Any HR leader would agree that the conventional approach to annual engagement surveys is not enough to understand and improve organizational health. Since the business expectations as well as employee needs are so dynamic today with the uncertain market conditions, waiting a year to gauge employee pulse is too long. 

As a result, most organizations today are adopting a variety of custom pulse surveys, which are shorter, more frequent and directly address specific employee needs; thus, more effective for enhancing employee experience. 

However, if you run custom pulse surveys without a strategy, clear objective and the right approach, you will have limited success. 

Through this article, we seek to help growing organizations like yours understand the various aspects of custom pulse surveys, including the different types and best practices to run them. 

Impact of custom pulse surveys on employee experience

Before we discuss the different types of custom pulse surveys you can leverage for your organization, let’s quickly understand why custom pulses are crucial to your organization’s success:

1. Preempt risks

By conducting custom pulse surveys on a regular basis, you can identify risks and challenges to employee experience in real time. This can help you address turnover, lack of motivation, etc. challenges before they surface, contributing to enhanced satisfaction and engagement. 

SUPER TIP — If you are interested in learning more about learning what drives employee motivation — check out our guide on the science of workplace motivation

2. Ensure alignment 

Custom pulse surveys can also help you in ensuring that the expectations and goals of your employees are well aligned with your organizational goals and objectives. A misalignment here can lead to detrimental outcomes for the organization as well as cause a poor employee experience. Fortunately, surveys can help you mitigate this challenge by helping you understand and manage expectations effectively.

3. Employee empowerment and engagement

Finally, custom pulse surveys are an effective way of augmenting employee engagement. Implemented in the right manner, these surveys can also give your employees voice on things that matter and make them feel included in organizational decisions. Engagement and empowerment both play a critical role in fostering a pleasant employee experience. 

SUPER TIP — Here’s how to use employee feedback to maximize engagement

Different types of custom pulse surveys

Limiting yourself to only one or two types of custom pulse surveys will seldom give you a complete picture. Contrarily, if you try to fit in all aspects of employee experience in a single survey, it might become confusing for your employees, and you will be unable to gauge pulse on any of the parameters. 

Therefore, it is best to incorporate different types of custom pulse surveys to your process throughout the year to achieve the best outcomes. 

1. eNPS surveys

eNPS or employee net promoter score is one of the best custom pulse surveys to help you measure how your employees feel about the company and how likely they are to recommend the same to those in their network. 

Advantages of eNPS

• Great starting point to gauge employee sentiment on key organizational attributes
• Easy to translate results into insights
• Effective and efficient as it is quick to implement, higher completion and low in cost

Top eNPS survey questions 

• On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
• What is the top reason for the score you gave?
• How likely are you to recommend our key product/service to those in your network?
• Would anything prevent you from referring our company to your peers?

SUPER TIP — Asking a few qualitative questions can help you get a deeper understanding of your people. Else, encourage your employees to leave open ended comments after their answers. To learn how to use survey comments for better employee experience, read this

2. Annual surveys

Annual employee surveys are conducted at the end of the year and seek to bring a comprehensive picture of employee performance across different aspects throughout the year. They are important to help you create a plan of action and define priorities for the next year.

Advantages of annual surveys

• Get a complete picture of different stakeholders in the organization and their contribution to organizational success
• Gauge employee pulse at the end of the year after different interventions have been implemented to enhance performance and engagement to measure the effectiveness of the people initiatives
• Set goals and objectives for the next year backed with data

Top annual survey questions

• Are you satisfied with your performance over the last year?
• How do you think the company can support you better?
• Are you satisfied with the way your organization has managed both its business and people?
• Do you have a good understanding of the processes and structures in the organization?

SUPER TIP — Check out the guided custom pulse survey templates provided by SuperBeings across all these categories. Book a free demo here 

3. M&A surveys

This is one of the types of custom pulse surveys that most organizations tend to overlook, but one which has a considerable impact on your culture. M&A or mergers and acquisitions have a direct impact on employee experience. Your employees might be confused or overwhelmed about their new roles or if there is a change in leadership. Therefore, M&A surveys are important to ensure productivity and retention during the merger/acquisition period. 

Advantages of M&A surveys

• Check uncertainty and ambiguity for employees and give them reassurance to prevent turnover
• Gauge employee sentiment about the merger and address misconceptions
• Facilitate smooth transition with consistent productivity, job satisfaction and morale

Top M&A survey questions for fast growing organizations

• Would you agree that the merger/acquisition is a good step for the organization?
• Are you clear and comfortable with your new role after the merger?
• Did you receive support during the transition?
• Has there been a change in the workload after the merger?
• Are you excited about the new opportunities the merger will bring along?

4. Onboarding check-in  

Employee onboarding, especially the first 30, 60 and 90 days are critical to a pleasant employee experience as this is the time  when perceptions are made, belongingness established and much more. Therefore, custom pulse surveys that focus on onboarding check-in to gauge how well your employees are settling in, how well they understand their roles and how well they blend into the culture are important. 

Advantages of onboarding check-in

• Reduce new hire turnover due to poor experience
• Influence the overall perception of new hires and impact future engagement, motivation
• Set up your employees for success by early expectation setting

Top onboarding check-in questions for fast growing organizations

I) First 30 days

• Do you feel welcomed by the organization?
• How well do you understand your job responsibilities?
• What do you think about the company’s culture?
• Do you have any suggestions for us to improve the recruitment process?

II) 30-60 days

• Would you recommend your peers to join the organization?
• Do you have a clarity of expectations from your role?
• Have you been able to identify areas of learning and development for your current role?
• How well do you understand your work goals?

III) 60-90 days

• Do you align with the organizational values?
• How has your experience been in collaboration and communication with your team?
• How challenging is your current role?

5. DEI pulse

Amongst the custom pulse surveys, the DEI survey requires a special mention. It can help you understand how your employees feel about the diversity, equity and inclusion aspects of your organization, as well as gauge sentiments of diverse team members on whether they have a sense of belongingness or not. 

DEI custom pulse surveys can help you facilitate high levels of engagement, promote creativity, create an inclusive workplace and promote pleasant employee experience.  

Advantages of DEI surveys

• Create the right diversity and inclusion goals to attract top talent
• Understand how different employee groups perceive your culture and address blockers to a feeling of inclusion
• Create a more engaged and motivated workforce with a sense of fairness and justice for all

Top DEI survey questions

• Do you agree that the organization values diversity and it is critical when it comes to key decisions?
• Are you satisfied with the level of diversity in your team?
• Do you feel included in key decisions of your team where you have a role to play?
• Are your unique background and opinions given due importance?
• Do you think different opportunities are available to all?
• Would you agree that the organization promotes transparency and respect for all?

6. Professional development survey

Finally, the last of the many custom pulse surveys you should include in your organization is the professional development survey. These surveys seek to help you understand if your workforce is satisfied with the professional development opportunities and support provided by the organization and how their long term goals align with organizational success. 

Advantages of professional development surveys

• Meet the upskilling and reskilling needs of your workforce to bridge the skills gap
• Reduce voluntary turnover due to poor satisfaction with professional development programs
• Increase the level of satisfaction and engagement among employees

Top professional development survey questions 

• Do you feel you are presented with adequate professional growth opportunities?
• Do you foresee achieving them in this organization?
• Do you have enough training and development opportunities to refine your skills?
• Have you received adequate mentorship support from your manager for your professional development?
• Do you receive constructive feedback to improve your professional performance?

How to create your own custom pulse surveys?

Now that you have an understanding of different types of custom pulse surveys you can run, it’s time for you to get started with creating your own surveys. While getting the questions correct is important, it is also important to identify the right audience for each survey, the best time to run the same, how long you should run the survey and how you should collect responses and benefit from the results. 

SUPER TIP — Check our detailed step-by-step article to create your own custom pulse surveys

However, here's a quick guide for you:

Creating and conducting custom pulse surveys

The first important aspect is to create the survey which captures every aspect you wish to gauge about the sentiment of your employees. There are several steps at play here:

• Identify the right questions. You can take reference from the above mentioned illustrative list and build on those. Or you can use SuperBeings templates for creating specific surveys.

• You can also create a custom pulse survey template from scratch and save it for later. As seen in the image above, SuperBeings allows you to add your own questions to the guided templates in addition to recommended questions from SuperBeings library. Whether you use a template suggested by your employee pulse survey tool or choose to create your own, just ensure that your template has an excellent user experience to facilitate greater completion rate.
• Identify the audience. Select who you will roll out the survey to. For instance, the onboarding check-in survey will be exclusive to the new hires, while a few others can be rolled out for the entire organization. SuperBeings lets you create and save your own dynamic lists to use later. Thus, reducing redundant effort.

• Define the length and frequency. The general trend is moving towards shorter and more frequent surveys to facilitate greater engagement and preempt risks in real time.

For a deeper understanding, you can refer to our comprehensive guide on creating and conducting custom pulse surveys. Furthermore, you can also leverage a pulse survey tool like SuperBeings to not only conduct the survey but also drive results and share insights, but leveraging automation, artificial intelligence and industry experience. Book a free demo today!

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Timelines and duration of the survey

You need to make a conscious effort into determining what is the ideal time for you to run your custom pulse surveys and for how long you should be running them. For the former, that is on the timelines, there are three factors that need to be taken into consideration. 

First, when do you need to present the results? This suggests that you need to determine when you wish to discuss the insights from the survey to create a plan of action. If you are adopting a more regular approach for real-time interventions, your timelines should be regular too.Unlike many other employee survey tools, SuperBeings allows you to set different frequencies for primary and sub driver questions — helping you to customize the survey even further.

Second, you need to gauge the best time for the survey when your employees will ensure a high completion rate. For instance, a busy period or festivals may not be the best time to run a survey as it might get missed. However, if you are running surveys on a regular basis, you need to encourage your employees to set aside time in their calendar every day/ week based on the survey frequency to complete the same. 

SuperBeings provides regular nudges to your employees to complete the survey on collaboration platforms you already use like Slack or Gchat without disrupting their flow of work. Thus, ensuring more participation.

Third, you need to be cognizant of the type of survey you are conducting. For instance, the onboarding check-in has to be conducted in the first 30, 60 and 90 days of the employee joining. Similarly, annual surveys will be conducted at the end of the year. 

The duration of your custom pulse surveys will also depend on the frequency you wish to choose. 

• On one hand, surveys which happen once in a while, giving about two weeks is good. However, you can always check with the recipients of the survey on what they think should be the ideal duration to keep the survey open. 
• On the other hand, if you are running surveys on a daily basis, like many fast growing organizations, your survey will automatically be available for 24 hours where your employees can participate in it asynchronously. 

Making sense of your employee pulse survey responses

You must understand by now that only conducting your custom pulse surveys and collecting responses is not enough. You need to ensure that those responses are translated into insights to create a plan of action to bring change. This involves showing gratitude to the participants, gauging sentiments and trends, sharing a plan and executing the plan. Here is a ready to use guide to help you make the most of your results. 

Suggested Reading —

• How to understand organizational climate from engagement survey results
• How to use survey comments to drive employee engagement

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For any scaling organization, there are two primary objectives — creating an empowering culture and driving business performance. While hitting revenue targets boosts the bottomline, sustainability of a fast growing organization depends on the strength of its work culture.

Thus every leader is faced with two primary challenges —

• How to align these two priorities? 
• How to achieve business goals while strengthening the team culture at the same time?

In this article, we will discuss the “how to” of doing exactly that.

It’s no secret that a focus on your OKRs or Objectives and Key Results is critical to business success. However, many high growth organizations have claimed that achieving team alignment and ensuring growth with team OKRs is tricky, especially in uncertain and complex times like we are facing today. 

This article seeks to help you master the art of goal alignment across teams to have a collective understanding and commitment towards team OKRs (and hence the key business goals). We will quickly navigate the critical role team OKRs are expected to play in the new normal and expert answers to key questions that you might have around unlocking success with OKRs in your teams. 

Why do you need team OKRs?

Let’s start with a quick recap of what OKRs exactly mean. OKRs or Objectives and Key Results form a systematic approach for organizations to set strategic goals and objectives that everyone works together to achieve, along with a few key results which seek to measure the level of achievement of the objectives. 

Put simply, objectives are what you seek to achieve as an organization while key results help you set benchmarks to visualize what success will look like for each objective. 

While team OKRs have been an important tool for augmenting employee experience and strategic goal alignment for quite some time, their relevance has increased considerably in the last two years, with the unleashing of uncertainty and ambiguity. 

