7
min read
The problem is in the system, not in the people. If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results. As a growing company, are you building systems? Or seeking quick fixes?
7
min read
“So often the problem is in the system, not in the people. If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results.” — Stephen Covey, Author and keynote speaker
Working in a fast growing organization, you must have seen your top priorities skewed towards world-class product development followed by out-of-the box marketing; which pushes human resource issues at the back seat. However, as you embark on your growth journey, having a high-performing workforce driven by purpose becomes non-negotiable.
While it may sound like a piece of cake, it is not. Building the right culture and people practices in fast growing organizations is fraught with challenges. Today HR challenges in fast growing companies are often driven by millennial workforce expectations, low bandwidth, long working hours, poor work-life balance, and engagement issues coupled with tight budgets. These people-issues if not handled on time could negatively impact your organization’s culture, employee well-being, and eventually hamper business growth.
In this article we will explore the top 10 HR challenges that you might be facing or are likely to face and ways to overcome them.
If you have been managing the people practices for a fast growing organization for a long time, you would understand the need to recruit high-performing talent during the hyper growth stage to drive high performance and rapid output. Consequently, the first major challenge you are likely to face is identifying roles and determining the candidate’s fitness in the company. Failure to ensure an employee-organization fit often leads to resource wastage due to repeated onboarding, replacing, and recruiting.
To circumvent this challenge, you can start by identifying specific human resource requirements for successful hiring. You can seamlessly attract the right job seekers (under a tight budget) by exhibiting the company culture, quality, and growth potential to the candidates and inspire them to join. Stress on USPs like autonomy and flexibility to make your organization an obvious choice for candidates.
If you have established a market presence and visibility, building a company culture to improve and stabilize your rapid growth is critical. In a dynamic environment with constantly changing priorities, you may find it challenging to build a culture that keeps employees engaged and focused towards the greater company vision.
Start by defining core company values to mitigate this challenge. Then break those values into 3-4 behaviors that people can observe. Reinforce these behaviors again and again until they become the norm. To know more about building a great culture, read this.
“Most bosses know instinctively that their power depends more on employee’s compliance than on threats or sanctions”, Fernanda Bartolome (Management professor and author)
It may be easy to manage 50 employee data — from contact details to quarterly performance review — on an Excel sheet, but the same is not true when you have 200 employees or more. During high growth, the lack of streamlined administrative processes can be a major challenge, especially as it increases the time required for completion of simple HR processes.
There’s no better solution for repetitive tasks than automating tasks with technology if you want to effectively deal with administrative challenges. A great HRMS will reduce the administrative burden exponentially, smoothening the HR process and eliminating the majority of the HR challenges. You can leverage a predefined system to streamline the tasks, policies, and procedures for the whole organization. Focus on identifying and implementing an HR Technology that is fool-proof, futuristic, and reliable.
You must have come across a low level of importance given to setting up and implementing futuristic policies and strategies in the initial stages of development for your organization. However, as you encounter high growth and enter into the transitional stage of advancement, you are likely to face several operational HR challenges pushing you to find quick fixes instead of a long-term solution.
The best solution to avoid such challenges is to adopt a policy mindset when your organization is young. This involves implementing organizational policies like timing, breaks, indiscrimination, equality, diversity, non-harassment, gender equality, etc. Focusing on them once you have gained ground, will be difficult and they are likely to add to the HR challenges. Invest time and energy to create a fool-proof draft and then identify the risk possibilities, eliminate unrealistic points, and train and educate your employees for compliance.
Fast growing organizations do not often employ a dedicated HR team due to its financial constraints to avoid the additional indirect expenses. While there might be a few resources to support the HR operations, you may not meet the total requirement. However, while scaling up or during the stages of high-growth, you will face the recurring need for hiring new people, onboarding joinees, retention, training, and several other processes along with having a standardized performance management system. The lack of a dedicated HR team might become a big roadblock in effective functioning. .
