Season’s greetings and Happy Holidays! With that comes the time to review the past year and set your resolutions and goals for the year to come.
Each year I re-publish my Year in Review Goal Planning workbook to help you review your past year’s successes, regret, disappointments and accomplishments. And, to plan the year to come.
My suggestion right now is to take some time to first review your past year using my year in review planning workbook and reflect on those things before diving into your resolutions and goals for the year to come.
Many companies and organizations have an annual employee awards and recognition program to honor outstanding employee performance. These programs can have both a positive and negative effect on employee motivation and engagement.
A psychologist I know who works with employee assistance programs told me about a client who was seeing her because she felt slighted and overlooked at her company.
Her job is in supply chain management for a large multinational. She has been with the company for over twenty years and likes her job and is engaged with the company. Her colleagues often come to her for help as she has years of experience and knowledge of the processes and the industry.
At the recent company annual awards and recognition event two of her colleagues that she helped frequently received an award, but not her. She felt terrible that she was overlooked, and that it dampened her prospects for promotion. She wants to become a project manager.
The effect on this employee was so strong that she needed to seek out counselling from the psychologist. Whether she was right or wrong does not matter. What matters is her perception.
I cannot comment on the company’s perspective regarding their awards and recognition program. But in the eyes of the employee who felt overlooked it seems something was not clear.
When creating an awards and recognition program it is important that employees understand what the criteria is to achieve an award. It may not be enough to just publish a document. Clarifying someone’s understanding requires a discussion and review throughout the year.
When things are unclear and wrongly perceived as in this case, there is a feeling of inequality. This employee feels that she was treated unfairly in comparison to her colleagues.
This is the same approach I recommend taking for the annual performance review. Employees need to know up front what performance they will be evaluated on at the year end. In fact, the awards and recognition program and annual performance review should be congruent so that the employee know that if they score well on their annual review, they will be eligible for an award and public recognition.
I often use the example of playing a game like Monopoly. You know that the person who holds the most properties and cash at the end of the game is the winner and you can clearly see as the game progresses who is ahead.
The same concept needs to be applied to employee performance. Make the rules for high performance clear and provide regular reviews during the year to make sure employees understand your perspective and that there won’t be any surprises at year end.
You can download and use my simple annual performance review worksheet and use my five performance competencies or replace them with your own criteria. Establishing job specific goals and objectives is another approach that can work very well, or you can combine the competencies with specific goals. Just don’t set too many goals and make sure you are also providing ongoing coaching and support.
Indeed claims to be the largest recruiting platform today. Job seekers use the site to search for jobs and employers pay to advertise their job openings.
Recently I have been hearing ads online targeting people who may not be happy with their employer to easily find a new job on Indeed. On the other hand, I have also seen recent TV ads geared towards employers to use the site to find new employees.
In their ads to employees Indeed is referring to unpleasant conditions at work that might be enough for people to look for a new job. Many of these things are what I listed in my last article and video on preventing employee disengagement and poor performance.
In an upcoming article and video, I will create a worksheet to use to apply the five preventative measures, so subscribe to my newsletter and videos to receive news of this new tool.
Employees don’t suddenly become disengaged and start performing poorly. It happens over time and can be avoided in most cases with the proper strategy.
Many articles from experts in human resources claim some important reasons why people become disengaged in their work. I agree with most of them but have my own take on the key reason for employee disengagement and thus poor performance.
You do not know and understand your employees. That’s a big statement but it’s true in most cases. You may know them superficially, but do you really know what their aspirations are? Do you know what they are motivated by? Do you know how they feel about their job and prospects for the future?
Unless you take the time to sit down regularly with each employee and ask questions, you can only guess as to where they are it in terms of engagement and motivation for their work.
So before working on the issues below that many experts claim to be the main causes for disengagement, consider scheduling a one on one with each direct report every quarter at minimum.
The work becomes routine and lacks challenge. When someone is hired, they are usually eager to learn and perform the job, but over time they will need new challenges to keep the job interesting.
Lack of training and development/coaching. Everyone needs to improve their skills in order to perform better and feel that they are marketable should they need to look for another job.
Lack of career growth options. Employees want to know if they can grow within the organization and progress into more interesting jobs with better pay or benefits.
Poor relationships with a boss or another employee. Bad working relationships can cause stress and anxiety and cause employees to disengage and start looking for another job.
Lack of recognition. Often employees get more negative feedback than positive feedback and this can wear them down over time.
There are other reasons I could list but these are powerful in terms of impact on employee engagement over time. Of course, fair pay and good benefits are important factors but once they are met the impact of the other items are big.
The way to prevent the above items from affecting employee engagement is to first learn about each person’s aspirations and needs. Some may be more concerned than others about training and development for example. Unless you take the time to meet each person regularly and talk to them you won’t know specifically what to do.
Once you have the proper information you can map out a plan for addressing their needs and concerns. You can align it with the goals of the department and job. This way you could design a plan in conjunction with the employee and review it together regularly. This would bind you together in a sort of agreement that is focused on meeting the unique needs of each person.
In an upcoming article and video, I will provide a worksheet with guidelines to map out a plan for each employee, so subscribe to my newsletter to be alerted about that.
Download the workbook from my website or from Elqouens and get started on creating your best year yet.