Therefore, team OKRs are key to fast growing organizations for navigating in a VUCA world and ensure business continuity. 

Here are the top reasons why you must use OKRs for your team, not individuals:

• To ensure organizational and individual alignment. Team OKRs can help you avoid conflicting individual and organizational objectives and bring everyone on the same page. 
• To create clarity on organizational priorities. Especially in uncertain and dynamic conditions, team OKRs ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of what they are working towards for effective collaboration.
• Facilitate the path ahead. You can leverage team OKRs to help everyone understand what success will look like and how it will be measured. This way goals become easier to achieve when there is an anticipated result in sight.
• Simplify tracking of success. OKRs can enable you to track progress on goals and facilitate a culture of accountability. 
• Maintain business continuity. Your team members can view team OKRs as their ultimate destination and keep moving towards them even in times of uncertainty and ambiguity and maintain business as usual. 

SUPER TIP — Check out our free OKR templates to set, implement, track and grade the OKRs you have for your teams

7 questions you must ask to align goals with team OKRs

If you find yourself convinced about the need to focus on OKRs this year, you need to pause and gauge the best practices to align all your team members. Team OKRs can only function effectively if everyone collaboratively works towards achieving them. 

Therefore, as someone leading the culture, you need to ensure that all your team members are rowing in the same direction with strategically aligned team OKRs. 

Based on our association with different hypergrowth organizations, we have answered the top seven questions that can facilitate effective goal alignment using team OKRs.

1. What was the verdict from last year?

You should start the process by taking a pause and reflecting on the year gone by. Marching straight ahead with the new OKRs may prevent you from celebrating what went well as well as learning from what could have been better. There are a few steps you can follow here. 

First, evaluate the achievement of the key objectives against the key results that you had set in the beginning of the previous year. Here, you can leverage the best practices for OKR grading to measure how well you have been able to perform on your OKR spectrum.

Second, try to do a deeper study to gauge what went well and what were the major challenges that prevented you from achieving your objectives. Within this research, focus on aspects like resources, teamwork, etc.

Third, delve deep into how aligned your team was on key goals and how it impacted their achievement. For instance, do a comparative analysis on OKRs that everyone was aligned to vs those which attracted only a few. This will help you build a case for whether or not efforts towards team alignment on team OKRs are needed.

Fourth, understand if any business priorities have changed and what things you can do in a different manner to avoid the challenges you faced last time. Try to get a comprehensive understanding on the cross team dynamics from last year and get a pulse on the overall team bonding and level of collaboration and overall alignment.

2. What should be the new team OKRs?

Once you have reflected upon the year gone by, you need to create a plan of action for creating new OKRs for the coming period. Here, it is important to have a balance between annual and quarterly OKRs. 

An ideal approach would be to start with setting annual goals or objectives that you would like to achieve over the course of the year. Once everyone is aligned on the annual OKRs, you can break them into milestone linked objectives and create quarterly or monthly team OKRs.

The importance of having annual and quarterly OKRs lies in the need for flexibility and agility in an uncertain ecosystem as well as the changing circumstances for fast growing organizations. 

Following are a few practices which can help you align your team members on annual and quarterly team OKR setting:

2.a) Setting quarterly team OKRs

• Focus on priorities which are time sensitive
• Give equal importance to priorities for each department/ team
• Conduct team wise discussion to set quarterly OKRs for each team
• Communicate the relevance of each quarterly OKR to the annual plan
• Create a strict timeline for each quarter to avoid spillage and overlap

2. b) Setting annual team OKRs

• Ensure alignment with organizational vision
• Identify contribution areas for each team
• Communicate the organizational impact that you seek to achieve
• Don’t break your annual team OKRs into quarter, let that happen organically every three months
• Provide room for flexibility in case of market changes

SUPER TIP — It is always better to use a dedicated OKR tool to keep track of all annual and quarterly goals in one place instead of using the limited features of Google Sheet. Wondering what features to look for in an OKR tool? Check this out!

You can also book a free demo with SuperBeings to see how you can apply these principles of setting team OKRs directly in your team.

3. How to set team OKRs? 

Once you have decided the frequency of the OKRs you wish to follow, you would want to jump into setting the team OKRs. As a fast growing organization, it is important to incorporate diverse views and thoughts. This suggests that you should steer away from a completely hierarchical and top-down approach where the leadership sets OKRs for all teams, which team members are supposed to execute and work towards. 

Here, you need to adopt an approach of collective brainstorming when it comes to setting OKRs for your team. You need to engage and involve your team members in setting OKRs which they are expected to achieve. 

You need to give each team the freedom to set their own OKRs and conduct some common and collective sessions where all OKRs can be converged and aligned with the organizational vision. Furthermore, a spirit of collective setting will add accountability, ownership and commitment leading to greater goal alignment within and across teams.

SUPER TIP — Sign up for our free 10 day OKR email course and learn all about writing the best team OKRs (includes step-by-step guides for setting goals for different teams)

4. What are the potential challenges?

You need to be cognizant of the potential challenges which might prevent you from setting effective team OKRs. Once you are able to identify and mitigate these challenges, you will find your team members working harmoniously towards the OKRs. Some of the top challenges include:

4.a) Lack of team buy in

It is common for fast growing organizations, especially the ones that are introducing OKRs for the first time to face employee resistance. Your team members might have a hard time acknowledging the relevance and value of OKRs. Here, you need to create a business case for OKRs and convince your team members of the potential impact they can create.

4.b) Inability to collaborate

You are bound to find some team members against the idea of setting OKRs with those from other teams. Since you will only have a few OKRs at an organizational level, each team will push their case and this is likely to hinder organization-wide goal alignment. 

The best way to mitigate this challenge is to create a distinction between organizational and team OKRs. While the former should exclusively be the ones that directly impact organizational growth, the latter ones could be focused more on team progress with incremental impact on the organization. 

5. Should you set long term OKRs for the team?

Finally, you need to answer the question whether or not you should set long term OKRs. While it is important to have a long term vision for your organization, setting long term team OKRs may not be the best move. 

As a fast growing organization, your priorities are likely to keep changing and committing to OKRs for a long term might prevent the flexibility and agility you need to transform and adapt. 

At the same time, the longer the run of the OKRs or the more future oriented they are, the harder it will be to facilitate agreement. Since your team members will have different versions of what they expect the organization to evolve into in the course of 5-7 years, having alignment on OKRs for that long might be an overkill. 

Instead of going for long term OKRs, you can experiment with a larger vision for the next few years which can then be broken down into annual and subsequently quarterly measurable OKRs. 

6. How to facilitate goal alignment and team agreement around OKRs: Best practices

While our entire discussion has revolved around this theme, there are certain practices which you can directly leverage to facilitate goal alignment with team OKRs:

• Keep the OKRs limited in number. The greater the number of OKRs you seek to set, the greater will be discussion and disagreements.
• Constantly reiterate the importance of collective action to unlock the complete potential of OKRs
• Adopt an effective OKR tool or platform to ensure that everyone has an understanding of the bigger picture. 

7. How to get started with an OKR tool?

If you are new to the OKR journey, you should consider collaborating with tools like SuperBeings to make OKRs simple and highly effective. 

• An OKR tool lets your team members get visibility into how their work is impacting the bottomline and overall organizational growth. There’s simply no better motivation for employees than realizing their work is important.
• Furthermore, you can effectively track and measure OKR progress with SuperBeings and identify any risks or instances of team misalignment preemptively. 
• Finally, using a dedicated OKR tool to create organization-wide visibility of team OKRs prevents the risk of priority goals being ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and keeps everyone focused on what matters most throughout the year. 

Get ready to make OKRs a force multiplier with team alignment powered by SuperBeings. Book a free SuperBeings demo today and see live OKRs in action.

Yes, performance reviews are important. But conducting reviews the right way at the right time is even more crucial. 

Today, most organizations realize the futility of once-a-year formal performance reviews, but they struggle to find an alternative that suits their needs. 

Furthermore, they struggle with implementing a regular review cadence that not only helps in performance appraisal, but also boosts employee performance and motivation.

In this article, we will discuss the following —

• Different performance review cadences
• Why annual reviews don’t work anymore
• Some alternatives to traditional annual performance reviews (bell-curves and continuous feedback)

SUPER TIP — Are you finding it hard to transition from annual performance reviews to continuous performance management? Our detailed guide on CPM can help. Download for free today!

What is the best time to conduct employee performance review?

The frequency of performance reviews depends on the scale of the company’s growth, market, and performance deliverables. Implementing the right kind of performance reviews that is effective for the organization is where major growing organizations get stuck. 

There is no fixed answer to what kind of annual review is the best. However, the most common types of performance reviews are:

a) Annual reviews

Annual reviews are a traditional practice of performance reviews and almost all previously growing companies followed its system at one point. Companies hold annual performance reviews once a year for appraisals, feedback, rewards, etc. Even though in the agile digital  world, a lot of companies have stopped following the annual review system, a few big companies still follow the yearly reviews. 

In the absence of an effective performance management system they find it hard to transition into other more effective performance review processes with a large number of employees spread globally. 

b) Bi-annual reviews

This performance review system is similar to the annual review system. However, instead of conducting a review only once a year, bi-annual reviews are conducted twice a year. The review and feedback for performance are conducted once every six months. 

In these reviews, the participants discuss their achievements accomplished and areas that need improvement, and objectives that need to be achieved in the upcoming six months. 

c) Quarterly reviews

The most recent system that a lot of organizations are trying to implement for performance reviews is quarterly reviews. This review system sets a chain of four performance reviews in a year. It helps managers and team members set short-term goals that are achievable within three months. Since quarterly reviews happen so frequently, employees get instant feedback on their projects that help them improve their performance sooner. 

SUPER-TIP — Get all your top questions answered about managing employee performance in our detailed guide on Continuous Performance Management. Click here to download the PDF

6 reasons why annual performance reviews don’t work anymore

The system of annual performance reviews has lost its merit in the fast-paced, digital corporate scene. In the dynamic work culture without the office boundaries, waiting for reviews at the end of the corporate spectrum do not seem very fitting. 

1. Annual performance reviews are arbitrary and weakens company culture

Annual reviews are arbitrary, as they are something the manager recalls by memory about employees' contributions to the company. Thus prone to recency bias where managers tend to give more weightage to the work employees did and didn’t do in the last few weeks leading to annual review. It fails to take into account the actual performance of the employee throughout the year. 

Moreover, most annual reviews are filled with opinions and judgments rather than backed by actual data and involve using metrics like attendance, which has no real impact on an employee's performance. 

Using manager’s opinion as a valid input for performance reviews often creates an unhealthy work culture where employees are more interested in pleasing their managers than improving their performance. When employees don’t open up about their actual problems at the workplace, the management does not get a clear picture of the root problems leading to low employee morale and poor business performance.

SUPER TIP — Learn A to Z of building a high performance company culture. Download our free culture guide today!

2. Annual reviews fail to engage or motivate employees

As mentioned, annual performance reviews often put employees in a position where they are at the end of the goodwill and mercy of the manager. Managers who strive for employee welfare and wellness sometimes feel they are put in an uncomfortable position of power against their employees, making it hard to conduct themselves well to give an effective review in absence of a continuous unbiased performance tracking system.

In contrast, managers who seldom care about employees may use it as an opportunity to take advantage of their subordinates and assert their dominance. 

Both are unfavorable situations that flow against employee morale, goodwill, and productivity and can be easily avoided with continuous employee performance review methods that are more casual, transparent, and promote good morale. 

SUPER TIP — Supercharge your team’s engagement with custom pulse surveys and create your own index. Book a free demo here

3. Annual performance surveys are prone to favoritism and rater bias

Among the forbidden things that clog up the workspace dynamics to achieve productivity is favoritism shown by some managers to their employees. A practice that brings down teamwork, creates a gap between employees and generates ill will towards managers and the company. Some managers also fall prey to unconscious biases such as the rater bias, which makes them rate employees higher in performance reviews if the employees showcase behaviors that resemble them, even if their output at work may be less than impressive. Hardworking employees who may not be at the grace of the managers might also have to watch poor-performing coworkers climb up the corporate ladder. 

Rater bias defers growth, and consequently, the manager's actions affect the whole company's performance. It also reduces employee satisfaction and makes the workplace toxic over time. 

4. Annual performance reviews often tie up with salary creating anxiety and stress  

One major factor that managers and employees hate about annual reviews is that it often ties with salary. 