You must focus on convincing your executive leadership to have a qualified team of HR professionals to work dedicatedly for the welfare, growth, and development of the company’s talent and culture. It will help you deepen your efforts towards employee engagement and experience and create a happy workforce.
Monitoring productivity is crucial not only for performance evaluation and bonuses, but also for keeping employees engaged and measuring the overall organizational progress. In a fast-growing company, the drive for high-performance often leads to undue performance pressure and lack of work-life balance without systematic guidelines and workflows. However, here you would face a challenge in achieving the dual goal of tracking and monitoring productivity continuously without affecting employee morale and losing employee trust.
You must adopt a continuous performance management approach for monitoring productivity. Start with performance tracking by creating transparent performance expectations and standards. Set OKR, use KPIs, and implement continuous feedback systems to understand the performance blockers as your company reaches new heights. This helps stop the negative snowball effect.
If you want to drive hypergrowth, you need to drive high performance. To drive high performance, you need to recognize and reward your employees for their effort. Also, to retain your high performing employees for the long-haul, as a growing organization, you need to provide them growth and development opportunities. With 25% of millennials looking to switch jobs after the pandemic, retaining key employees is going to be more challenging for fast growing companies.
Quick fixes do not boost employee morale. Neither do financial incentives once a year. To drive continuous performance through regular reward structure, you need to create a structured process to reward the employees on time and motivate them to do better. Use technology to guide your managers to conduct regular 1:1 check ins to encourage them, build a recognition policy, and continuously check employee pulse to understand the sentiment of your workforce is a great way to minimize attrition.
One of the biggest HR challenges that you might be facing would revolve around aligning employees towards a common goal, i.e., the company’s vision. In a high growth situation, especially when your team size is growing, it is normal for employees to lose sight of the larger goal.
One of the top ways you can experiment with to align individual employee strengths, day-to-day tasks, with business goals is to set clear Objectives and Key Resources (OKR). Create an OKR performance framework and set KPIs against their roles. Let the employees set personal goals with the organizational objectives in mind and let the organization relate the company objectives with the personal goals of the employees. Also, mentor them, guide them, and drive them towards success and satisfaction.
In the growth stage, you might lack structured development programs. However, the importance of learning and development programs cannot be understated. They are great for on-the-job learning due to their autonomy, flexibility, and scope of role they provide. When 59% of millennials consider training and development opportunities before applying for a new job, as a scale-up, if you want to attract top talent, you need to provide them not just a job, but a career path.
To mitigate this challenge, you need to iInvest in employee development. There’s no way around that. Focus on training your managers to offer guidance, mentoring, and assistance to employees. This opportunity to develop and train under competent leadership will help employees align their career and personal goals towards your organization’s growth and success.
Lastly, as you scale up you cannot afford to lose momentum due to disengaged employees. It not only leads to an unproductive workforce and high turnover costs, but also quick attrition, poor company culture, and dissatisfied customers.
This HR challenge can be solved by leveraging employee pulse and analytics to better understand workplace sentiment and real performance blockers. You can further use the data to implement frequent communication, strength-based goal alignment, leadership support, and building a culture that drives engagement.
As your organization embarks on the growth journey, your people will be your biggest asset and the best way to facilitate success is to have a a highly efficient HR system.
This involves investing in your employees and their well-being as you scale. Use people analytics to know your people. Don’t wait for catastrophes to occur to create full-proof organizational policies and HR strategies. Leverage technology to automate as many processes as you can. Build a work culture that attracts the right talent whenever you need it. The bottom line is that you need to preempt HR risks before they surface to create a high performance culture.
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Book a demo today and see your managers grow in 2022, resulting in organizational and team success.
If you are trying to design a continuous and comprehensive performance management system, you would know the importance of conducting a 360 degree feedback. However, to make this exercise most effective, you need to go beyond simply involving everyone in the process to getting the process right — most importantly asking the right feedback questions to each stakeholder. This article will focus on how to write 360 feedback questions that create maximum organizational impact.
Let us quickly start by understanding what you must include in your 360 feedback questions to make it more effective.
