Employee Experiences Design

Performance Management Redesign

Should you use ratings or not? How frequently should your managers and employees talk about expectations and performance against business and personal goals? The answers vary based on the specifics of your situation. I have helped companies to unpack some of these issues, and redesign their PM Process.

A lot of vendors out there will sell you tools to facilitate performance management in a slightly different way, but what really makes the difference is the content and process design. I have conducted focus groups, interviews, and surveys, all to learn what employees are getting and missing through their current performance management. The most common things employees’ want are:

• A sense of where they’re going
• Recognition of their accomplishments
• Support to achieve their goals
• An understanding of how they fit into a bigger picture

With the psychology and specific needs of the organization in mind, I’ve helped to redesign performance management from a formal process to a rewarding experience.

People Analytics Skill Development Experiences

More organizations are realizing the power and need for People Analytics expertise not just in a central team, but across HR. I’ve designed two separate experiences for audiences in different settings to help them understand how to approach problems more analytically and then work towards a resolution.

In a student population, I developed a five-week program to accelerate their familiarity with various HR data sets and the most common tool they will have available to them: Microsoft Excel. In this module we spend ten hours reviewing various data sets, practice applying spreadsheet functions, and approaching case study examples to see how and why these practices provide value. Course evaluations of this module have been consistently strong over the years that we have delivered it, with students saying it is one of the most valuable experiences they received.

In a working population of HR professionals, I lead the design of a hands-on learning experience. The unique 90-minute activity guides a group of learners through a real hands-on experience in analytical thinking. Learners choose from three fun and puzzling scenarios, and are then guided by the information packet through the process: creating hypotheses, identifying what evidence would be required to confirm and refute each hypothesis, and prioritizing potential next actions. The exercise was crafted to allow team members of any skill level to be the session leader, and to demonstrate how thinking this way can be beneficial to problem solving while not over-emphasizing the complex statistics that many HR people imagine “being analytical” requires.

This was great – and I already have an idea about how I can use this approach on one of my thorny issues!

– A pilot participant