Managers feel the stress as they have to make judgments about the employee's overall performance, review their productivity, code of conduct and finally make decisions about their future roles in the organization. The review decides whether to promote, demote, or fire the person. Moreover, in most organizations, there’s no proper learning program to train managers to provide a meaningful review.  

On the other hand, being at the receiving end, employees feel the pressure and stress as the once-a-year performance review decides their future in the company, and decisions will directly affect their livelihood. 

Add to the misery, sometimes, companies use annual performance reviews as a time to cut down wages, and staff either to survive in the market or to keep the charts clean in terms of profit to keep the goodwill of the stakeholders. 

Tying salary with performance reviews may have worked well in the past, but now it lowers employee morale, engagement and long-term employer brand. 

SUPER TIP — Looking for employee recognition ideas? Check out our complete guide on employee recognition do’s and don’ts.

5. Annual performance reviews are too formal and prevent open feedback from employees

Formally structured performance reviews fail to collect authentic and open feedback from employees. Instead, it often comes as a namesake, and employees feel that their feedback may either not get valued or might be used against them. 

Performance evaluations feel like a sit-down interrogation. The employees do not get enough room to comment and reflect on the manager's performance or share any other general issues that may indirectly affect them, making it a dull, unproductive, biased, and one-sided affair.

SUPER TIP — Take your performance reviews 1:1 and team meetings from being an interrogation to two-way feedback driven conversations with SuperBeings 1:1 meetings tool. 

You can also check these top 50 1:1 meeting conversations prompts to guide your next meeting.

Most of the time, the review's formal structure also prevents employees from opening and sharing their feedback. They are rigid, and the structure feels unwelcoming to provide any meaningful feedback. 

6. Lack of timely feedback in annual reviews negatively affect productivity

In this agile environment where scrum meetings and standups are the norms to save time and bring focus to work, annual reviews hold no significant value. It is because yearly reviews make managers wait to give feedback to an employee who urgently needs it. 

Instead of tackling an issue head-on, right at that moment, often they are dealing with it only when the performance review is near. Such delays negatively affect team morale and company culture because, during that waiting time, the poor performer is either stuck or only helping to bring down the rest of the team.

Continuous feedback vs. annual reviews

Annual performance reviews were a largely followed tradition for providing raises and bonuses and all the required feedback of the year. But with the changing times, the annual performance review methods and evaluation lost their value in performance management or employee satisfaction. 

These reviews allow employees to receive feedback from their immediate supervisor. But puts both managers and employees in a difficult, anxiety-ridden situation, where the manager has to deliver the feedback of their performance all through the year with various aspects at stake. It is inevitable that some major details are skipped, leaving employees dissatisfied with the results. 

Annual reviews were replaced with more modernized and tech-based processes to streamline the way feedback and reviews are done within the organization. Continuous feedback creates a cycle of more regular review and feedback sessions with transparent conversations between employees and managers. 

Since it is a two-way communication system, employees can voice out their concerns as well as receive praise and feedback instantly for their work. Continuous feedback provides real-time insights for employee growth, improving engagement, and building good relationships through open communication. 

SUPER-TIP — Read this article to learn more about implementing continuous feedback in your workplace

How relevant is the bell curve today?

Bell curve has also lost its relevance in the upcoming times, due to its extremely rigid system and several issues in measuring the performance of individual employees with accuracy. 

A bell curve is a form of equal distribution, it contains a large group at the center and then an equal number of people on either end of the spectrum. This means the maximum number of people falls under the curve of average while a relatively smaller and equal number of people are put in the top-performers and non-performers. In today’s workplace culture, employees look for equal treatment and opportunities when considering taking a job and the bell curve rarely includes any of it. 

There are several reasons why it lost its relevance such as —

• In this method, collaboration isn't a factor 
• Assessments that are inaccurate and unfair 
• Employees are severely discouraged by forced rankings and constructing the idea of losers and winners sets the wrong example. 

The Bell Curve performance appraisal best remains irrelevant as it is replaced with much more effective and data-driven performance appraisal systems that provide results based on real-time insights. 

Which performance review cadence should you choose?

There is no strict rule that specifies how many performance reviews an organization should do in a year. However annual and bi-annual reviews are being criticized for lacking accuracy. These reviews are usually related to salary appraisals and promotions, managers and employees both have to rely on their memory to recall the achievements of the past twelve or six months.

On the other hand, studies indicate that enabling managers and employees to have more frequent and transparent conversations about work expectations, problems, and progress improves engagement and performance in the long run.

Making it evident that having a continuous feedback-based performance review system naturally leads to proper employee development, brings more connected and engaging employees, builds solid organizational bonds and results in the company's overall growth and revenue.

If you are running a sales team or trying to accelerate your organizational revenue and profits, you already know that hitting sales goals although crucial is not easy. Especially for fast growing organizations, identifying and executing the right sales strategy is critical for success. 

Using sales OKRs or Objectives and Key Results form a goal setting framework that not only help managers and leaders set sales goals, but facilitate tracking and measuring them, creating alignment and ensuring seamless execution. 

By using the right sales OKRs, managers are positioned to ensure that sales teams are clear on what they seek to achieve and how to measure their level of accomplishment when it comes to meeting the targets. 

However, writing effective OKRs for the sales team can be challenging, mainly because having ambiguous OKRs can lead to more problems than solutions. Working with fast growing organizations, who seek to exponentially accelerate their sales targets, we have identified a few steps that you can leverage. 

Furthermore, we have captured some of the top examples of OKRs for sales teams, based on different phases of the sales cycle to give you a comprehensive picture. 

How to write OKRs for sales team

1. Understand the sales gap

When you write OKRs for your sales team, you need to be cognizant of the gap you are trying to fill. Ensuring a high flow of sales is not only about converting a sale, it also involves several other aspects. 

You might have the best closer in the industry on your sales team, but without an inflow of quality leads, you will find it difficult to reach your sales target. Therefore, you must undertake a comprehensive analysis to identify what are the key gaps and set sales OKRs which can bridge them.

2. Align with business objectives

Second, your sales objectives must be aligned with your business objectives. Is the larger goal for your organization directed towards increasing revenue or increasing recurring business or something else? You must answer these questions. 

Therefore, when writing sales OKRs, you must confer with your organizational leadership to avoid any disconnect. Simultaneously, you must also involve your sales representatives and others in the sales team to ensure that your objectives are ambitious enough that stretches each member’s potential and the key results are clear to all. 

SUPER-TIP — Download our easy to use customizable templates for OKR setting and OKR implementation and directly use them in your team today!

3. Make them quantifiable

Using ambiguous sales OKRs as examples will only lead to missing the key goal or objective. For instance, simply saying that your objective is to generate more leads will not be enough. You need to be specific with a number or a percentage in mind which you seek to reach. It could be something on the lines of increasing sales by 15%. 

Furthermore, your objectives and key results must be accompanied by a time frame when you seek to achieve it and preferably a comparison point like last year or last quarter. This will help your sales team get a comprehensive and clear picture, leaving no room for misinterpretation and poor performance. 

4. Create OKRs for different steps of the sales cycle

You must understand that there are different steps in a sales cycle, right from lead generation to repeat sales. It is important to have specific OKRs for the sales team during each phase. Here, the OKRs should focus on that particular phase. 

For instance, if you talk about lead generation, your objective could be to increase the number of qualified leads by 50% by the end of the first quarter. You might want to review your OKRs for each phase, once between the timeline decided and once at the end by tracking performance on the key results. Here, OKR grading will be useful.

SUPER-TIP — Download our templates for OKR grading and OKR tracking today and help your sales team by setting the right sales OKRs.

5. Define metrics

When you write OKRs for your sales team for each phase of the sales cycle, you need to be clear on the different metrics that each phase includes. For instance, in the sales conversion phase, there can be multiple metrics like number of deals, size of deals, deal close rate, etc. 

It is important to not only set these metrics to add efficacy to your sales OKRs, but also equally critical to explain to your team members what they mean and the importance of each. 

SUPER-TIP — Use a free OKR email course to clear any confusion around OKRs and be empowered to set and achieve your sales goals this year.

6. Have a fair balance of different types of OKRs

Finally, when you write sales team OKRs, you need to understand that while most of them will correspond to the different metrics in each phase, there might be a few others that don’t fall in any one. These OKRs are related to the entire process or the people in your sales team. 

For instance, an objective on recruiting the best sales team in the industry or shortening the entire sales process are very important but do not fit the understanding of a particular phase. Therefore, you need to ensure that you go beyond the steps of your sales cycle and incorporate all important parameters. 

OKRs for sales team: Top sales OKR examples 

Now that you have a fair understanding of how to write OKRs for sales teams, here is a quick read for you to explore different sales OKR examples for different steps of the sales cycle. 

Lead generation

In the first step of the sales cycle, your focus will be on generating and capturing leads that you can connect with as prospects for your sales. Here, generally, the focus is on the number of new leads generated, percentage of qualified leads, etc. 

Objective A: Create a robust lead generation plan

Key result 1: Create a database of 200 new prospects

Key result 2: Reach out to 1000+ potential customers via campaigns

Key result 3: Generate a pipeline of INR 50,000 through sales 

Lead nurturing

Once you have a robust pipeline through your lead generation efforts, you will focus on nurturing those leads to convert them into sales. This generally involves email and calls to connect with the leads and give them a deeper understanding about your offerings to attract them further. 

Objective A: Increase the qualified prospect pipeline created through emails by 50%

Key result 1: Increase the number of emails sent everyday to 35 from 20

Key result 2: Increase the number of responses received by 20%

Key result 3: Reduce the average response time to 24 hours

Sales closure

This is the most rewarding phase of the sales cycle. It generally has sub phases and multiple metrics within it. For instance, some could revolve around the revenue from sales, some could focus on deals exclusively. However, the major focus remains the same — adding more revenue to the organizational bottom line. 

Objective A: Increase revenue for the new products

Key Result 1: Sign up 10 new clients for the new product

Key Result 2: Close in on INR 2,00,000 as revenue for the first quarter

Key Result 3: Increase the number of deals for each month by 20%

Objective B: Increase the profit margins by 20%

Key Result 1: Reduce the sales time to 20 days from 25 days

Key Result 2: Increase the average value of every sale by 20%

Key Result 3: Increase the deal close rate by 30%

Post sales 

In the final phase of the sales cycle, you need to focus on establishing customer stickiness and foster repeat or recurring sales. The objective is to provide an exemplary post sales experience to encourage your customers to build loyalty. 

Objective A: Ensure recurring sales 

Key Result 1: Increase repeat customers to 30% from current 20%

Key Result 2: Increase customer retention to 90%

Other sales OKR examples

In addition to the OKR examples which are specific to the sales cycle, there are a few others that you must consider and leverage for a robust sales strategy.

Sales OKR example #1

Objective A: Grow sales and revenue through third party platforms

Key Result 1: Generate 20% of total revenue from cross selling

Key Result 2: Get the products to be listed on at least 10 new platforms

Key Result 3: Partner with 15 organizations to explore cross selling opportunities

Sales OKR example #2

Objective B: Build a world class sales team

Key Result 1: Recruit 10 new sales representatives in 3 months

Key Result 2: Conduct 3 sales training workshops

Key Result 3: Get regular reviews and feedback on performance of sales team

Sales OKR example #3

Objective C: Increase sales globally

Key Result 1: Generate 20% revenue from overseas

Key Result 2: Establish visibility in the international markets with partners

Key Result 3: Build a pipeline of 500 international prospects 

Getting started with OKRs for sales team

This guide must have given you a clear and comprehensive picture on how to write OKRs for your sales team. However, as a part of a fast growing organization, you might not have the bandwidth or the expertise to create truly effective and remarkable sales OKRs. 

Fortunately, you have the option of banking on external partners like SuperBeings to help you out. With SuperBeings, you can: 

• Set transparent and collaborative OKRs which are visible to all
• Get real-time insights into day-to-day sales OKR progress and resolve performance issues preemptively
• Leverage OKR progress reports, check-ins and AI recommendations
• Set, implement, and track sales OKRs easily by integrating OKRs with the collaboration tools
• Train your line managers to write and implement the right OKRs with expert-led OKR coaching and onboarding support

Book a free demo with SuperBeings today to get started on an amazing sales journey.

Most organizations today are in the midst of adopting a continuous feedback approach to improve employee performance and organizational success. If you have joined this bandwagon, you would have several questions in your mind around the same. Questions around the best practices, the common pitfalls, duration and frequency and much more. 