Read: How and when to conduct 360 degree feedback
Without wasting any time, let’s dive into the 10 tips that can help you in writing excellent and effective 360 feedback questions.
Keep the language easy to understand and avoid using technical jargon. Make sure everyone is able to gauge the same meaning of the question and the focus is not lost in translation.
Keep adding the questions list for your next 360 degree feedback to your records throughout the year.
Since 360 feedback should focus on all aspects of an employee, if you add questions at different times, they will be more relevant
Ensure that the questions don’t have an inherent bias or don’t push or influence the respondent to answer in a specific manner. Make sure that the questions can have varied options as answers and not a singular focus because that’s what you want as a result. Furthermore, the questions should not create a bias in the mind of the reader of any kind.
Focus on one specific attribute or competency for each question. Don’t try to include everything in a single question to keep the number of 360 feedback questions low. You will end up receiving responses for only a part of the question and it will confuse the respondent too. For instance, if you want to talk about collaboration, do not couple it with factors like leadership skills or problem solving.
Before you start framing the questions, identify the key competencies that are most important for your organization as well as the role. Competencies could include communication, innovation, strategic thinking, etc.
Make sure that as a whole, all the questions cover all aspects you want to gauge the employee on from an organizational and functional role perspective. However, don’t overstuff too many competencies, keep them relevant to the employee in question. For instance, a person in sales may not need a question on technology knowledge as a part of 360 feedback questions.
In addition to being specific, be clear on what you wish to gauge or understand with every question you ask. For instance, a question on whether or not the employee pays heed to the opinion of others can help understand the level of active listening and a spirit of inclusion.
You need to have a fair balance between open ended and close ended questions.
A very long or complicated process is likely to reduce participation and defeat the purpose. Therefore, keep the count of 360 feedback questions to a maximum of 30-40 and make it very easy to participate and complete the same. Preferably, disseminate it through your existing communication/ collaboration tools.
Finally, make sure that the questions are framed in a way that is simple to evaluate. Too complex evaluations might take too much time and delay the action and execution, leading to reduced faith and impact on 360 degree feedback.
To ensure that your questions are relevant and specific, you can start with writing 360 feedback questions for different situations and contexts. Put simply, in this section, we will focus on what you should be asking and when. It will also help you in picking the right questions for the right employees, instead of bombarding everyone with the same questions.
These questions will help you understand what your team members think about the overall management at your organization and the effectiveness of specific team leadership.
These questions can help you understand the level of communication efficiency in your organization to ensure there is no gap between intention and execution.
Use these questions to identify and nurture employees that show leadership potential to build an effective succession pipeline.
These questions can help you understand how committed your employees are towards the organization, which will impact their level of engagement and quality of work.
You can leverage these questions when you wish to understand which employees are quick to think on their feet and will be able to address problems/ challenges that might come their way.
These questions can help you gauge the level of alignment between what your organization stands for and the core values/ beliefs of your employees.
Read: Strategic goal alignment: How to align team and organizational goals
Focus on these questions when you want to understand how well your employees are able to connect with their peers and other stakeholders.
These final set of questions can help you gauge how efficiently the employees are able to get work done. This points to the presence of the right skills to utilize resources in the best way possible.
To keep the entire survey with 360 degree feedback questions interesting and engaging, you can experiment with different question formats and templates. While some of your questions can have simple Yes/No answers, some can have multiple choices along with room for providing open ended answers as well. Here is an easy to follow template you can leverage.
Key competency: Strategic decision making
Top line: The employee/ subject name is able to
Attributes:
Spectrum
Open ended questions
Once you roll out the survey with your 360 feedback questions and receive the answers, you need to analyze the responses to come up with a final report and plan of action. However, any response analysis is subject to biases and other factors which might put the validity and reliability of the report into question. Fortunately, you can leverage these following practices to eliminate such instances:
Before concluding this article, we would like to discuss the top 8 questions that most managers have when it comes to 360 degree feedback, highlighting concerns they may be having.
Highlight how the performance and feedback on the performance of others is likely to have an impact on their performance too. Make them believe they can be an integral part of the growth journey for their team members.
