Wednesday, December 30, 2015

HR SPECIAL........... Identifying core strengths through reviews

Identifying core strengths through reviews


Letting your employees review you can lead to personal and professional growth of the team, and you

Organisationally, we are far away from team members 'reviewing' their managers. Before we get there, there are a few hurdles to be crossed: a) Willingness of the 'boss' to receive feedback and do something constructive about it; b) 'Dare' in the employee to give feedback without fear of any consequence whatsoever; c) Acceptance on the part of the reporting manager that he may be and ideally should be having people in his team.
Structured interventions:
FORMAL APPRAISAL PROCESSES
In the mid-year and annual appraisal process, the management generally has two questions that the reviewee is expected to first fill online and then discuss in the face-to-face meeting with the reporting manager. First, two things that you should continue doing to enable my performance; and second, two things that you could do differently to help me perform better. While the first one was always filled up, we found the second one to be blank in almost 30-40% of the forms, a couple of years back. HR teams had to intervene and take some steps to bring in the change.
UPWARD FEEDBACK
While annual and mid-year appraisals evaluate the accomplishment of the goals and objectives, in most cases, the manager does not really receive comprehensive feedback on hisher style of team management, since the manager's own supervisor has littleno view to the leadership style that is employed with the direct team. Therefore, in a way ,a very critical developmental feedback related to organisational performance is missing in most cases! So, here comes the practice of upward feedback a tool to collate a collective team feedback based on individual responses. This would enable a manager to get objective feedback on aspects of his leadership; aspects that play a big role in the motivation, retention and performance of his team. Actively encouraging the direct team to give feedback can lead to personal and professional growth of the manager.
Un-structured interventions:
Every team has a cadence of regular group meetings to do stock taking. Encouraging peer-review during these meetings is a great way of collectively uplifting each other's performance levels.
Identify core strengths of each team member like e-mail communication, project planning, data analysis, presentations skills, etc., and then build a work culture wherein these 'in-house experts' review the rest of the team as and when necessary .
Needless to say , the reporting manager is the catalyst in bringing in a change for the better in the work culture.
Shampi Venkatesh
-- chief people officer , NIIT Ltd

TOI16DEC15

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