To help you leverage the continuous feedback framework, we have compiled a list of all the questions you might have along with answers from industry experts. 

#Q1. What is the frequency and duration of reviews for continuous feedback?

When it comes to continuous feedback, the idea is to make the reviews short and regular. Instead of making it a long drawn annual process, try to offer reviews which are frequent and to the point. The reviews can be as frequent as daily or weekly or monthly. 

PRO-TIP — Under continuous feedback, instead of focusing on a pre-decided timeline and frequency for reviews, go for an approach where you give your employees review and feedback when the need arises. 

For instance, if you have inputs or suggestions on the way a particular task has been completed, share it with your team members in real time instead of waiting for the review cycle to commence. 

Also, keep your reviews and suggestions concise and don’t elongate them just for the sake of it. Set the context and share your inputs. Therefore, when continuous feedback is concerned, the best frequency is to offer feedback in real time and keep it crisp and action oriented. 

#Q2. What are the best practices to ensure effectiveness of continuous feedback?

If you are part of a fast growing organization, you need to ensure that you adopt an effective and evidence-based approach to continuous feedback. Providing reviews and feedback to your employees in real time can be a great starting point. However, it is not enough to create a culture where continuous feedback contributes to continuous performance improvement. 

Here are the top best practices you can leverage to augment the effectiveness of your continuous feedback focus:

1. Track progress regularly

Continuous feedback will only lead to better performance when you have a clear picture of the employee's progress. If you don’t know where your employee stands and in which direction they are moving, you will not have anything concrete to share in your frequent conversations. Therefore, it is important to constantly track the progress of your employees and provide them with appropriate timely feedback. 

2. Encourage dialogue

Your continuous feedback will only be effective if you promote and encourage dialogue. Simply sharing your inputs and feedback on a regular basis with your employees will not suffice. Rather, you need to encourage your employees to share their side of the story as well as voice challenges and provide feedback to you as well. This way, continuous feedback will ensure that a culture of improvement comes to the forefront. 

3. Gauge employee pulse

To make continuous feedback effective, you need to have insights and intel on employee perceptions and opinions in real time. This will help you to preempt risks and address challenges in real time by providing appropriate feedback and support. You can do so by conducting employee pulse surveys which can go out on a daily basis. This employee pulse can help you lay the foundation of actions of your managers with empowering feedback. 

QUICK READ — Check out these articles to learn how to make the most of your employee pulse surveys —

• Pulse Survey 101
• How to use pulse survey results
• How to find the best employee pulse survey tool

4. Leverage technology

Finally, one of the key aspects to augment the effectiveness of continuous feedback is to ensure consistency and continuity. As a fast growing organization, you might be swamped with a lot of other priorities and continuous feedback might take a back seat. 

Here, leveraging a platform like SuperBeings which can automate capturing employee pulse, sharing key insights and providing next steps for managers and guided templates for conversations can help maintain the momentum. Therefore, you must consider leveraging the right tools and resources to stay on track. 

Get a hands on experience on how SuperBeings can drive continuous feedback in your organization, book a free demo today.

#Q3. How can fast growing organizations embed ongoing feedback in their flow of work?

As mentioned above also, to make continuous feedback effective, you need to have a consistent approach. One of the best ways to achieve the same is by embedding continuous feedback in the very culture of the organization. The idea is to see it as a part of the flow of work, rather than an added responsibility. 

Here are a few ways to embed ongoing feedback into flow of work:

1. Focus on constructive conversations

To begin with, you need to focus on conducting constructive conversations regularly. When it comes to continuous feedback, it is not always about sharing with your employees where they can improve. It is equally about sharing some insights with them and learning from them how they feel and how work is going, what are the challenges they face etc. 

Therefore, if you focus your efforts towards ensuring regular constructive conversations as a part of your workday, feedback continuity will be taken care of. Here you can also focus on creating a culture where 1:1 conversations are a norm. 

Use a tool like SuperBeings to provide your managers with AI driven 1:1 meeting recommendations, conflict free time slots for 1:1 meetings whenever they need and guided templates for all crucial conversations.

2. Build a cadence

It is important that you set a cadence with all your team members. It could be weekly, fortnightly or monthly, depending on the role and responsibilities and the relationship you share with them. 

While you must offer feedback in real time, this cadence will become a part of your schedule to ensure that even when there is no apparent review to offer, you do connect with your employees on a regular basis, without it becoming an added burden. 

When it is there in your calendar, it will be a part of your tasks for the day, and will not require any extra effort. SuperBeings integrates with your favorite calendar based on your feedback needs and helps you find conflict-free meeting slots with any one or more of your team members.

3. Make feedback a core value

Next, you must focus on making feedback a core value for your organization. You would agree that for most organizations, there are certain values which are very important and can be seen being practiced by almost every employee. You need to make feedback one of the values. 

If you are able to do so, continuous feedback will come as second nature to everyone in the team and will become part of the day to day expectations, rather than an added one. 

#Q4. Performance Reviews vs. Continuous Feedback: How to keep them separate?

If you are moving towards a continuous feedback approach, you might gradually realize that your regular ongoing reviews are replacing your performance reviews. There is often this challenge that most organizations face. 

However, it is extremely important to keep the two as distinct because while the former focuses on real time challenges and concerns, it does not offer a holistic picture of the employee’s performance and will not be enough to assign appraisals, long term rewards and career planning. 

Fortunately, there are a few ways in which the distinction between the two can be maintained and you can prevent continuous reviews from engulfing performance reviews:

1. Set dates for annual/bi-annual performance reviews in advance

The first step to avoid this is by not doing away with annual or bi-annual performance reviews and communicating the dates or the timeline for the same in advance. This will give out the message that while ongoing reviews are important, you are equally committed to performance reviews in the long run.

2. Emphasize on the difference and importance of each

Second, it is important to emphasize the difference between the two and highlight the importance of each. You need to make your team members understand that while ongoing reviews seek to address challenges in real time and preempt any major risk, performance reviews seek to focus on long term performance improvement and gauge the impact of employee performance on organizational success and vice versa. 

Ongoing reviews have a more short term and immediate focus and seek to ensure everyday work efficiency. Performance reviews set the tone for long term performance improvement and have a more pronounced focus. It is extremely critical to communicate this to your managers and executives, who are then responsible for ensuring that the same reaches their team members. 

3. Have distinct parameters for evaluation

If you wish to prevent ongoing reviews from taking place of performance reviews, you need to have distinct parameters for evaluation of both. If you have similar parameters, your managers will have a hard time differentiating between the two and the whole purpose will be defeated. 

Therefore, your ongoing reviews must focus on metrics of task and project completion, while the performance reviews should include parameters like organizational impact, personal and professional growth, etc. 

4. Identify different forms of continuous feedback

Another way to prevent continuous feedback from taking place of performance reviews is to expand the scope of what continuous feedback entails. The idea is to broaden the idea beyond performance and goal setting to include different factors that influence employee experience. 

Your continuous feedback could focus on augmenting engagement and talking about creating an empowering culture. 

While your performance review will solely focus on the employee and how his/her contribution has been to organizational success, continuous feedback can take care of several other factors which enable employee growth and development. 

#Q5. How to align continuous feedback with rewards decisions?

There are several ways in which continuous feedback can ensure that rewards and recognition happen in the most effective and meaningful manner. Following are a few aspects that you need to keep in mind —

1. Eliminate bias from recognition

In the first instance, if you look at annual performance feedback, you might see that it is vulnerable to various forms of biases which come along when feedback is delivered after long intervals. Two of the most common biases include halo or horns effect and recency effect. 

a) Halo or Horns Effect

In halo or horns effect, your judgment of an individual’s performance might be clouded by a singular positive or negative event. Here you will end up seeing their entire performance with a tinted lens. 

However, when you leverage continuous feedback, you are able to leverage real time performance insights which prevent you from making rigid assumptions about a person’s performance on the basis of a single event. 

This will enable you to make fair rewards and recognition. It will help you recognize the efforts and performance the way it is and prevent you from anchoring your reward decisions only on one or two instances of employee performance. 

b) Recency Bias

In the recency effect, you might be vulnerable to gauging the performance of your employees based on the most recent events. 

In an annual feedback approach, you might end up taking into account only the most recent aspects of the performance, which will only give you a myopic view. However, with continuous feedback, you can eliminate the recency effect and offer feedback in real time to ensure that every aspect of employee performance is given due credit and their rewards and recognition give a holistic picture of their performance. 

Quick Read — Read Employee Recognition 101 to learn everything about implementing employee recognition programs the right way.

2. Facilitate continuous recognition and motivation 

Continuous feedback is also a great tool to create a culture of continuous recognition. This has the potential to improve organizational score on factors like engagement, motivation, retention and an overall positive employee experience. 

Continuous feedback can be aligned with rewards by creating a continuous recognition program to appreciate and reward performance in real time. 

• You can make an instant effort to acknowledge the contribution of your employees in public (if that’s the culture) to encourage others also to keep a consistent level of performance throughout the year rather than only on days close to the performance review.
• Continuous feedback can help you in recognizing efforts and good work as well as giving credit when credit is due rather than postponing it to the end of the year.
• It can help facilitate and fulfill the human need for instant gratification with the right praise at the right time. 

More often than not, when you delay recognition due to lack of real time and continuous feedback, its impact reduces considerably and it fails to act as a motivation tool for the employees. 

#Q6. How to train managers to give constructive continuous feedback?

One of the final questions that you might be struggling with would revolve around giving your managers constructive feedback in a continuous and regular manner. Here are a few ways in which you can achieve the same:

1. Capture employee data

To offer constructive and continuous feedback, managers need to be armed with employee data. This refers to not only having relevant data points about employee performance and achievements, but also insights on what they feel and their opinion about the work and workplace. Constructive and continuous feedback stems from hard evidence based on which you can have a rational conversation for improvement. 

Pro-tip — SuperBeings’ intelligent Sentiment Analysis can take your employee understanding to the next level. Book a free demo today to see it in action in your organization.

2. Practice active listening

For feedback to be constructive, as a manager, you can’t simply share your point of view and expect the employee to absorb and execute the same. You need to give them a chance as well to explain why certain things panned out the way they did. 

Furthermore, you need to understand from them what their plans are and how they seek to grow professionally and personally. For continuous feedback to actually be effective, you need to engage in dialogue because just listening to your monologue will end up frustrating your team members, because chances are that without their perspectives, you will end up repeating yourself every time. 

Quick Read — Check out this list of 50 questions to ask in your next 1:1 meeting to ensure you are talking about what really matters.

3. Offer specific solutions

One of the key aspects of constructive feedback is to ensure that some action points or next steps or solutions are discussed. Simply sharing with your employees what is working and what is not will not suffice. 

This becomes even more important when the feedback is continuous because you are talking about challenges in real time and simply stating the problem without brainstorming on a possible solution is self defeating. 

This does not mean that you have to force ready made solutions for your employees. Rather, it is important to have a good conversation to collectively identify potential solutions. 

#Q7. What are the challenges to developing a culture of continuous feedback?

When you implement the continuous feedback framework in your organization, you will realize that there are certain risks and challenges that are likely to come your way. It is best to anticipate them beforehand and be prepared with appropriate solutions to ensure that they don’t retard your growth and hinder performance improvement. 

Some of the common pitfalls that managers all around the world have come across include:

1. Lack of consistency

The first common pitfall that stands in the way of continuous feedback success is the lack of consistency. A continuous approach to feedback requires dedicated and consistent efforts towards tracking employee performance and creating feedback on the same. However, due to various priorities, fast growing organizations tend to lack consistency when it comes to feedback.

This is why it is crucial to use a continuous feedback tool that will automate the process and supply managers with timely action recommendations.

2. Lack of manager buy in

Second, continuous feedback requires a lot of effort on the part of managers and leadership to provide the right inputs and also engage in dialogue with their employees. As opposed to annual feedback, they need to spend more time and effort on continuous feedback and that too on a regular basis. This generally leads to a resistance from the managers and an unwillingness to change the status quo.

3. Limited resources

The next common pitfall to continuous feedback comes in the form of limited resources, both human and capital. Most fast growing organizations are constrained by the availability of resources. 

Therefore, even if there is a motivation to focus on continuous feedback, activities which have a direct impact on the bottom line (such as goals and OKR check-ins) take precedence. Often, organizations lack dedicated resources to manage the entire continuous feedback spectrum, which adds to its ineffectiveness and limited success. 

