. In SnapEval, all four components work together to provide a complete, state-of-the-art Continuous Feedback Management solution.

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.

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.