Employee Engagement: Pivotal to Talent Management

When we work with clients we see that engagement plays as key a role in Talent Management as it does in Organisational Performance.

We all know the research and the resulting stats surrounding employee engagement: which show that a stronger engaged workforce will demonstrate an increase in productivity, a reduction absenteeism, a leap in creativity - but how often do we look at employee engagement as a critical component of our day-to-day talent management activities?

Without engagement in your appraisal and performance management processes, or your talent reviews or your succession planning programmes, any actions planned can become little more than tick-box, form filling exercises.

But how do you plan to increase this engagement - and indeed do you know from where you are starting?

Good questions - and ones we are help our clients to grapple with right now.

360 – how often is too often?

Once people start to use a 360 questionnaire and realise the value of gaining the insight into how others see them, it’s sometimes easy for them to make the (incorrect) leap in thought process that the more 360s they do, the quicker they’ll develop and acquire the skills and behaviours they’re looking for.

So how often should we be utilising this tool?

Based on the experience both of our Head of Psychology and the feedback from customers as to what works for them, we’d recommend this to be every 12-18 months as a minimum. Any more often than this and you may start to see a less effective 360 feedback emerge.

Why is this?

People tend to get ‘rater fatigue’ when they're constantly being asked to fill in 360- degree questionnaires. 

You need to allow sufficient time between reviews for people to make the behavioural changes identified or to plan and engage with any personal development which comes out of the 360 feedback session.  There’s likely to be little shift in the behaviour and therefore the ratings in just, say, 3 months.

But even if it isn’t the time to complete a full 360 questionnaire, it’s worthwhile gathering on-going, regular feedback at critical points. For this reason, both our Talent Performance® and Talent Advance® modules from our on-line talent management Talent® system include a ‘Get Feedback' function. This enables people to get more informal, immediate 'pulse' feedback on things that have just happened or on areas they're developing. This is usually shorter, qualitative, aimed at a small number of people and related to one or two specific questions, which doesn't create the rater fatigue that 3 month full-360s would.

To talk about this more, let us know your thoughts below.

Can you spot high potential?

In many organisations, the HR team is able to identify those with high potential – and knows how to
develop this. But for some organisations, spotting high potential can be a tricky business – and
especially so for line managers as traditional career paths no longer, if they ever, necessarily
enable the leaders of the future to rise to the top.

At Head Light, we see that two of the main challenges which impact the identification of potential are:

• Projection
• Detection

Let us explain.

To find the future stars of the organisation, line managers need to identify and understand what the
early markers of High Potential (HiPo) are. That is, what are the behavioural precursors of superior
performance in more complex or more senior roles? This involves a bit of projection and
extrapolation. Often these precursors or indicators are identified by carrying out biographical career
interviews with current high performers and looking back at what set them apart at an early stage in
their career. A crystal ball would be helpful though...

Once you know what you’re looking for, then you have to assess for it and find ways to detect it.
Traditionally this has been done by gut feel (“I know it when I see it!”), line manager evaluation or
performance appraisal. The main difficulty of these approaches is that they all rely on the view of
one individual (and it is usually the line manager) and they are typically based on an assessment of
performance in the current role, and that may not afford the individual the opportunity to
demonstrate broader capability or potential.

Evaluations that are reliant on one perspective are, of course, also subject to a number of cognitive
biases, which are naturally very hard to manage or mitigate against:  The Horns Effect; The ‘Face Fits’ bias. .
In addition to these biases, if the manager-subordinate relationship is not a happy one, this may
well affect judgement regarding current performance and future potential.

So what's to be done?


Psychology and technology have offered us a wide range of means by which we can more robustly
and reliably assess potential – although access to these is not always at a line manager level.  Assessment centres are often used to test for future potential - as are some psychometric tests. More recently, we see the emergence of 360 degree feedback as a means for picking up those HiPo markers but if course this can only be used with those already within the organisation.

But it does make sense to embed the means to ‘assess’ the potential for bigger and more complex roles into current talent management and HR practices so if you and your line managers are already using 360 review as one of one of the processes which help you to manage talent within the business, with only a slight adaptation, it could used to look for ‘high potential’ thereby providing more information and keeping costs to a minimum.


So how can we at Head Light help?

Some organisations are very clear on what ‘potential’ looks like and in our experience, there are a number of attributes which tend to predict success in higher-level roles. Common ‘HiPo’ indicators are:

• Capacity for learning – being able to learn from own mistakes, actively seeking feedback
and using it constructively to inform future performance, reflecting on own behaviour
to learn lessons for the future, being a quick learner and able to learn in a number of
different ways

• Resilience – being able to recover quickly from setbacks, coping with high pressure and
demands, finding ways around obstacles; perseverance in the face of adversity.

• Strategic thinking – longer-term thinking, looking outside the organisation for
opportunities, seeing patterns, trends, themes and relationships, being able to manage
ambiguity and deal with increasingly complex issues, problems, timescales and
information, systems thinking, seeing things from an organisational perspective.

• Flexibility – being able to adapt communication, influencing, leadership and interpersonal
style to suit the demands of the situation and the other people involved, managing change,
shifting one’s approach in response to new priorities.

• Emotional intelligence – being able to accurately recognise and manage one’s own
emotional states, recognising and understanding emotional responses in others, using this
understanding to increase interpersonal effectiveness.