4. Inability to follow up with action steps

Finally, for continuous feedback to bear results, it is important that feedback and reviews are followed up with action items that indicate change. However, for many organizations, feedback is seldom backed by action and next steps. 

Invariably, when there is no action following the feedback, due to either lack of expertise or limited managerial competencies or lack of insights and industry best practices, level of performance improvement is negligible. 

Final thoughts

We hope that we were able to answer most of your questions on continuous feedback. In case you have any more queries, you can reach out to us directly. In our experience of working with fast growing organizations, we have realized that most of them benefitted highly from partnering with platforms like SuperBeings. 

Leveraging such a platform can help you ensure that on one hand, there is a consistency and continuity to your feedback approach and on the other, there are concrete next steps and way forward after the feedback which is regularly tracked to ensure effective results. 

Book a demo today to get a flavor of how continuous feedback can automate your performance and 360 reviews with a highly flexible system built for reducing admin work and rater bias.

Performance management is an inevitable strategy that helps organizations measure each employee's contribution, productivity levels, development opportunities, and focus of action. It is also a crucial tool to evaluate the energy, drive, and engagement of a team. 

The right performance management system helps managers provide additional support to the staff, decide on a staff's training requirements, and determine pay hikes/cuts. It also allows them to assign additional responsibilities to the person based on his actual performance metrics and results.

Importance of Having a Performance Management System

An organization needs clear performance metrics to evaluate its growth and development over time. A spreadsheet alone doesn’t meet the purpose when you grow beyond five or ten employees.

Without a proper performance management system, managers often feel uncomfortable confronting employees’ demands and justifying organizational decisions. As a result, managers tend to ignore recognizing high-performers and potential talents when operations become unmanageable. New and inexperienced managers may also lack the judgemental and analytical skills to evaluate employees correctly. 

HR managers, on the other hand, find it difficult to coordinate people management processes with inaccurate data resulting in interpersonal conflicts and poor team performance.

When employees do not feel valued and rewarded, employees start quitting their jobs.

Organizations that spend time and effort to track employee performance, provide them with adequate support and guidance to keep them motivated and productive throughout. This appraisal process lets both the employee and manager compare expectations and reality.

Furthermore, a competent manager can utilize a performance management system to encourage employees to meet their performance expectations and goals frequently and keep them focused on their roles and responsibilities.

Quick Read: Check out this step-by-step article to learn everything you need to know about measuring and managing employee performance — from goals and reviews to ratings and development.

But how to understand when you need to implement a performance management system in your organization? Or, even more importantly, do you know if your current performance management platform needs to be updated or changed?

This article will help you take action before it is too late.

9 early signs you need a performance management system 

#1 - Your company is headed towards hypergrowth

Initially, a start-up often has four or five employees who share multiple responsibilities to reduce the cost of operations. It is not the case with an established business or a company heading towards hyper-growth. 

As you expand, you need to specify roles and responsibilities to each individual, monitor their work, review the output, work on the marketing and sales side, focus on the development and sustainability, and build networks and relations. You cannot oversee every operation and do it all alone. You need to delegate tasks and automate processes to ensure consistency and result. 

Solution: That is when you know you can leverage a performance management system to streamline operations by setting delivery expectations, creating organizational alignment and enabling timely documentation of performance and workflows.

Quick Read — Check out this guide on developing a Continuous Performance Management process in your organization. Click here to download the PDF

#2 - You find it difficult to retain high-performers and top talent

It is a competitive world where employees are aware of the global work culture and organizational processes. Today’s employees look forward to growing mutually with the organization where they are valued, listened to, and recognized.

In such a time, you must enable a system where you are able to measure and recognize individual and team performance instead of just focusing on the output and financial results. Being indifferent to continuous performance improvement and feedback needs of employees may lead to quick attrition,  microaggression at the workplace, disengagement and lack of commitment from your employees.

Solution: The right performance management system eliminates the systematic barriers to high performance leading to timely recognition, reduced employee turnover and enhanced team performance.

#3 – Low employee motivation and productivity

When employees feel unappreciated and know that they can get away by doing the bare minimum — their productivity dips and motivation dwindles. 

Moreover, when the manager fails to set clear goals and performance expectations, employees keep on asking what to do next. Without a performance management system, a majority of the employees chase deadlines instead of goals. They do not understand the importance of their contribution or do not have a great picture of the whole process.

Solution: A performance management system helps employees understand their responsibilities and roles fully by creating organizational goal alignment. It records everything they contribute and do and gives them performance nudges throughout the week to keep them productive. It automates the performance analysis and review process and helps in timely recognition and rewards.

On the other hand, it helps managers assign the right employees for the right task and facilitate team collaboration to counter low productivity and motivation.

#4 – You find it difficult to streamline HR activities 

A performance management system is an HR tool in its core sense. Without a system, an HR manager finds it difficult to acknowledge employee feedback, understand their demands, and provide a solution to employee disengagement.

The general issues faced by an HR manager without having a proper performance management tool are — 

• Unable to trace the performance history of employees
• Completely dependent on the line manager’s comments which are often subjective and prone to biases
• Find it difficult to understand training requirements
• Placing inappropriate performance goals against employee capabilities
• Not able to build employee-manager rapport
• Unable to retain employees and attract potential talent

Solution: An effective performance management system helps streamline HR activities by suggesting timely rewards and recognition programs. Furthermore, it also enables the manager to communicate clearly with the employees on the expected results vs. actual performance. Thus, helping HR managers understand employee learning and training requirements — personalizing the HR process for each employee.

#5 – Your current performance management system is inefficient

A poor performance management system could be more dangerous to your organization’s growth than not having a system in place as it does not guarantee data accuracy, traceability, open communication, and evaluation metrics. Some of the critical issues are:

• Inconsistent and unorganized data
• Lack of accuracy
• Weakened HR policies
• Non-compliance
• Resource wastage
• Dissatisfied employees
• Lack of traceability
• Unclear performance goals and objectives

This leads to biased decision-making and feedback based on incorrect data and analytics reports, resulting in employee-manager conflicts and inconsistent performance issues.

Solution: The solution is to implement a proper performance management system that’s efficient and suits your specific needs.

Pro-tip — Book a free demo today to see how SuperBeings can help you align goals and boost employee performance. Or check out this 8 point checklist on what to look for while choosing the right performance management tool for your business.

#6 – Your company is unable to attract potential talents

21st century employees — millennials and gen Z — look forward to career advancements and growth. They are not satisfied with a good salary package alone. They seek value-addition, clear career advancement, freedom and flexibility, incentives and perks, and recognition and appreciation.

When an organization fails to implement an effective performance management system, the attitude and disengagement of the existing employees influences the joining and retention of new talents. 

Solution: On the other hand, a performance management tool helps the HR manager to describe the workflow, expectations, company policies, and procedures clearly during the interview process. Having a clear and communicable strategy will attract new candidates and motivate them to stay in the organization with a big picture in mind. 

In short, a performance management system helps organizations to;

• Attract potential talents
• Lay-out a detailed career plan
• Set clear expectations
• Point out policies and procedures for raises and perks
• Detail them about promotions and growth
• Improve workplace interpersonal relationships

A performance management system outlines and automates the whole employee management process more convincingly than hundreds of excel sheets and paper files.

#7 - Your performance review process is inconsistent  

Old-fashioned annual appraisals are no longer considered efficient and effective in organizations as it usually boils down to judgments made by a manager without having proper evidence to support them. The drawbacks of traditional performance management processes are as follows —

• It does not facilitate continuous feedback and frequent check-ins
• Creates fear-based employee mindset instead of growth-based
• It can be biased and unfair
• Primarily driven by subjective opinion instead of objective data
• Spreadsheets and paper files often get misplaced
• Performance history cannot be traced easily

Solution: A good performance management system is a continuous process that offers traceability and fairness. It delivers a 360-degree analysis of the employee performance throughout this life cycle. In addition to the consistency it provides in the appraisal process, it standardizes the process across the organization. 

#8 -  New managers lack analytical skills and experience

To establish their potential and skill sets in the new organization to prove themselves, new managers try to use unconventional methods or practices to manage people and make common leadership mistakes.

The limited experience and skillsets force new managers to perform appraisals with the support of other supervisors or deputies. They do not often try to collect data by themselves but depend on others’ inputs — causing unfairness and inaccuracy.

Solution: A good performance management system provides templates for all crucial 1:1 and team meetings, allowing new managers to complete performance review without hassles. They only need to follow the instructions and procedure. 

Performance management tools also train managers on understanding people analytics helping them preempt attrition and operational risks and build better employee-manager relationships. 

#9 -   It is hard for you to align everyone towards a common goal

Another negative impact of not having a performance tracking system is that you manage the performance metrics incorrectly and employees miss the bigger picture. Managers also struggle to guide the employees in the same direction and reiterate the importance of achieving the organizational goals and objectives. 

Employees and managers start to contradict and conflict arises when there is a mismatch in the performance expectations against actual results. 

Solution: Implementing a performance management system to streamline the entire people management process and restructure the policies and practices is the first step that creates organizational alignment. With OKRs, frequent performance check-ins, and continuous feedback — it becomes easier to make sure everyone in the organization is rowing in the same direction at all times.

For any growing organization, employees are its biggest asset. And optimizing employee performance is the first step towards building a company that lasts decades. Book a free demo with SuperBeings today to unlock the hidden performance potential of your people.

Employee recognition has been one of the top tools that most organizations are leveraging to create an empowering and positive work culture to attract and retain top talent. You must have come across at least one discussion over the past couple of years on how your organization needs to develop and implement a robust employee recognition program. 

However, we understand that with several priorities in your mind and limited resources, there might be multiple questions that you would have on employee recognition and the best way to maximize its effectiveness and ROI. 

After working with several fast growing organizations, we have been able to identify some of the tried and tested ways to get started with employee recognition, in a way that is efficient, cost effective and bears incremental results. 

Here is a detailed guide to help accelerate your rewards and recognition journey. 

Create a culture of recognition and appreciation

The first major question or thought that is likely to strike you is how to create a culture of recognition and appreciation. It goes without saying that if you simply recognize the work of your employees on an ad-hoc basis, there will be no sustained efforts or results. 

It will be a one-off event, leading to no impact on performance, retention or motivation. Therefore, it is important to create a culture of recognition and here are a few steps to achieve the same:

1. Recognize early and regularly

First, your employee recognition efforts need to be in real time and regular in nature. There are two aspects at play here. On one hand, you need to ensure that you recognize and appreciate the performance or efforts of your employees when it is due and not months after, when the cause of appreciation is out of mind. Therefore, you need to ensure early employee recognition. 

On the other hand, you need to be regular in your recognition efforts. Appreciating your employees once every six month is not enough to create a culture of recognition. You need to make recognition a habit, across all levels of the organization.

Pro-tip: Having regular 1:1 check-ins with team members is a quick, easy and cost-effective way to induce a culture of regular recognition. Check out our short guide on how to take your next 1:1 check-in to the next level

2. Be specific 

A culture of recognition and appreciation thrives when you are specific. Simply telling your employees that they did a good job is not enough. Be specific and clear on what they are receiving appreciation and recognition for. 

Whether it is for closing a deal or for improving customer satisfaction, you need to be clear when recognizing efforts and performance. This will help them understand what they are being recognized for, and will further enable them to work towards the same with greater motivation. 

Being specific will also give cue to others on how recognition works best, and, thereby, encourage them to emulate the same.

3. Celebrate effort and intention

If you wish to truly create a culture of recognition and appreciation, you need to recognize every aspect of an employee's work and not focus merely on the results. This includes appreciating the efforts and intention, even if they were unable to achieve the desired results. Creating a culture is all about encouraging others to follow the same, and when you appreciate efforts and intentions, others will too. 

Top 5 Best Practices for Employee Recognition

An idea closely linked to creating a culture of recognition revolves around the best practices. These best practices can help you ensure that your recognition culture grows and thrives effectively. 

1. Have a clear recognition program

As one of the best practices for employee recognition, it is important to have a very clear recognition program. There are several aspects to this. 

First, you need to align on what the objectives of your recognition program are or what you seek to achieve by focusing on employee recognition. It could be a combination of results like increased sense of belongingness, better performance, greater satisfaction, higher engagement etc. 

Second, you need to be clear on what kind of behaviors will be rewarded and recognized. You can define these behaviors based on the culture or practices that you seek to establish in the organization. For instance, if you feel that your employees are not as responsible as you would like them to be, recognize accountability. 

