by Brian Clark | Business Process, Knowledge Management, learning and development, performance support
Performance support is not instructor led or e-learning. Performance support is all about providing easy access to knowledge and information that people need to execute their roles. Performance support delivers information at the point of need. Performance support must support traditional learning but neither is a substitute for the other.
The case for performance support is being made globally. The competitive and environmental stressors facing organisations are varied and expanding in size and impacts. As most other competitive advantages decline and blur, people and teams are still primary to sustainable growth and success. If you understand the competitive advantages that learning and development can delivery then you will also understand increasing the pace and pertinence of shared knowledge in an organisation results in benefit flows within and outside the organisation.
Some key realised benefits in our clients who are in the process of a performance support implementation:
- faster response times to client help enquiries.
- higher productivity levels of all client facing teams.
- greater cross-team sharing of best practices.
- emergence of thought leaders within the organisation.
- less resources committed to instructor led training and issues with retention of information.
To further distinguish performance support there are three characteristics of performance support:
- Information is available within a ‘workflow’ and available with a minimum of navigation.
- The information is directly relevant by being contextual to the work being performed by the individual.
- The user accesses enough information to get the task done without too much information or opportunity for distraction.
Performance support may be digital or analog. There are plenty of examples of paper ‘ready reckoners’ or ‘quick start’ guides that qualify as performance support in an analog format. Paper based content tends to be less easily accessible and searched. The most common place you will find analog performance support material is pinned to a cubicle wall.
Digital performance support takes many different forms in different media across many different delivery channels. In many cases the content is accessed from a computer, tablet or mobile phone from a platform of some type; for example MicrosoftSharepoint, in application contextual support, Google sites, Salesforce Libraries, deep links to an LMS, OneDrive, Dropbox,Box, among many others. We have worked with all of these tools as well as some more social style channels includingHootsuite, Yammer, Lync etc.
Performance support needs a change program to be successful. A learning culture must not only exist in the organisation but a shift to adopt performance support changes the way information is shared and sourced. Performance support demands a self serve, self reliant mind set removes any anxiety around finding the right information and applying it quickly. There are always those that prefer asking a question to solve a problem over sourcing an answer via search.
There are some key planning measures that are critical to success, among these are:
- Understand the different ways people learn and catering for this diversity.
- Ensure the means of accessing information is simple.
- Choose simple, easy to use technology platforms.
- Use search technology.
- Your content must be fit for purpose; fast to read and easy to comprehend.
- Performance support requires ongoing commitment and administration.
by Brian Clark | coaching, competency frameworks, DOTS LMS, LMS, Performance, performance management
Make performance reviews an effective contributor to your organisation’s health. You can utilise features within the DOTS LMS to help you create and deliver performance reviews without the dread and and trepidation so often part of this business process.
- Don’t accept a 6 or 12 month review cycle as default. You can set the system for shorter periods for review meetings that may include some ‘course correction’, praise and recognition and re-focusing on new objectives.
- Create scales for your key result areas [objectives] that are clear and descriptive. You can create as many points in your scale and add as much text as you need to make the scale very descriptive. The more accurate your scale the less likely there will be ambiguity and misunderstandings during the review process.
- The same goes for your competency scales. There may be a number of competency frameworks operating in your organisation so make the scales as extensive and descriptive to meet the needs of your workforce.
- Encourage the use of the Development Planning module for post-review action plans. You can use both pre-set plans and enable custom plans for people with specific needs or ambitions. One of the biggest complaints about performance appraisals is the lack of follow up actions.
- Show managers how to enter interim notes into to review system. These notes ensure information, ideas and observations are collected in one place and available for the review meetings. Interim notes are a great way to ensure your people receive the recognition they deserve.
- Explore the use of the 360 Profiling module. Many clients are using the 360 module for their senior leadership and developing a range of assessment types. You can also use the 360 profile as a self-assessment tool that is a great re-enforcer for development and learning plans.
- You can assist managers by enabling other managers to ‘review the reviews.’ This is very effective as a coaching tool to help mangers improve their delivery of performance appraisals.
Performance reviews are often met with trepidation by both employees and their managers. This contributes to both a reluctance to conduct them and if they are conducted the quality of the experience and the follow up often destroys any good that could flow from this activity. We recommend that managers meet regularly with their team members and build performance coaching ‘all the time.’ When it comes to review time there will be less friction to having the conversations necessary to help your team to performance improvement.
If you would like some help setting up performance reviews in DOTS LMS, other systems or even on paper, we can help you out. For an initial discussion please get in touch.
by Brian Clark | change, culture, performance management, Values
Values can be effective in sustaining a great organisational culture as well as building a new one.