Make the feedback anonymous to prevent sugar coating. At the same time, do not rely upon a single review as the ultimate feedback for any employee. Analyze at least 2-3 feedback responses for each employee to get the real picture.
3. How to make the process time effective?
Leverage technology platforms to roll out the surveys and collect responses. Furthermore, you can rely on the NLP sentiment analysis to gauge insights from open ended questions in addition to trend generation based on quantitative questions.
Check out how SuperBeings can help you conduct seamless 360 degree feedback. Book a free demo today
Highlight the positive impact of participation as a whole. Make it an interesting part of the employee lifecycle. Provide employees designated time within their work schedule to provide feedback. Do not make it an added burden. Additionally, keep the process simple with not a lot of questions at once.
Depending on the nature of the organization you can decide on the level of anonymity. Facilitate anonymity will help you fetch greater and more authentic responses. However, sometimes, you might struggle with context in this case. Therefore, you should adopt an approach of flexible/ partial anonymity.
Create a business case for 360 degree feedback. Illustrate how it can lead to a better employee experience, strategic learning and development, greater employee retention and other aspects which can lead to better performance and productivity.
Ensure that your questions are neutral and don’t lead to a specific sentiment or response. For instance, if you want to gauge punctuality for an employee, don’t use statements like do you think the employee is always late to work, rather focus on how would you rate the punctuality and sense of time for the employee?
Try to conduct 360 feedback on a regular basis and not wait for the end of the year to ask all the questions. Maintain a cadence to gauge responses.
As we end this discussion, it is clear that if you want to write 360 feedback questions in an effective way — you need to adopt an all encompassing approach, taking into account the different aspects of employee attributes, performance, personality and behavior.
It is, therefore, ideal to leverage platforms like SuperBeings to help you roll out, gather and analyze the responses using NLP and automation for best results. You can leverage our best practices to not only get the questions right but to also enable your managers to facilitate employee development at the end of the process.
If interested, feel free to book a demo today. No initial commitment required.
How and when to conduct 360 degree feedback
In the recent years, there has been a lot of attention that is being given to employee feedback, performance reviews and evaluation as a part of the whole performance management system.
While a major focus has been to prepare managers to give feedback in a constructive and effective manner, paying attention to employee self evaluation is equally important. Knowing what self appraisal comments to use can play a major role in helping employees to effectively reflect and evaluate their performance and convey it effectively to the rest of the team.
The purposes of employee evaluation and performance review in general have been talked about time and again. However, self appraisal takes the process of evaluation at a very personal and individual level, leading to a more pronounced understanding of an employee’s performance. Some of the top benefits of employee self assessment include:
Read: Employee self assessment: How to write a great one
In the section above, we have talked about the purpose or the need of self evaluation mostly from the perspective of the employee. However, self appraisal, when done correctly, has equally compelling benefits for the team as well as managers. A quick snapshot is captured below:
With self appraisal, employees become active participants in their review and appraisal process, rather than simply being passive recipients. Consequently, they feel valued, motivated and the level of engagement increases. Furthermore, with greater engagement, levels of commitment, retention and productivity go up.
When employees take a step back to reflect on their performance with self appraisal, they become more receptive to diverse ideas. Put simply, in the absence of self reflection, they will have a hard time gauging where they need to improve. Consequently, they will be defensive when a manager or the team gives them feedback on the same. However, self evaluation will help them accept the gaps and be open to learning and growing.
When employees reflect on their performance and identify the development areas, they will don a problem solving hat on to accelerate their professional journey. Through the course of time, this problem solving attribute will become a part of their skill set which will benefit the team and the manager greatly.
As a result of greater alignment due to self reflection on the strengths and areas of development, teams will see a greater sense of accountability to bridge the gaps identified. Under conventional circumstances, performance improvement might be seen as just a tick in the box by employees. However, after self appraisal, employees truly acknowledge and accept the need to bridge those gaps and take greater ownership and accountability.
