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Irresistible Updates

Sliding into your inbox, fresh & fruity:
Your monthly dose of people & culture inspiration 🍇🍒🍉

Hi friend!

Welcome (or welcome back!) to Episode 2 of Irresistible Updates.

We’re bringing you Food for thought, a few tips & tricks, fresh people & culture jobs, and much more! Created with love by the 7people team, because sharing is caring. Enjoy 💓

How to create a performance approach that people love instead of dread

This months’ theme, because it’s on our collective minds.

‘Employee Performance’ seems to be on everyone’s mind at the moment. Because a lot of us still have a fairly traditional model in place, where salary increases are tied to performance ratings. And this is the time of year when the budgets and salaries for ‘23 are discussed. So, for a lot of managers and employees the end of the year traditionally means ‘end of year performance reviews’ and salary discussions.

Here is our take on Performance Reviews in a summary of the full article:

Effective? No. Fun? No. Unfortunately a lot of managers dread these conversations. Mainly because they can be really time consuming and don’t often lead to improved performance. It can actually result in the opposite: less engaged employees! For many employees it’s not always a fun process either. The big risk with a performance review, is that it comes across as poorly defined feedback, given too late.

Do we actually need performance reviews? Or can we just skip them altogether and move on with our day to day business? Here we can be short: yes, we need them. Employees do want these conversations to happen, just with a different focus. They prefer to understand how they can grow! Looking forward instead of looking back.

Don’t review, give a preview! Yup, previews instead of reviews. Use the conversation for a bit of reflection, and mainly for looking forward. Give your employees a ‘preview’ of how their future might look like. What they might do and become if they continue to develop and grow.

‘’Performance review statistics to show how performance review systems can impact employee engagement. 92% of employees want feedback more than just once a year. However, if they felt they received an unfair performance review, 85% of employees would consider quitting.’’ (ClearCompany)

🤑 Separate salary from the performance conversations. When you know your feedback or performance rating is tied to your salary, it’s quite logical you’ll challenge ‘constructive’ feedback and defend your performance. It’s when these conversations become awkward or difficult. Salary increases are tied to so many more things (company performance, global economic circumstances, someone’s career level) than performance, that we feel this should be another chat on another day.

How can we, as People & Culture professionals, contribute to the performance of individuals? By enabling managers to have fantastic conversations, to offer coaching and training, and to provide a clear framework for growth. We don’t influence the performance, but we can provide the foundation and tools to enable growth.

🛠 Do we need a tools for this? A tool is cool, but not essential. (Sorry all tools!). Why not? Because ‘I want a tool to document my performance review, and I need that tool to improve’... said no employee ever 🙊.

If you absolutely love tools, there are plenty on the market for performance. Most HRIS systems have an option to capture the outcomes. We’ve also had positive feedback from users on: Leapsome, CultureAmp and Lattice. For what it’s worth, a simple Google-doc completed by the manager and employee can also do the trick when you’re still a small-ish organisation.

What do your people actually want? If you can’t answer this question, it’s probably because you’ve not asked them directly. It’s a process which is often fully designed and driven by HR departments. When you apply design thinking principals, you’d go to your employees and ask them how they would want to see this process. Perhaps that’s an idea for 2023?

Time to redesign your approach? Don’t forget it’s not about the process, but about the outcomes! 🪄

People Hacks

Tips and tricks to take your people & culture game to the next level.

Sharing is Caring

Feed your brain with the latest articles, podcasts, webinars and other sources of people & culture inspiration.

What’s On

Great stuff happening in the people & culture community you do not want to miss.

People & Culture Jobs

Fresh jobs in our community worth checking out.

The Social Hub: HR Operations Manager
Full Time | Amsterdam

Your mission will be to build a better home for all the employees at The Social Hub. In this exciting role you’ll manage a team of 4, together you are responsible for their first line HR support and HR work streams - for all locations in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

Client Corner

Insights and behind-the-scenes learnings from collaborations with our clients.

MAAK is a young innovative law practice, and they want to be disruptive when it comes to their employee experience. As their employees are their most valuable asset, they wanted to become more attractive to new and current employees.

As first-time employers, Remko and Martin wanted to make sure the employee experience at MAAK is different from what they experienced themselves early in their law careers. They believe a healthy work-life balance and support in career and growth will make the MAAK lawyers become the smartest, happiest, and thus the best in the industry.

7people (Yara) helped with defining their culture & values, and people strategy. We also worked on their employer branding, and delivered a growth and performance program.

The growth and performance program
First, we’ve created a growth framework, which visualises the steps you are offered to take when you’re working at MAAK. Second, we created the support tools for how to achieve those steps. Part of these support tools are the performance chats.

One of the values of MAAK is being open and constructive. This is all about giving and receiving feedback. So, their performance chats look like this:

• Happy Me: Twice per year, there are Happy Me chats with the employee, manager, and external coach. These chats are based on reflecting on values and measurable performance over the last 6 months. And focussing on what the employee wants to develop in the upcoming 6 months.
  

• 360: To boost feedback, we initiated a yearly 360 feedback moment between the team. All colleagues give and receive feedback from each other. In the Happy Me reflection the employee is asked what the biggest compliment is they take with them from the feedback, and what outcome of the feedback they want to develop. The goal is to strengthen your strengths and work on your weakness.
  

• In-between: On their own initiative, team members can request an extra in-between moment with their manager to discuss performance and ask for feedback.
  

• Coach: Sometimes it’s nice to have a chat with a professional career coach. MAAK offers an external coach twice per year (the same who joins the Happy Me chats).
  

• Evaluate: Last but certainly not least: project evaluations. Before the start, during the project, and at the end of a project, the team has a tool to reflect on their collaboration and on servicing the client.

One cool addition: The performance chats are not based on ratings and are not connected with salary increases 💪

With a customized feedback toolkit and giving feedback as an ongoing process, MAAK is ready to let its people flourish and grow.

Life at 7people

A peak behind the curtain at what our team is up to!

We’ve celebrated Romara’s one-year anniversary with 7people. She joined last year as a freelancer and became a full-time Talent Specialist once she finished her studies in HRM. She’s worked on a range of assignments, currently as Employee Experience Assistant at Instapro Group, where she works in their people operations department.

📸 Pictures from our month at 7people 📸

THE END

Do you have a topic, tip, job opening, or an upcoming event you’d love to see covered in the next episode? Let us know please, by replying to this email.

GIVEAWAY: Be the lucky one to win the book Let’s Talk by Therese Huston 📚 by filling out our super short survey. (Congrats to Minne and Esther, who won tickets to Onboard ‘22 last month)

That’s a wrap! We hope to have inspired you in some way or another, and that we’ll see you again for Episode 3 🌟