I'm David Ciccarelli, the CEO of Voices.com.
Now, many of you have probably gone for performance review before
sometimes they're referred to as "the dreaded Annual Performance Review" where
once a year your entire performance is evaluated - did you do a great job
in the last 365 days? You just kind of sit there passively and your manager
lets you know how they viewed your performance to be.
Now I found that to be a very inefficient and ineffective way
to be able to coach people along the way because
meeting somebody just once a year and having that in-depth discussion on areas of improvement,
maybe highlighting and identifying what some of those weaknesses are
and then how to overcome them - waiting a year is just simply too long.
So new approach to the antiquated performance review that we're taking
here at Voices.com
and one that many organizations are also employing is called the 360-degree Performance Review
So before even considering a performance review and how to roll that out
let's start with the performance measures themselves. Now at Voices.com
people are organized into departments just like they probably are
in your organization as well. So we have departments for Marketing and Sales,
Customer Service,
Finance, Technology, Research and Development and so forth.
Every department has department goals and individuals have their own personal
performance metrics that they need to hit so sales is an obvious one
often referred to as "sales quotas" or "sales targets".
Customer Service representatives also have Customer Satisfaction Score targets
or Response Time targets. Anyone in your organization can have a personal performance metric
and I would encourage leaders to come up with those metrics so people can truly know
if they're doing a great job. By communicating how everyone's measured
individually and how their performance impacts the greater good of the organization,
just creates a sense of clarity and purpose
for all the individual team members within your organization.
Then, when it comes time to doing a quarterly Performance Review,
or even a weekly check-in, everyone will know where they stand
and what they need to do to ramp up their per personal performance
and how they're contributing to the overall organization.
As Managers and Leaders within organizations
you're also likely responsible for a Team, so how do you gain insight into knowing
if your team members are contributing in your meeting your department targets
and ultimately your overall company targets? Well you've identified
individual performance metrics but now you need to make that actionable and visible
to all the individuals on your team. One of the ways that we've been able to do so is through
personal performance dashboards so this is a visual indicator, if you will,
where people can see if they're on track for hitting targets.
Now I talked about the 360-degree performance review so let me kind of break
that down into a couple different parts
The first one is a self-assessment - this gives an individual within your
organization the opportunity to rate themselves on how well they're doing
against their targets and also identify areas improvements
or goals for the upcoming quarter. There's also what we refer to as a Peer Review.
Now this is a bit of a different concept it's where peers and people in similar jobs
and positions within your organization get to actually review each other.
Once the individuals rated themselves and they've gotten peer feedback
next up is what we call an Upward Review.
An Upward Review is an opportunity for an individual to rate their manager
and that is then seen by Senior Level Management within the organization.
Is their Manager accessible?
Are they communicating well? Are they tracking my time
in the office and time-off appropriately? Are they addressing my needs? Are they giving me
career and growing opportunities?
To finish off the 360 would be the Manager's Review. Now this is probably the
stereotypical performance review that you're familiar with
but we've been able to round it out by getting the perspectives from other
people within the organization.
So by doing a 360-degree Performance Review you now have multiple views
on how that individual is doing from different perspective of people within your company.
In addition to the Self-Assessment, the Peer Review, the Upward Review and the Management Review
is the opportunity for recognition. Here at Voices.com we use a social
performance management application called Work.com.
Work.com is a product of Salesforce. People at Voices.com can give badges of recognition
to others on the team, their peers, their managers, or even people in other
departments - these are the rewards and recognitions other people spotted you
doing a job well done.
It's often hard to remember those in the moment but having this audit trail, this history
of virtual kudos - pats on the back, if you will - from your team members
certainly goes a long way in identifying and
and highlighting all the great work that you've been doing within your
organization. Once you've made a commitment to revamp your performance review process,
you're gonna want to ensure that everybody on your team gets the same level of training.
It's important that there's clear communication that everyone knows
how they're going to be measured in terms of the performance but also what
to expect during the quarterly sit-downs.
Now that you've trained up all your current staff on your new performance
review process
you want to consider building that same training into the on-boarding or
initial training for new people joining your company.
It'd be good for them to know how their performance is going to be measured in the
upcoming quarters and years.
Everybody wants to be successful - individually,
as a team, or even your whole company. So the best way that you can do that is
being clear about what the company goals are
how individuals are contributing to those goals and then tracking progress along the way.
Performance reviews should really be seen as an opportunity to align
everyone's individual goals
along with the overall company objectives.
Now go out there -- I know you can do it!