Values have had their proponents and detractors and I will admit to being a bit cynical about the use of values in an organisation to drive a cultural change. I have changed my stance a bit based on some of these components to a values framework.
1. A reasonably well known company I am familiar with adopted a very democratic method to choosing a new set of values for the business. There were committees, surveys, arguments, pilots and all sorts other change elements in a process that took 3 years. No exaggeration. Some or most of your values should be reasonably obvious based on how you ‘roll’ now. Your entire culture and its norms could not possibly be all bad.
2. Values need to be part of the language of the organisation. The best models are the leadership. The modelling must be behavioural. You do not need posters on the wall with inspirational images and the values. In my experience this actually cheapens the meaning and power of the values. I think it may have something to do with those inspirational posters that spawned in offices all over the world in the 80’s and 90’s.
3. Decision making needs to be based on the values. When decisions are made they will be scrutinised by people for alignment with the values. When leaders present and discuss decisions they must frame them in the values.
4. The values must be simple and easy to understand for every member of the workforce. The language and words need to be economical and clear just like good journalism. If you have a diverse work force that includes persons with different primary languages this is even more important.
5. Repeat the values all the time in communications. It is well known that communications are heard by a few, understood by fewer and adopted by virtually none. The way that managers and leaders lift the odds is by constantly repeating the values. It will seem weird but it works. Repetition of message.
6. Build your values into team meetings, social gatherings and all other events where people are assembling in teams and groups. You can do this by communicating the purpose of these events as well as including them in the agenda.
7. Publicly recognise behaviour and performance that is aligned with and demonstrates the values of the organisation. You may choose to create an award that recognises people who demonstrate the values and make this part of your organisations tradition.
8. Performance appraisals must include the values and they should be discussed and ranked by the employee, the manager and an agreed ranking by both. You can build a great culture more quickly when values are included in performance appraisals and recognition processes. When you are looking at succession or termination decisions the values need to play a key if not primary role in the decisions.
by Brian Clark | capability, competency frameworks, learning and development, performance management
9 Tips for Improving Performance Management
1. Performance management is a process and not an event. Include performance management in one-to-one meetings between managers and employees throughout the year. This can include discussions on barriers to execution, lack of clarity on projects/tasks, resource availability, learning opportunities among many others.
2. Create easy to use and easy to understand performance appraisal forms whether they are online or paper based. I have seen some that include scoring formulas and ranking scales that are way too complicated.
3. Ensure there is ‘line of sight’ between an individual’s goals and the organisation’s strategy.
4. Offer coaching and interpersonal communication skills development to managers who may need this training to conduct better performance appraisals and strengthen interpersonal relationships.
5. Include competencies in the appraisal as one means of structuring development plans.
6. There must be follow up actions from the performance appraisals. Too often appraisals are filed away never to be seen again.
7. Ensure the whole performance management processes are on the radar of the management team. Performance management should be a regular topic in meeting agendas dealing with organisational health, succession planning, tactical and strategic decision making.
8. Perform some quality control by undertaking interviews with selected employees to gain feedback on how satisfied they are with the performance management process. Look for some common feedback and ask some good questions to learn how the process can be improved.
9. Your performance appraisal process should include at least one face-to-face meeting with the manager and employee present. At the very least this could be an online meeting with cameras turned on. Believe it or not, I have worked with one company that had a performance appraisal process that only included inputs from the manager and employee entered separately.
Performance management has had a bad reputation for too long based on lousy design, planning and execution. I think the term ‘performance management’ is pretty bad as well but at this point it is a commonly understood term. When done well, performance management can be a positive contributor to organisational health and employee engagement. If you are interested in more information and ideas on how to make your performance management processes more effective then you can get in touch and we will help you out. performance management processes more effective then you can get in touch and we will help you out.
by Brian Clark | e-learning, learning and development, LMS, Webinars
All of our clients are receiving invitations to our first round of v11 webinars to help showcase our latest version of DOTS LMS. There is a lot to show and we will follow up this first round of webinars with focused sessions for each of our existing clients and the new clients coming on board in the next few months. Our growth this year will be topped off with our v11 release and helping our clients leverage new features and tools to further improve organisational performance with learning, compliance, performance support and management. It has been a big year so far for DOTS Talent Solutions with expansion into new industry sectors not previously represented in our client community. We hope to foster even more collaboration among our clients during our v11 roll-out.
If you are one of our clients and have not received one of our invitations, please get in touch with us.
