My Dad had a favorite saying – ‘Don’t take anything out of the shed unless you intend to use it the right way.’ He was talking about the riding lawn mower, mainly, but I think the saying has pretty solid grounding and near-universal meaning and relevance. And I would even suggest that the sentiment, the necessity to use tools the right way, applies all too often in HR shops everywhere.
Take the performance review process. I know, what a bore.
Hear me out.
If your performance management process is ineffective, and isn't producing the kind of big business impacts that you need, well, it really doesn't have to be that way.
You might not even realize the incredible leverage that can be, well, leveraged, by making a simple tweak to the process, and it’s the kind of tweak that doesn't really require any investment in new software or a slowly cascaded throughout the organization nine-year deployment plan to take effect. In truth, it might be as simple as changing just one of the key performance evaluation criteria on just a subset of your employees.
A case in point, recently reported in the Harvard Business Review Blog, was retailing behemoth Walmart’s strategy and desire to operate more sustainably, to reduce their (admittedly massive), environmental footprint, and try to do the right thing, more or less, by Mother Earth, primarily by ‘greening’ up their supply chain. Just like Walmart has been notorious for hammering its legion of suppliers to help deliver Low, Low prices, (or whatever their slogan is these days), it wanted to use that same power and pressure to bully the suppliers into more sustainable and ‘greener’ practices. Simple math really – if the major suppliers of the chain were forced to operate in more environmentally friendly ways, then Walmart’s overall negative environmental impact would be reduced. If the suppliers wouldn't or couldn't meet these goals, then Walmart could simply find other ones that could.
But there was just one problem in this plan, in that Walmart's buyers, (known as merchants), were primarily measured on the costs of the products they sourced, and not on the environmental impacts of making the products.
The problem, as summarized in the generic cialis online
As a manager, if you’re not already using your performance reviews to leverage the needs of your office or upper management, then you’re just not thinking. Think of the possibilities if you did just change one question in your reviews — to find one new piece of information across all employees or to plant in seed in the heads of your employees. You might be surprised what you find.