Greg Pryor, senior vice president, people and performance evangelist at Workday, led a Business Leader Forum on the transformation of the performance review and explained that the first stage of reinventing performance management is moving away from a ratings system.
Michael Arena, chief talent officer of GM, shared that based on GM’s research, they found that ratings disengaged the workforce and had a net drag on the entire organization. Instead, they experimented and used design thinking to look ahead. “Ratings are just a proxy for people to understand how they’re doing, so we shifted from ratings to feedback,” he said.
As the nature of work changes across industries, organizations must focus on revamping their performance management models to support more agile practices. As GM evolves from being a manufacturing company to a mobility company, Arena said, “From an HR standpoint, we can either be the enablers of that change or the grand stiflers. We need to graduate from a one-size-fits-all model.”
Pat Leckman, vice president of human resources at Illumina, said that her company’s rapid expansion into new markets sometimes produced a disparity between corporate and personal goals. “It seemed counter-intuitive to do reviews once a year even through goals change throughout it,” Leckman said. “We had employees asking, ‘Should I talk about what I really did or should I talk about what my goal said I was supposed to do?’ and we knew that we had to move to a more continuous model.”
Dave Johnson, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said that his firm’s research has found that monthly or continuous reviews result in more engaged employees, higher retention, better alignment of the workforce with business needs, and ultimately improved customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
Read more onsite reports from Workday Rising: “Workday Rising Daily: Welcoming the Workday Community,” “Workday Rising Daily: News Highlights from Innovation Keynote,” and “Workday Rising Daily: Going Even Further Together.”