Now that you have an understanding of why self appraisal matters, let’s quickly look at how to make it most effective. If you are experimenting with self evaluation for the first time, it can be an overwhelming activity for your employees. It is human nature to feel uneasy when you’re expected to evaluate your own performance. However, if you provide your employees with some comments they can use for self evaluation as a starting point, you can make the journey easier for them.
Put simply, self appraisal comments are common statements that can be customized by your employees during the self evaluation process, especially, if they find themselves at a loss of words to describe their performance
These phrases are available for both strengths and areas of development to help employees paint a realistic picture of their performance. Here are the top 100 self appraisal phrases that you can use for different performance parameters.
Use these self phrases to reflect on your clarity of communication, willingness to listen to others, etc.
These self evaluation phrases reflect how reliable or dependable you are for your team members, especially under special circumstances.
Using these self appraisal phrases can help indicate how invested or engaged you are in taking ownership of work without being asked to at times.
Similar Read: 150+ performance review phrases for managers
The following self appraisal comments are important to help review your performance on the basis of how punctual and attentive you are.
Use these self evaluation phrases when you want to highlight your strengths/ areas of improvement of working with the team, your collaboration skills, etc.
Creativity self appraisal comments can help you in reflecting on how effectively you are able to come up with novel and innovative solutions to challenges and new ideas to augment the impact and value created.
The following phrase can create a picture of your quality of work and how much attention you pay while undertaking a particular task during your self reflection process.
You can use these self appraisal comments to illustrate how well you understand what is expected out of you and how well you are able to deliver on the same.
Customer satisfaction self evaluation performance phrases help gauge how effectively you are able to address customer requests or complaints that leads to a higher Net Promoter Score, brand credibility, etc.
Finally, these self-appraisal comments can help you highlight your growth plans towards your professional development and impact on the organization.
With a broad understanding of the more than 100+ self appraisal comments that you can use as a part of your self evaluation process, let’s move to this concluding section. Here, we will focus on sharing a few templates that employees can use to articulate their performance in an effective manner.
The self evaluation phrases mentioned above can be added at the right places in these templates to give a holistic picture of one’s performance. A few things to focus on include:
In the last <performance period>, I have successfully <activity/ initiative undertaken> which led to <tangible impact (metrics)> for the organization.
My focus was on <a detailed view of everything that was done> which resulted in <accomplishments>.
Overall, I believe that I have been able to create an impact by achieving <top 3 achievements> and seek to amplify the same in the future.
I believe that the last <performance period> has been full of learning and development for me.
While I was able to <quick snapshot of achievements>, I acknowledge that I need to pay attention to <areas of improvement>.
I believe that this focus will help me <intended outcome for improvement>.
Towards this, I will ensure that I consistently work towards <improvement plan (courses, behavioral changes)> to achieve <SMART goal>.
That said, self appraisal is an extremely crucial step of performance review. As a manager you must encourage your team members to provide honest reflection on their performance without being afraid of any negative consequences. Apart from providing the self appraisal comments mentioned above, you can also use assessment tools to make self appraisal a common practice within the organization.
Custom Pulse Surveys by SuperBeings can help you with understanding their needs and help you support them better. If interested, book a free demo today.
Employee Self Assessment: How to write a great one
150+ performance review phrases for managers
How to use custom pulse surveys to enhance employee experience
Holistic performance reviews are integral for any organization that seeks to create a high performance culture. However, the nature of performance appraisals has undergone significant transformation with a focus on 360 feedback and review.
One of the key pillars for the same is employee self assessment and self appraisal. Through the course of this article, we will share with you why self assessment is important and how you, as a manager, can help your employees get it right to facilitate maximum impact.
As the name suggests, employee self assessment or self reflection is the practice or process where employees reflect on and assess their performance over a period of time to identify accomplishments, development areas and other performance aspects
The aim of self assessment is to get the employees’ view of their performance and add the information and data to manager and peer feedback. This can enable organizations to get a holistic understanding of the employee performance and gauge the overall contribution, some of which might be invisible from a macro view. Here are a few reasons why employee self assessment as a tool for performance review makes sense for growing organization:
With the rise of continuous performance management and regular review and appraisal, your self assessment process should follow a similar approach.