Other factors that you need to decide on include the frequency of recognition as well as who should recognize, leaders vs peers. Having these bases covered will ensure that you have a robust employee recognition program. 

2. Experiment with different types of rewards

Next, you must ensure that your employee recognition efforts are actually bearing fruits, you need to experiment with different types of rewards and ways of appreciation. While in some situations a pat on the back can go a long way, others might require public appreciation or a combination of incentives and rewards along with recognition. 

However, don’t be afraid of using recognition and reward ideas like a day off, or a gift voucher. They can be as effective as any other form of recognition. It is important to play along with a bit of variety to make the experience of being recognized fun and exciting. 

3. Make it personal

One of the best practices that has had a high success rate for almost all organizations has been the ability to make recognition personal. You need to understand that you are recognizing a human being for their efforts and that requires personalization. 

Instead of sending out the same gratitude message to all, make each message personal and highlight how you appreciate their individual contribution and performance alongside team effort. 

Having a standard template for recognition looks more of a tick in the box and does not express any genuine or authentic effort for employee recognition. Invariably, you will be unable to achieve your desired result. Therefore, make each instance of recognition personal and customized to employee performance. 

4. Recognize everyday

When you seek to learn about the best practices for employee recognition, you need to understand that confining recognition to celebrate only the big wins is not enough. You need to recognize the everyday small wins for your employees and make them feel motivated at all times. 

The idea is to celebrate small wins like checking all points in a task list. All great leaders know that recognizing efforts everyday will act as a motivator for employees to outperform themselves everyday and give in their best, because they know their efforts and contribution are always appreciated. 

5. Recognize even when times are slow

Finally, don’t save recognition only for the good and happy days. To make the most of your employee recognition program, it is crucial to appreciate efforts even when times are slow. For instance, if your team has been putting 12 hour long days for a deal and the deal doesn’t come through, you still need to appreciate the effort that went into the preparation. 

The idea here is not to completely dismiss what happened and celebrate despite being in a backstep when it comes to organizational success. But, it is important to motivate the team to perform better when the next opportunity comes along and avoid the fear of failure as well as prevent self doubt. 

Role of qualitative vs. quantitative recognition

A key component for employee recognition is to gauge performance review and evaluation effectively. That is what forms the basis for quantitative vs qualitative evaluation and consequently recognition. 

• Quantitative evaluation refers to gauging the level of performance numerically in terms of deals closed or targets achieved. They have a clear goal, achievement of which turns to recognition. 

• Whereas, qualitative evaluation is ideal for roles which have a more abstract outlook, especially the ones which come from a creative side. Qualitative employee evaluation is also useful to gauge employee behaviors.
  

Based on the type of evaluation, you can leverage different ways of recognizing your employees. These can include bonuses, praises, written notes, etc. You can leverage quantitative recognition when you wish to appreciate their achievements from a quantity or volume of work lens. However, leverage qualitative recognition when you are truly impressed by the quality of work your employees have been able to turn around or the kind of energy and enthusiasm they bring to the team.

What is the difference between recognition and rewards?

Many hyper growth organizations face a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding the relationship between rewards and recognition. There is often a question if there is a connection between the two and if one should take precedence over the other. 

For a simple understanding, you must look at recognition and rewards and intrinsically linked. If you look closely, recognition is relational in nature, while rewards are transactional. While rewards are tangible and constitute gifts, bonuses, vouchers etc., recognition is an intangible form where the work of an employee is appreciated by calling out their accomplishments and the like.

If you are wondering if you can replace one for the other, you need to think again. Both of them play a different and equally important role in advancing the cause of employee retention and satisfaction. 

While rewards are materially driven and become an important incentive and source of motivation for employees, recognition helps in employees believing that their efforts and contribution are being valued, even if it doesn’t translate to tangible rewards every time. 

For a more comprehensive understanding, you may want to see rewards as a way of recognizing employee performance which is less frequent and comes with an attached cost of realization. 

Whereas, recognition can be more frequent and does not necessarily require resources and investments. All that is needed are words of gratitude and a genuine willingness to appreciate efforts. 

Top 7 career milestones for employee recognition

As a fast growing organization, you will have many employees who will be celebrating key milestones in their professional life for the first time when working with you. It is extremely important to celebrate such career milestones from an employee recognition lens to create a greater sense of belongingness. 

We believe that the top 7 milestones can be divided into two major segments. The first ones include those which are more common and are generally considered to be more important, like:

1. Work anniversary

Celebrating the day when employees complete a tenure or a year and more with your organization to recognize their efforts and contribution. 

2. Landing first big deal

Recognizing the hard work and commitment of your team members when they accomplish a major target in their functional area which has large scale positive impact for the organization.

3. Promotion and appraisal

Celebrating promotion and appraisal for your team members. Here employee recognition comes in the form of appreciating their performance and congratulating them as they move up in the professional ladder of success. 

4. Retirement

Finally, the last of the most common career milestones for employee recognition is retirement. Here you can express gratitude and appreciate your employees for all they have done for the organization throughout their journey. 

While these are some of the common career milestones that you take into consideration as a part of your employee recognition framework, there are a few others too which may not be as prominent, but are equally important. These milestones deserve equal recognition and celebration to boost employee morale and encourage efforts and perseverance.

5. Meeting goals

Celebrate and practice employee recognition when your team members are able to meet their weekly or daily goals. A simple email or words of appreciation can go a long way to help employees strive harder for their goals. 

6. Sharing insights and knowledge

You must focus on employee recognition when your team members go out of their way to share insights and knowledge with others in the team. This will help expand the overall capabilities and competencies of the team and encourage others to contribute towards collective growth.

7. Mentoring peers

This is an important career milestone that you must recognize. Your employees deserve due credit if they make a genuine effort to mentor their peers and those who are new to the organization. If they are trying hard to help others navigate through the challenges they faced, they definitely deserve recognition and celebration of an important milestone. 

How to implement an effective employee recognition program?

Many growth stage organizations today struggle with getting started with the whole employee recognition journey. While we have talked at length about how to create a culture of recognition and the best practices you can follow, we have also captured here a few tips to commence your journey in a way that is destined for success. 

1. Get leadership buy-in

You need to start your employee recognition journey by ensuring leadership buy-in. This involves creating a business case for employee recognition and convincing those on top about how it has the potential to make a business impact. 

Back your pitch with evidence and data points and make a clear pitch around the return on investment. Leverage metrics like greater retention, increased productivity, etc. and how each one impacts the bottom line. 

2. Have a clear criteria

Once your leadership is aligned on the entire employee recognition agenda, you need to be clear on what recognition means to you. Furthermore, other factors like on what basis and how will recognize employee efforts need to be brainstormed and documented for effective implementation. 

3. Explore different ways of recognition that fall in your budget

There may be several ways to facilitate employee recognition including some of the most extravagant ones like a foreign trip. However, you need to identify ways of recognition that best suit your budget. Dig deep and you will be able to find many ways to recognize employee efforts which come with no attached cost and have the potential to create large scale impact. 

4. Include employee voices

As a fast growing organization, while setting up the employee recognition program, you have the golden opportunity to include the voices of your employees. You can ask your employees what ideal recognition looks to them and incorporate those ideas when devising your program. This will ensure that your employee recognition efforts are accepted and appreciated by the employees and they will actually be able to drive performance and results. 

PRO-TIP — Conduct a quick survey to get insights into how your employees want to be recognized. Click here

5. Collaborate with external partners

Finally, as you may have multiple priorities to take care of and limited expertise in the area, it might be a good idea to collaborate with partners like SuperBeings. 

• SuperBeings can help you in gauging employee pulse to understand what recognition means to them. 
• At the same time, you can easily track employee performance to recognize efforts in real time with performance snapshots.
• Finally, with SuperBeings, your managers will have access to AI driven guided templates to help navigate through recognition conversations in the most effective manner. 

What features to look for in an employee recognition platform?

Taking cue from the point above, to accelerate your employee recognition efforts, you can collaborate with external platforms, especially if you have limited time and resources at hand. 

Most high-performing organizations believe that leveraging the services of employee recognition platforms has enabled them to create a culture of recognition effectively. However, if you plan to go with a platform, you need to check for the following features:

• Does it offer real time employee insights for recognition?
• Does it align OKRs with recognition based on performance?
• Does it enable your managers to have 1:1 recognition conversations effectively?
• Does it provide you with industry insights and best practices for recognition?
• Does it help you gauge employee pulse to refine your recognition efforts?

If you are looking for an employee recognition platform that takes care of all these and much more, you need to collaborate with SuperBeings. It can help you ensure a consistent and regular approach to employee recognition coupled with OKR alignment and guided templates for your managers for effective 1:1 conversations. Click here to book a free demo.

How to align your DEI initiatives with recognition for workplace success?

In recent times, organizations have seen a lot of focus being diverted towards fairness and inclusivity in the workplace, which takes into account recognition as well. Here are a few ways to ensure that all your recognition efforts promote inclusivity: 

1. Have a diverse criteria

Don’t have a narrow or a single criteria for recognition. Be open to recognizing different efforts and achievements. Have unique criteria for each team to ensure that you are recognizing employees based on what they bring to the table and not on the basis of a standardized approach. 

2. Emphasize on inclusive rewards

While your criteria needs to be diverse, your rewards and ways of recognition need to be inclusive. Ensure that the way your recognition messages are worded do not exclude anyone in the team. Similarly, your rewards should be such that can be utilized or enjoyed by everyone and not limited to a particular group. 

3. Leverage technology for performance review

To promote inclusivity, you need to ensure that your review is fair and unbiased. Here, you can use performance management tools like SuperBeings to get a real time picture of performance which can help you eliminate recency bias or horns/halo effect and recognize and reward holistic performance based on continuous review and feedback. 

PRO-TIP — Are you looking for the perfect performance review tool that suits your needs? This quick guide will help you to find one.

What role does technology play in effective and fair recognition?

As mentioned in the point above, technology can play an integral role in ensuring that employee recognition is effective and fair. 

If we look closely, recognition is based on performance reviews and feedback. However, these reviews can be vulnerable to recency effects in which only the events closest to the review are taken into consideration. Similarly, reviews can be clouded by the halo or horns bias where one positive or negative feedback becomes the base on which the employee is reviewed. Invariably, these biases prevent fair recognition. 

Fortunately, technology can play a major role in preventing the same. On one hand, technology is unbiased and can help provide a true picture of the employee’s performance. On the other hand, it can help you capture performance and effort in real time with a continuous lens to ensure that single instances or events don’t cloud recognition in the long run.

Efforts vs Results: The Best Approach for Recognition

If you feel confused whether you should be recognizing efforts or results, you are not alone. However, replacing one at the cost of the other can be detrimental. Undoubtedly, you need to recognize results, but recognizing and appreciating efforts is equally important because of the following reasons:

1. Motivates employees

It encourages them to keep trying and striving for excellence and enables them to believe that their contribution is being valued. 

2. Promotes innovation and risk taking

Employee recognition of efforts encourages them to take risks and unlock innovation rather than follow the same path for results every time, which will eventually lead to growth stagnation.

3. Facilitates engagement and a positive experience

Finally, it will create a positive experience for employees where they see recognition of efforts as an empowering environment for growth and development, reducing voluntary attrition. 

3 common problems with employee recognition programs

It would be an overstatement to say that the path to building a culture of employee recognition is one without challenges and struggles. Here are a few challenges that you might face along the way:

1. Inconsistency

Due to other pressing priorities, you might find yourself unable to maintain consistency in recognizing employee efforts. This will lead to an ad-hoc mechanism, which will not reap sustained and scalable impact. 

To facilitate consistency, you can collaborate with a platform like SuperBeings which will help you recognize employee efforts on time and ensure that you don’t miss any accomplishment that deserves celebration. 

2. Lack of authenticity

Sometimes, your managers or leaders might recognize employee efforts just for the sake of it, devoid of any authenticity. Employees are generally able to recognize the lack of authenticity and such recognition will backfire as a simple tick in the box. The best way to navigate through this challenge is to invest in the training of your managers on key leadership competencies to enable them to lead and recognize authentically. 

3. Inability to communicate effectively

At times, you might have the right motivation, but the inability to communicate your recognition and appreciation effectively can impact the whole situation adversely. Here, you need the right guidance and templates to sail through the conversations in an effective manner.

If you want to avoid these challenges and effectively implement the best practices for employee recognition, book a free demo with SuperBeings today. As a one stop platform for all people management needs, we can help you take your recognition game to the next level.  