• Drive and motivation – being a ‘self-starter’, actively seeking out opportunities to learn
and stretch oneself, showing a drive to make a difference, actively managing and planning
a career, setting stretching personal goals.

Building on this, we have developed the functionality within our award-winning Talent 360® tool to ‘flag’ some of the indicators within a 360 questionnaire as ‘high potential markers’, thereby supporting the line
manager in his or her need to identify these.

These ‘markers’ are not shown when people complete the questionnaire, and they may be existing
indicators across as number of different competencies. But when a report is generated, however,
the software looks at the ratings given to these indicators and produces a composite HiPo score,
providing a useful visual summary on a separate page.

If you want to see how this looks in practice, then please do get in touch.

7 benefits of moving on-line for 360 review

Want to know what the key benefits to moving to on-line 360 as highlighted in our recent survey?  Some are obvious, some less so.  Read on.

1.     Reduction in administration time.  77% of organisations in our recent survey have observed this time saving. It seems that some of this time is 're-invested'.

2.     More time spent on development planning. 46% of survey respondents signal that they now spend more time on development planning. 

3.     Better individual understanding of own strengths and development areas: 91% have found this to be the case showing the improvement since going on-line.

4.     Greater commitment to the development plan: 73% reported that their people were more committed to their individual development plan after moving on-line. 

5.     Easier comparison of people across departments and the organisation with 55% commenting that this is easier since going on-line.

6.     Faster analytics: 60% of respondents say that the analytics are faster with the on-line system.

7.     Spotting of those with high potential made easier:  57% comment that is it easier to now identify those employees with high potential.

If you’d like to know more about our research or are looking to see how moving on-line with your performance review can bring these benefits, do get in touch.

The ups and the downs of moving on-line for performance review

If you’re an organisation which has already invested significant time, resource and energy into the design and roll-out of a performance management process, the last thing you may want to hear is how much better it is if you now move on-line!

Our recent research looked at the criticisms and downsides as reported by those who are still working with an off-line process, and also reported on the benefits as seen by those who have made the move to an on-line system to support their performance management and review activities.

Interesting reading.

The most common criticism seems to be the lack of consistency across the organisation in the way in which objectives are set with 71% reporting this.  This lack of organisational view of objectives is also reported by 31% and a difficulty in monitoring performance across the organisation by 34% of those completing the survey.

Time is seen as a key downside – with 71% saying that the line managers say that the process takes too long – and yet, those who have moved on-line report that whilst there are great business advantages to the move, time saving is not a significant one.  Only 20% say the sessions are shorter and the meetings taking place with more or less the same frequency – and three quarters report the performance review sessions take the length of same time. 

So what are the benefits to moving to on-line performance review? Better quality seems to be the major shift. 

The quality of the conversation improves.

·         Just over half report that performance is tackled more readily.

·         A quarter see managers themselves become better coaches.

The quality in performance increases.

·         Two thirds have seen an increase in the quality of performance.

·         80% see there to be better goal alignment between the individual and those of the organisation.

·         Two thirds have witnessed a greater achievement of objectives.

If you’d like to know more about our research or are looking to see how moving on-line with your performance review can bring these benefits, do call us.

It’s pay back time!

It the recent Head Light survey - Justifying spend in hard times: measuring Return on Investment for 360 and Performance Reviews – we asked when users of on-line 360 and performance reviews saw a return on their investment.

Only a fifth of those who had moved, had looked at ROI – but where they had…

• 46% of those moving to an on-line 360 system saw a return on investment within 12 months and over three-quarters (77%) within two years
  
• 17 % of those stepping up to an on-line performance review process saw a return within 6 months,  42% saw a return within 12 months  – and 92% see pay back within two years. 

 Compelling figures for those looking to make the move!

Calculating ROI – are we all doing this?

With economic uncertainty comes the need for greater scrutiny of spend and examination of return of any investment.  But how does this apply to areas of talent management spend?  Are we all justifying our spend, building a business case and looking at the payback on the investment once made?

Our recent survey - Justifying spend in hard times: measuring Return on Investment for 360 and Performance Reviews – looked at just this and took a snapshot of the current practice of ROI measurement and business case creation.

Towards the end of 2012, following questions from customers about how to best demonstrate the value effective talent can bring, we decided to survey the HR and Learning & Development decision makers with whom we regularly communicate.  We chose to focus our research on two of the most widely-used talent activities: 360 feedback and performance review, asking these HR and L&D decision makers and practitioners to complete our on-line survey anonymously during December 2012 and January 2013.

The results are in.

Less than one fifth of those moving to an on-line system have calculated an ROI figure – although a third of respondents to our survey intend to. 18% of respondents to the survey stated that they had already looked at ROI for their on-line 360 system – and a further 39% plan to.  It is a similar picture for those who have introduced on-line performance review systems, with 13% already having looked at ROI and 31% intending to.

But a quarter of both of these talent activity respondents commented that they have no intention to look at the return on investment.

It seems the most common reason cited for not looking at ROI to date is because it is thought to be too soon in the implementation – although 35% of those with on-line performance review systems report that they are not clear how they would go through this exercise. 

To this end, we’re developing a step-by-step guide to help calculate a return on investment figure.  To learn more and to keep in touch, contact us at http://head-light.co.uk/contact/informationrequest.asp