Instead of pushing employees to assess and reflect on their performance at the end of the year, you should encourage them to conduct regular self assessment
On one hand, regular and continuous performance linked self appraisal by employees will ensure that no part of their performance goes unnoticed. On the other hand, it will constantly give them a chance to reflect on their performance and improve on the development areas on the go, instead of waiting for the year end. Invariably, they will embark on the path of development and improvement at an accelerated pace.
Here, if you leverage employee pulse surveys which are short and frequent in nature, you can ensure consistent and continuous self reflection from employees. With as frequent as one question a day, you can encourage your employees to build a culture of performance-oriented self assessment.
With self assessment and reflection being a fairly new practice to performance management, many organizations and employees struggle with getting it right.
While some believe that employees might see it as a chance to explain their bad performance, others believe that it might end up biasing the manager’s perspective.
However, when done right, employee self assessment can be an extremely powerful tool to facilitate a high performance culture. Here are a few tips to get your employees conduct performance self assessment the right way:
Encourage your employees to be open and honest. Employees must not see self assessment as a place for self aggrandizing in the hope of a better rating, rather an honest assessment of one’s performance.
For self evaluation to be effective, your employees need to reflect on their performance without the worry of being penalized for identifying areas of development and improvement
It is important to not see self assessment as the sole foundation for promotions and appraisals, but rather as a journey towards growth.
Next, persuade your employees to reflect on their OKR performance. The idea is not only to assess what has been achieved with OKR grading. It should also include reflections from OKRs about the possible enablers and blockers to further refine them for the next performance period. The employee must be guided to reflect on what helped achieve the OKRs and what other support is required as well as what he or she would personally like to work towards.
Download: Free OKR grading template
Third, when self assessing for performance review, employees must incorporate feedback from their conversations with managers and peers. If your organization has a culture of regular 1:1s, this will be very easy for your workforce. The idea here is to motivate your employees to reflect on what feedback they have been able to gauge and whether or not according to them their performance is a reflection of the same. 360 degree feedback can also be a helpful tool for employees to understand all aspects of their performance.
Factors like what did the manager praise about their performance or what did a coworker thank them for are very important for self assessment.
Read: Top 50 1:1 meeting questions for great managers
Finally, as a part of performance review self assessment, employees need to reflect on the challenges and opportunities, both internal and external. Internally, they need to assess their attributes, skill sets and aspirations and align them with the expectations to gauge their level of performance. Similarly, external factors like resources, team support and their impact on performance needs to be documented.
When you share these above mentioned tips with your team members, they are bound to ask questions about the best practices for writing or filling up self assessment surveys in the most effective way. We have you covered for that as well. Here are a few quick tips to help your employees write effective self assessment:
Read: How to go from performance management to employee development
If you look at these best practices closely, you will realize that the key to writing effective self assessment also lies in the questions that you ask.
Simply asking an open ended question like reflecting on your performance will seldom yield any substantial responses, mainly because your team members will struggle with starting their answers
Therefore, we have compiled a list of questions and potential answer prompts/ templates to help you make self assessment a part of your performance review process effectively.
Also read: 150+ useful performance review phrases to start using today
Ensuring impact with self assessment is not only dependent on your team members. There are several ways in which managers of an organization can help build a culture of effective self evaluation.
Create an open culture where employee self reflection does not become the sole tool to penalize or promote employees, see it as an extended glimpse of performance
As we come to an end, it is clear that employee self assessments are an integral part of performance reviews and if conducted in the right manner have the potential to drive a high performing culture. However, we understand that administering and facilitating participation for self assessment can be daunting, especially for a growing organization.
Fortunately, custom pulse surveys by SuperBeings with automated sending and reminders, along with NLP based sentiment analysis can take care of the same for you. If interested, book a free demo today to learn more.
How to use custom pulse surveys to enhance employee experience