Putting people at the heart of people performance
It’s that time of year when many organisations embark on the start of their yearly performance management process. For many, this process involves completing an appraisal process, where objectives are set at the start of the year and progress on those objectives are reviewed at the end.
But how did something that is meant to help people thrive become something dreaded by so many?
The traditional process puts too much focus on completing a complex form and is often done in isolation without factoring in the many other things that help people to thrive.
Despite this being universally known, many organisations continue to stick to this process, even though they know their employees dread it and have very little evidence to show it makes any difference to performance.
Why? Because there isn’t a universal solution to what you do instead.
What you do should be led by what your people tell you they need to perform
I’m going to share in this post how we’ve embarked on doing just this at British Red Cross.
Why is it important to us?
For every organisation supporting their people to thrive in their work environment is key. As an organisation that adapts to changing humanitarian needs, we need a performance system that is flexible to these changing needs and enables our people to give to be their best to support those in crisis.
However, our engagement survey told us that 45% of our people told us our current appraisal process did not help them to perform better
So we’ve started on a journey to look at what we need to do to enable our people to be at their best.
Our approach
So I embarked on finding out more about why our people found our current process unhelpful and to explore what we could do going forward. I explored this through:
1. Appreciative Inquiry workshops — to draw out from our people experiences when they felt they were giving their best.
2. Conversations with subject matter experts — Because performance management is intertwined with so many other elements of an organisation I had conversations with other teams such as learning and development and our strategy team.
3. External research — to understand what external research is telling us regarding performance management practices and what the research is telling organisations they should look to do.
The workshops
In order to understand what our people needed to perform well, I wanted to draw out from their experiences where they felt they were giving their best, and capture what was happening.
Appreciative inquiry is an approach that can help to do this and what I decided to do for our workshops. It focuses people on exploring good experiences and thinking about how they can build on those good experiences and ensure they happen in the future.
But I didn’t want to bring people together in person unless it was needed (for many reasons such as COVID, impact on the environment, accessibility etc) so I embarked on finding a way to deliver the elements of appreciative inquiry virtually. Here is what I learnt
Conducting appreciative inquiry online
Appreciative inquiry follows what is called a 5 D cycle
There were some elements of this cycle that were trickier to do virtually. Here are the solutions I found to conducting those:
· Discovery
Paired conversation with script on MS Forms. Asking people to record highlight notes from the conversations with their partners. Using MS Forms to complete this was actually better than how you would do it in person as it allowed me to have an anonymous electric record of those conversations that I could use for analysis later.
· Dream
This was one of the trickiest ones. In-person I’d come along with a bag full of craft stuff and ask people to creatively visualise the future.
We first attempted doing this by people completing the dreams using images from google into a PowerPoint presentation to make a picture.
But what I witnessed from this session, was a lot of what was being discussed as the dream for the future state was getting lost as it was hard to visualise in this way.
So for the last two workshops, I invited a sketch note artist to help visualise what peoples dreams were, this was a lot more powerful
· Design
We used Miro for the design stage.
Asking people to put the action they felt we needed to take onto post-it notes and place them on a grid in terms of how long they felt something would take to do and how difficult that task was
· Destiny
In-person I would give people postcards to complete their commitment and I’d send this to them in 3 months’ time as a reminder.
Virtually I gave them instructions on how they could set up an email to send to themselves in three months’ time, with their commitment
I tested this way of working with a pilot workshop first and I asked for feedback via an EasyRetro board at the end of every session.
I kept building on this feedback from each workshop to make improvements each time.
The results
Before we got started with the 5 D cycle, we did an ice breaker with participants.
We asked them to select an image of how they currently feel about performance management and how they wish to feel about it in the future.
Below are the images from all 5 workshops we completed
As you can see from the images, the pictures about how people currently feel about performance management paint a rather glum outlook.People are confused and drained of energy.
Discovery
I analysed the 60+ conversations that were held and pulled out key themes people were mentioning about a time when they have felt they were giving their best.
The word cloud below shows what people were mentioning was happening during these experiences. The larger words were the words that were mentioned most frequently. This allowed me to understand which ones were the most common factors in people performing well and areas we should therefore put more focus on.
Dream
Below are the wonderful dreams people came up with regarding what they wanted the future to look like.
There are things in these dreams that came up multiple times across all the workshops which really helped in defining what is important to people
Design
I brought all five Miro boards outlining the steps people felt we needed to take to go from where we are now to our dream state.
I categorised these actions into the following areas:
· Performance cultivation
· Performance accountability
· Performance planning
Our new performance framework
Based on the above we’ve developed a new performance framework, which shows performance as a holistic system, made up of many elements of other functions within the organisation.
Our next step is to look at the actions within these areas our people said we needed to take to understand what already exists, what is in the plans to be developed and where are the gaps.
From this, it will give us a clear view of what we need to focus on developing going forward.
We’ve created a ‘Thriving at British Red Cross’ co-production group to help us develop the actions we need to take. By ensuring it is designed by those who will be using it, we’re putting people at the heart of our people performance.
My next blog will be discussing the first element of performance we’ve looked to make improvement to, reflection.
