Tools to end bias and discrimination in performance management
“The most important part of any company is its people.”
You’ve no doubt heard that before. Quite likely out of the mouths of every founder and executive you have come across. And yet, for some reason, “human” resources seem to always take a back seat. The reality is, you can succeed with great technology; you can succeed with substantial financing, but you will fail all the time when you have the wrong people or treat them poorly.
Recently, there have been stories that shed a light on the dark side of the tech industry. Now I am not here to argue those cases specifically, but I think most can agree that discrimination and harassment have been the Achilles heel of many companies trying to create diverse and scalable workforces for quite a while now. These issues remain rampant in part because it happens subtly in ways that are hard to pin down or prove without a shadow of doubt.
But this type of behavior undercuts the most important tool for success…high performing employees. When employees are slighted, when they feel pushed aside, when they are harassed because of gender, race, creed or whatever reason, performance suffers and companies fail. We are not talking about teams failing, we are talking failures of entire organizations. When you see high-profile companies hitting the wall, you can likely trace the downfall to poor management not providing the right focus and not enabling the right behaviors from employees, thus a harmful culture is perpetuated.
Inappropriate organizational cultures are often allowed to fester because it is impossible for a manager or HR to see everything that happens to each person everyday and there are no systems in place to identify and call out these behaviors. Now, discrimination and misogyny are complex issues. We can’t solve these problems overnight, nor imagine that we could. But we can start with fixing some of the systems that allow such conduct to continue unchecked.
Louis D. Brandeis once said, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” But how do we open the shutters and let sunlight shine onto such practices?
Enter Squadley. Our next generation planning and performance tool is anchored in pillars of transparency, collaboration and strong analytics and built to democratize the performance process. It removes the fear and politics that can hide dangerous practices by management. For example, all of us can probably name a time where we didn’t agree with our manager’s “score” or performance assessment. While in most cases this is likely innocent, in others it’s where true discrimination and bias surface. And there isn’t always a way to prove it.
People are, frankly, people. Most of the time, they are good, honest and decent. Every now and then, however, we see sentiments creep in that are vindictive, petty, vengeful and discriminatory. To combat personal biases, recency effects and inaccurate feedback, our team, through Squadley, set out to to truly create the “always-on” planning and performance system.
We did this by:
- creating a transparent plan of record that brings clarity on the goals of the organization
- gathering 360 feedback every two weeks through micro pulses that deliver “what” and “how” performance trends for each employee, including manager’s performance
- analyzing actions on company/team objectives and measurable goals
- analyzing the frequency of 1:1s between the manager and employee
- serving up regular data and pro tips to make managers more effective with their teams
No longer will one or even two people’s feedback be the sole data point in reviewing someone’s capability. Hundreds of data points are collected all year long to truly get a full picture of each person’s performance, including assessing the manager’s effectiveness in their role.
We didn’t “remove the humans” as so many solutions try to do. Instead, we decided that if the most important, most expensive item in a company is its people, then treating people like cogs in a wheel was not the best solution. We wanted people to have visibility into the organization’s plan, clarity on what was expected of them and a voice to let management know when things weren’t working.
We are here to #MakeManagersAwesome because great management builds great teams and helps usher in great organizations. We think it’s time to change the conversation around performance.
Let’s start creating cultures that drive success and execute on strategy where everyone is included.