Managing employee performance is a key priority for every organization. With the rise of the knowledge economy, it has become quite evident that an organization’s human capital is one of its biggest assets. Invariably, leaders globally are identifying and experimenting with new ways to manage and improve employee performance. 

For a long time, performance management has been equated with reviews and feedback. However, most organizations are now adopting a more comprehensive approach for managing employee performance. 

If you believe that performance management goes beyond reviews, you are in for a knowledgeable read.

Based on years of industry research and experience of working with fast growing organizations, we have been able to identify that there are three major components which collectively contribute to managing employee performance. 

In this article, we will take you through a deep understanding of each of the three components and how you can facilitate effective performance management. 

Performance Goals

In the first element of managing employee performance, you need to be clear on what your team members are performing towards. This requires setting key goals on individual, team and organizational level. Setting goals effectively can enable you as well as your employees to gauge where the performance is expected to go, making performance management seamless. 

However, performance goals must be set strategically and there must be an alignment between individual, team and organizational goals to ensure collective success. There are two facets to managing employee performance when it comes to performance goals, first is the types of goals and second how goal setting  should take place. 

Additional Resources: 

We have a free guide on how to set and align goals effectively. Click here to download the PDF.

A) Types of Goals

Based on the intent, scope and impact, you may find three types of performance goals for your fast growing organization:

1. Role specific goals

Role specific goals for managing employee performance talk about major goals that align with the responsibilities mentioned in the job description. When you onboard any employee, you set a job description for the role you seek to get them for. The goals highlighted in this job description are primarily the role specific goals. 

For instance, if you hire someone in the marketing team, the role would be to ensure better product reach and brand awareness. Essentially, this will become a goal, against which performance will be measured and improved, i.e. managed. 

2. Project goals

The second type of goals which can help manage and monitor performance revolve around project goals. These goals are more specific in nature and are generally time bound. 

They are meant to be achieved in a particular time frame (the time of the project) and change once the project is over. Managing employee performance here depends on how well and to what level these goals have been achieved. 

3. Behavioral goals

The final type of goals for managing employee performance talk about behavioral goals. If you take a close look, you will realize that the first two types essentially talk about what has to be achieved. 

This third type talks more about the behaviors and patterns that must be achieved while achieving the above two types of goals. Behavioral goals mostly have a longer life than role based and project goals. 

B) Goal setting

Once you understand the type of goals and have a broad agreement on different aspects of the same, you should focus your energy towards actually setting the goals. Goal setting should generally be a collaborative and collective process where managers, leaders and employees all should have a voice. 

Collaborative goal setting ensures that there is greater buy-in, commitment and ownership towards the goals which makes managing employee performance more effective. 

In this regard, you need to streamline your efforts across two major aspects:

1. OKRs

OKRs or Objectives and Key Results is a goal setting approach that many fast growing organizations leverage to ensure that everyone in the team is on the same page and collectively works towards a collective vision. There are two facets at play here — 

One, you need to set the objectives or the larger vision that you wish to achieve. 

Two, you need to have a few key results that will help you measure and gauge whether or not you have been able to achieve your objectives or not. 

Generally, you should have at least 2-3 key results associated with every objective to ensure holistic goal setting and performance management. Let’s take a quick example here:

Objective: Improve customer experience

Key result 1: Increase customer stickiness by 50%

Key result 2: Improve Net Promoter Score from 6 to 8

The example clearly illustrates that while the macro performance goal for employees is to improve customer experience, the milestones which will help determine the achievement of the goals, and are in turn sub goals include increasing customer stickiness and improving net promoter score. 

Additional Resources: 

We have a free 10 day Email course on OKRs to guide you through everything you need to know about setting, tracking and implementing OKRs in your organization. Click here to enroll now. 

2. SMART Goals

Most fast growing organizations today are adopting the SMART goals framework to ensure the performance goals they set are effective.

Specific: Ensure that the goals you set are clear and to the point to avoid any ambiguity

Measurable: All your goals must be measurable and result oriented to gauge the level of achievement and performance

Attainable: Keep your goals aspirational but not out of reach to ensure motivation 

Relevant: Your goals must align with the organizational vision and employee objectives as well

Time Bound: The goals must have timelines to mark a start and end date to streamline efforts

Irrespective of the goals you set and the way you set them, it is very important to:

• Document the goals and corresponding parameters
• Communicate the goals to the entire organization to ensure maximum visibility (Here’s how you can do it easily)
• Facilitate flexibility to adapt the goals to changing circumstances

Performance Review

Setting of performance goals takes us to the next phase or component of managing employee performance which focuses on performance review. 

Once the goals are set, it is important for you to constantly monitor the progress of your employee’s performance on the goals and determine their contribution to organizational success. 

Here, it is very important to gauge employee pulse in real time. There are several reasons for this — 

First, real time insights can help you track employee engagement and form a great base for performance review

Second, it will enable you to address any risks or challenges before they hinder performance levels massively

Based on the employee data collected through pulse survey and feedback received through regular team and 1:1 check-ins, you should focus on facilitating effective performance reviews. Performance reviews are a critical component of performance management. 

Types of performance review

There are several types of performance review systems that rapidly growing organizations today leverage. Based on your organizational priorities, you can either pick one of them or leverage a combination of a few to ensure maximum effectiveness. Some of the common types of performance reviews include — 

1. Ratings

Rating for managing employee performance generally focuses on adopting an objective approach towards performance reviews. It talks about grading employee performance on a scale, while taking different aspects into consideration. 

The most commonly used one is the 5 point rating scale which starts from below average to excellent performance over 5 points. Depending on organizational comfort, either 1 or 5 are considered as excellent performance, while the other end of the spectrum denotes need for improvement. 

Other rating scales include the 10 point scale, the Likert scale etc. 

Benefits of Using a Rating Scale:

The importance of rating is that they form the basis for a fixed metric around which employee performance can be measured. It ensures that an objective and uniform approach is followed for all employees, which can be used as a basis for comparison of dedication, commitment and hard work. 

On the simplest level, ratings can be on the achievement of a particular goal or objective, which makes the rating task specific. For instance, if an employee is able to achieve the task, with time in hand to go beyond the target, they surely deserve the highest rating. 

However, there are a few other types of rating scales as well that will encourage you to look beyond target achievement into performance parameters that are critical for business success. The top two are mentioned below: 

a) Graphic Rating Scales (GRS)

This particular rating scale has been used by many fast growing organizations to gauge the overall contribution of employees, and not just productivity. It seeks to rate employee performance on different characteristics which are instrumental for growth and success. 

Under GRS, you may rate your employees on factors like punctuality, ownership, dependability, quality of work, collaborative potential, creativity, etc. These characteristics are essentially the guiding factors which enable employees to push their boundaries and achieve their goals. 

b) Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales

The next rating scale focuses primarily on employee behaviors. This tool generally has two components to it. 

The first is a performance dimension that organizations seek to review or measure. Attached to it are a few anchors which are graded on a 5 point scale, the cumulative result of which indicates the level of performance. 

For instance, you might take the behavioral dimension as ‘accountability’. Here, the anchors would be, ‘takes responsibility for actions’, ‘does not indulge in blame games’, etc. The rating on these anchors can help create a final rating for accountability for an employee. 

2. Self-evaluation

The next type of performance review that many organizations rely on is self-evaluation. This generally entails giving your team members an opportunity to reflect on their own performance and share key insights. It will help you get a chance to hear their side of the story about their performance, actions, impact, etc. 

Self-evaluation will enable you to understand how the employees perceive their contribution to the organization and whether or not it aligns with your view. Furthermore, engaging in self-evaluation will give your employees to identify areas of improvement on their own which later you can collectively streamline and work towards. 

Self-evaluation is critical  for managing employee performance as it encourages employees to gauge a true picture of their performance. 

3. Rankings

Rankings primarily involve creating a stack of employees based on their performance in comparison to others. One of the top reasons organizations leverage rankings as a performance review tool is to get a comparative picture of everyone in the organization for decisions like appraisals, promotion, etc. 

4. 360 degree review

A 360 degree review is very important for managing employee performance, especially for fast growing organizations. Today, employees no longer only work with their managers. In the hyperconnected and collaborative workplace, employees work with almost everyone in the organization. Therefore, a review only from the manager will paint an incomplete picture. 

Thus, you need to ensure that employees in your organization undergo a 360 degree review where feedback is collected from everyone they have worked with. This will help you manage their performance on different attributes and factors, and not simply on achievement of target.

You may want to collect feedback from peers to understand their teamwork and collaboration potential. Feedback from subordinates can help you gauge mentorship and leadership abilities, etc. 

5. Management by Objectives (MBO)

Finally, the last performance review type for the discussion here is Management by Objectives. This majorly revolves around the goals and objectives set in the beginning of the year, which become the base for review. 

Here, performance is measured against the achievement of the set goals. Setting OKRs can really help in performance reviews with MBOs. It can help you gauge performance based on achievement of key results and collectively the objective. 

To learn how SuperBeings can help you set and align the right goals, click here or book a free demo. 

Pitfalls to avoid

Now that you have a clear understanding about the performance review components or ways you can follow, it is important to also be cognizant of the pitfalls you should avoid.

1. Biases

To begin with, performance reviews are vulnerable to human biases. There are several factors at play here. 

First, if your line managers are not trained to evaluate performance and you are following a rating review format, there is likely to be similar ratings for all, high, low or average. This lack of differentiation will make managing employee performance difficult as you will have an incomplete understanding of true performance. 

Second, reviews are vulnerable to the horns and halo effect. In the former, a particular negative aspect of the employee tends to cloud all other performance indicators and the employee gets an overall lower ranking than they deserve. In the latter, the opposite happens. A particular positive aspect of performance guides the entire review leading to a better rating than deserved. 

Third, the notion of personal bias and favoritism comes in. As humans, we are all vulnerable to having favorites. However, when this manifests itself in performance evaluation, a few favorites of the manager might receive better reviews as personal feelings dominate this objective process. 

This is where using an employee performance review software becomes crucial. Check out this quick 5 minute guide to understand what kind of performance review software your company needs.

2. Limited data

The second major pitfall that fast growing organizations are vulnerable to is limited data for reviews. Due to limited bandwidth, you may be unable to gather all important information about employee performance from the employee themselves as well as all others who have worked with them. 

This limited data might not contain components instrumental to gauging overall performance effectiveness. Invariably, when you don’t have a complete picture of the performance, managing the same will be difficult.

This is why most organizations use AI based tools to gather and analyze employee performance data. Here’s how you can choose one for yourself too.

3. Recency effect

Finally, the last performance review pitfall that you should avoid is the recency effect. In the absence of a continuous approach, organizations fall prey to evaluating only the latest performance and do not get a comprehensive picture of the entire year. 

The major focus is on the latest events, which may not reflect the true performance caliber of the employee, hence compromising the effectiveness of your managing employee performance journey. Using employee performance snapshots throughout the year can be a great way to eliminate recency bias.

Performance Improvement

The third and the final component of managing employee performance revolves around performance improvement. Once you have reviewed the performance of your employees, your focus and energy should move towards improving the same to facilitate individual, team and organizational development. 

Performance improvement is not just about identifying weaknesses and areas of development, but involves actually creating an action plan at all levels to bridge performance gaps. That’s what performance management is all about. We have identified a few practices that businesses can leverage to facilitate performance improvement for their employees. 

1. Reward high performance

You should focus on creating a culture of recognition and appreciation. Here rewarding high and good performance will be instrumental. Even if you have limited budgets, a paid day off, a voucher or social recognition are ways to reward your employees. There are two ways rewarding performance begets performance improvement. 

First, it will motivate top performers to keep up the good work when they believe their commitment is being valued and appreciated. 

Second, it will incentivize others to also go the extra mile to be a recipient of the rewards and recognition. 

2. Create performance improvement plans 

Creating performance improvement plans is extremely important for managing employee performance. This generally involves identifying key development areas and aligning them with learning opportunities to ensure performance improvement. However, a crucial element here is conducting meaningful 1:1 conversations.

Check out this list of top 50 1:1 meeting questions to prepare for your next conversation.

Managers should ensure that they have a real time insight into every aspect of employee performance to preempt any risks or challenges. Based on this data, they must focus on having streamlined and impactful conversations with their employees to address any gaps that exist.

This will in a way be a parallel approach to coaching employees, without making any big investments. If you feel your managers need support for the same, you might want to explore platforms that can help you provide AI driven guided conversation template recommendations to help with the right statements and resources. 

It would be useful to create performance improvement plans for each employee and document it effectively. In addition to basic details about the employee, capturing performance goals, reviews and feedback, resources, etc. can be instrumental in gauging trends and performance improvement data over time. 

3. Provide resources and support

Based on the performance improvement plan, you need to ensure that your employees are able to access the required resources and get adequate support for improving performance. This is very important for managing employee performance. 

It entails identifying the training required or investing in other resources that employees consider important for the learning curves. In addition to technical training, investing in mentoring and coaching programs, providing opportunities to innovate and grow are also important. 

4. Build manager competencies

While providing resources and support for employee development is important, it is equally critical to ensure your managers are competent to manage employee performance. This involves equipping them with key leadership competencies and resources that can help them lead better. 

You can rely on employee management tools to understand what key competencies are most sought after by the employees for performance improvement and encourage your managers to build the same. Leveraging heatmaps provided by third party platforms on the top competencies can be a good starting point. 

Simultaneously, you need to ensure that your managers know how to handle 1:1 conversations and eliminate any biases mentioned above to ensure fair reviews and performance management. 

Getting Ready for Managing Employee Performance

Managing employee performance can be an overwhelming process especially for fast growing organizations that might have limited capital and human resources. Here, you can collaborate with a platform like SuperBeings to manage the performance of your growing team effectively. Following are some quick points you can benefit from:

• Set OKRs in the most effective manner and give visibility to the whole organization
• Capture employee pulse with continuous pulse surveys to get real time insights on employee sentiments
• Gather 360 degree feedback on diverse aspects of employee performance to get a comprehensive picture
• Drive employee performance with effective 1:1 conversations based on AI driven guided templates
• Collect all essential data about your organization culture and performance with analytics to get real time heatmaps and recommendations
  With SuperBeings, you can build a culture of continuous performance management and employee engagement. Book a demo for more details today!

The workplace has been constantly changing for a few years now. With the changing nature and scope of work, employee priorities as well as organizational objectives are undergoing transformation. More specifically, the past two years, with the unleashing of the pandemic, have led us to redefining the Future of Work with some interesting workplace trends coming to the forefront. 

Top 20 Workplace Trends & Statistics You Must Know

The modern workplace is driven by new age priorities — an emphasis on employee engagement, hybrid model of working, increased focus on employee wellbeing initiatives and of course digital transformation through HR tech. Let’s look at the current trends and statistics across these areas:

Employee Engagement and Company Culture

1. 86% of employees and executives cite the lack of effective collaboration and communication as the main causes for workplace failures (Salesforce)
2. 46% of job seekers cite company culture as very important when choosing to apply to a company (built in)
3. 85% of the global workforce doesn’t feel actively engaged (Gallup)
4. Employee engagement leads to a 17% increase in productivity and a 41% decrease in absenteeism (Gallup)
5. Companies that support collaborative work environment are five times more likely to be high performing (Institute of Corporate Productivity)
6. 33% of employees say environmental factors negatively affect their productivity and engagement levels (Gallup)
7. Good Company Culture Increases Revenue by 4X (Forbes)
8. 37% of employees consider timely recognition most important factor for job satisfaction (O.C. Tanner)
9. Only 29% of employees are happy with career advancement opportunities (SHRM)

Remote and Hybrid Working

10. Hybrid work models are used by 63% of high-growth companies (Accenture)
11. 65% of employees think they would be more productive at home than in the office (FlexJobs)
12. 75% of remote workers prefer working remotely as they find it easier to be productive at home (FlexJobs)

HR Technology

13. HR managers lose an average of 14 hours a week manually completing tasks that could be automated. More than a quarter waste 20 hours or more (CareerBuilder)
14. Nearly 40% of companies are using some form of AI in HR alone (Deloitte)
15. 80% of HR employees found that using HR technologies improved employee attitude toward the company (G2 Crowd)

Employee Wellbeing and Stress

16. 80 percent of employees complain of stress at work (TimesJobs)
17. 60% of employees quit because of stress (TimesJobs)
18. 79% of employees are burned out (O.C. Tanner)
19. 70% of employees enrolled in wellness programs have reported higher job satisfaction than those not enrolled in the companies’ program (Aflac)
20. 89% of workers at companies that support well-being initiatives are more likely to recommend their company as a good place to work (American Psychological Association)

Now that you are aware of what the workplace statistics look like in 2022, you must be wondering how to prepare your organization for the Future of Work. 

Let’s get you started on that with these top 9 workplace trends for 2022 to facilitate employee and business success. 

1. Focus on employee wellbeing will increase

You would agree when we say that health and wellbeing have become key priorities for everyone at and beyond work. Invariably, as one of the workplace trends for 2022, this priority will manifest itself in the form of focus on providing innovative employee wellbeing benefits. 

Organizations need to augment their efforts on employees wellness to ensure a healthy workforce. Some of the top practices that have been observed lately include — 

• flexibility of time, opportunity to work from anywhere, 
• increased health benefits and insurances, 
• collaboration with mental health platforms among others. 

Most of the efforts have been concentrated towards ensuring that employees don’t reach the brink of burn out and are able to attain the right balance between work and life. This will grow further in 2022, becoming a key workplace trend. 

To learn more about employee wellbeing initiatives, read this article on Wellness in the Workplace.

2. Effective communication will become key for collaboration

Many of you may look at this workplace trend and consider it business as usual. However, the focus on effective communication will become more pronounced. If your organization is on the path of adopting hybrid models of work, effective communication will be extremely important to achieve meaningful collaboration. 

As mentioned above, 86% of employees and executives cite the lack of effective collaboration and communication as the main causes for workplace failures. 

One of the most critical components here will be to empower your managers to develop the right skills and competencies to lead with impact. You need to ensure that your line managers are able to articulate their thoughts well and are equally good active listeners to ensure a good employee experience. 

Within effective communication, one of the key workplace trends for 2022 will be a focus on conducting 1:1 conversations effectively. You must ascertain that your managers have the right tools and resources or guided templates to facilitate meaningful conversations with their team members.

Here’s a list of top 50 1:1 meeting questions for you to take inspiration from for your next crucial conversation.

3. Hybrid work will become a norm

If your organization transitioned to remote work with the unleashing of the pandemic, you must understand by now that for many roles, physical workspace doesn’t matter too much. Keeping pace with this thought, our next workplace trend revolves around the rise of hybrid work models. 

Research shows that most fast growing companies adopt a hybrid work model. In fact, companies like Tata Steel, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft are offering their employees the option to permanently work from home as 65% of employees think they would be more productive at home than in the office.

However, as work from home or hybrid work becomes a norm, you may need to reinvent your focus towards culture and engagement. 

First, there needs to be a clear hybrid work policy to ensure there is no chaos or confusion among your team members. 

Second, you need to invest in the right tools and resources which can help you constantly gauge and monitor employee pulse, identify any potential challenges in the way and enable redressal of obstacles. The objective is to ensure seamless remote engagement which will require external collaboration and partnerships.

We have compiled this list of 27 fun remote team-building activities to boost engagement. Don’t forget to check it out.

4. Development of a value driven culture 

Core values will play a major role in driving success for fast growing organizations, making it a key workplace trend for 2022. Millennials and Gen Z joining the workforce today have different priorities and are looking for opportunities that align with their core values and objectives in life. 

Research shows that 46% of job seekers cite company culture as very important when choosing to apply to a company. Therefore, organizations are likely to move towards a value driven culture, where some key values or attributes will define their goals and priorities as well as ways of work and employee policies.

We have an exclusive guide that will help you build a thriving company culture in 2022. Click here to get the PDF.

5. Focus on developing an empowering employee experience will continue to grow

One key aspect you must have noticed across all the workplace trends we have discussed so far is a focus on employees. This suggests that workplaces are increasingly moving towards an employee-centric culture and creating an empowering employee experience. 

One of the key components of this workplace trend would be to comprehensively gauge employee pulse and take real time action on any challenges. No wonder, demand for platforms like SuperBeings is on the rise. These platforms help you conduct, measure and understand employee sentiment to implement organizational policies and practices that your employees love.

6. Organizations will strive to preempt risks and challenges

The last two years have made it very clear that to survive and thrive in an uncertain world, we need to predict risks and adopt remedial measures even before challenges surface.

While this is mostly understood from a business continuity perspective, it is equally important for people managers and HR leaders. 

On the onset of the ‘great resignation’, attracting, retaining and developing high quality talent is becoming increasingly difficult. Therefore, as a key workplace trend, you need to preempt cultural risks and navigate before they surface. 

Relying on annual surveys to identify risks is no longer effective in today’s fast changing world. Instead, you must adopt a more regular check-in based approach to monitoring employee pulse with continuous feedback, 1:1 conversations and daily pulse to ensure that your talent feels engaged, valued and empowered, thereby countering the risk of voluntary turnover, reduced productivity, etc. 

7. Fairness and distributive justice in recognition 

As organizations seek to onboard a diverse workforce in terms of gender, age, geographical backgrounds, etc. a major workplace trend will revolve around ensuring fairness for all. This is particularly tricky as what might seem relevant and fair to some might not come across as the same for others. Especially in a multigenerational workforce.

Moreover, fairness and distributive justice in recognition, benefits and perks will be a key aspect in the workplace trends for 2022. If you look closely, many organizations have been adopting a blanket approach when it comes to recognition. 

However, increasingly, your employees will ask for benefits and recognition in accordance with their efforts and contribution, rather than being treated in the same way as others. This will also act as a source of motivation and encourage to constantly improve performance. 

In order to create an unbiased performance review system, more and more companies will rely on data analytics and AI and move towards a continuous performance management approach leaving the older annual review system behind. 

8. People analytics will lead the way for retention

People analytics is all about collecting key employee data and sentiments, monitoring it over time to gauge trends and acting on the same to facilitate success for your organization. However, a major trend in the workplace we will see in 2022 is a continuous approach to gaining insights from people analytics.

If you have been focusing on an annual or bi-annual approach to capturing employee data and pulse, it’s time to change your ways. In this VUCA world, you need to continuously monitor different employee parameters which determine organizational health and benchmark your score against other high growth organizations. 

9. Automation and AI will power people practices

With the rise of digital disruption and technological adoption, your role as a leader will also see an infusion of key tech drivers, automation being a leading one. As you drive your organization towards a more continuous approach for employee analytics, experience and more, you will find a considerable increase in administrative work. 

According to a survey, HR managers lose an average of 14 hours a week manually completing tasks that could be automated. More than a quarter waste 20 hours or more. 

To ensure that your managers are not burdened under the same and are able to concentrate on what matters most, i.e. empowering your workforce, you need to leverage the power of automation and AI.

One of the key workplace trends for 2022 will be the influx of the potential of automating administrative tasks, performance reviews, goals check-in, employee engagement activities, and ensuring multiple follow ups without any human intervention. 

Furthermore, an infusion of artificial intelligence in the right tool can help you get AI driven recommendations based on the insights generated through automated pulse surveys. Invariably, automation will become of your greatest partners to create an empowering culture. 

10. Adoption of the right tools will augment organizational impact

Finally, one of the last workplace trends that will influence 2022 will be the move towards adoption of the right tools and resources to supplement your efforts towards organizational success. The key point we are discussing here is how the right tool can help you focus on every aspect of the employee lifecycle. 

Focusing on employee feedback, review, evaluation, performance, etc. in a continuous and process-driven manner is likely to be the new norm. Research shows that 80% of HR employees found that using HR technologies improved employee attitude toward the company.‍

Therefore, you need to ensure that you are ahead in the race by adopting a tool like SuperBeings which can support your organization to drive business performance using the power of aligned teams, effective managers and a motivated workforce. 

If you are still unsure of which tools to choose, the following step-by-step guides will help you to choose the perfect tool to suit your very specific needs:

• OKR tools
• Employee engagement tools
• Employee pulse survey tools
• Employee performance review software
• Performance management software

Prepare Yourself for Future of Work

In the end, it is important to emphasize on the fact that organizations that are agile and  prepared for the Future of Work and have the right resources and capabilities to leverage the workplace trends for 2022 are marked for success. 

If you are gearing up for an impactful year, SuperBeings can help translate your strategy to results by connecting OKRs, Continuous Performance Management, Employee Engagement, and Manager Development in one unified solution. 

Eliminate barriers, drive performance, set collective goals and develop the right culture for an empowering 2022. Get all your questions answered and book a demo today!