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 | 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.
by Brian Clark | learning management systems, LMS, Performance, performance management, strategy
The process outlined here represents a project undertaken by a client to improve its management of development and performance. There are limited resources available outside the budget allocated to a learning and performance software platform and existing team members in human resources and learning & development. The organisation has approximately 2,500 employees.
The goals for this project were identified and quantified prior to being presented to the executive leadership team. Most of these goals had been on the radar for some time and were worked on but never completed as part of a formal project plan.
Goals-
- establish a centralised information source for performance and competency management.
- consolidate and standardise job titles across the organisation and map to remuneration packages.
- standardise competency frameworks mapped to job titles and business units.
- enable employees and managers to capture ideas and observations between reviews.
- provide the tools for employees to conduct self and 360 assessments.
This list of goals is ambitious. As you can see they are all integrated and interdependent. The core of the whole process outside of the software implementation has been the standardisation of competency frameworks. These competency frameworks are the hub for the performance management and job title consolidation.
The software solution comprises a learning management system that includes competency management, job titles, assessment tools and performance management. The LMS has been integrated with the payroll system and the HRIS. The HRIS has become the single point of truth for management reporting upstream. The LMS is the point of truth used by the learning and development team.
The change management program included a pilot launch of the software initially to a group of approximately 200 users. The pilot was run in parallel with the larger implementation of the job title consolidation, performance assessments and competency frameworks. The pilot program was 6 months and the system went live just after six months from commencement.
These are some of the benefits that were identified and measured one year after ‘go-live.’
- surveys indicate employees are more certain of their goals and how they align with the organisation’s big picture strategy.
- the HR and L&D teams are able to generate meaningful reports to assist senior leadership in planning.
- performance assessment meetings are occurring and followed up.
- productivity has been increased with automation of processes and notifications.
If you would like to learn more about this project and the processes that were used to achieve successful outcomes, please get in touch using the form on this website or contact our office directly.
by Brian Clark | competency frameworks, DOTS LMS, Innovation, learning management systems, LMS
The LMS is not often thought of as a platform directly supporting or driving innovation but it should be. There may be differences in how your LMS may support innovation based on what features it has, however I will offer some generic ideas that should be applicable to most LMS software.
- Set up a course catalog specifically for innovation content. There is plenty of off-the-shelf courseware on innovation but I encourage you to consider creating some ‘home-grown’ modules that align with your business specifically.
- Create a competency framework for innovation. You may wish to start with specific user populations but this framework can be extended throughout your organisation. Remember you may have different tiers to the competencies to ensure they are relevant to the person’s position and strategy horizon.
- Include the innovation competency framework[s] in the performance management process. When your competency frameworks are integrated with courseware and development planning this becomes a powerful tool to encourage innovation in your culture.
- Set up groups of users that are ‘outside’ the normal organisational structure. This works very well to encourage communities of practice and thought leaders. Ideally the groups will have content authoring permissions as well as other collaborative tools such as a wiki, discussion forum and blog. These can be external tools accessible via links in the LMS interface.
- If you have established some innovation processes using other platforms that capture ideas and include polling and commentary, link the platform to the LMS. I have seen specific software as well as more common tools such as Microsoft SharePoint and Citrix Podio. Most of these are very easy to link to and if you add access via the LMS interface you will have a learning support system operating in real time.
- Select some reports to measure innovation focused learning and collaboration in your LMS. You should measure the enrolments in your innovation courses, assessment results [if you use assessments], identify users with high and low participation, competency gap analysis based on the innovation frameworks, and others depending upon your system and your innovation objectives.
Innovation occurs in all parts of an organisation and all tiers of positions and job titles. When you introduce learning support for innovation you will go a long way toward breaking through the misconception that innovation is some ‘activity’ undertaken only by senior positions or positions focused on product development, marketing and so forth.
Please get in touch if you would like some more information on innovation and learning. I am also interested in hearing from persons who have integrated an LMS or other platform to support innovation.
by Brian Clark | DOTS LMS, DOTS webinar, LMS
We are pleased to announce our next client webinar is scheduled for October 8. We have had enormous interest in this topic so we decided this would be our next session. These sessions are recorded so our clients outside Australia will be have access via our client portal.
Everything About Managing Your Users, But Were Afraid to Ask
DOTS Webinar Details – 8 October 2013
• 11.00am AEST (Brisbane)
• 12.00pm AEDT (Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra)
• 11.30am ACDT (Adelaide)
• 09.00am AWST (Perth)
We are focused on helping you get the most out of the DOTS LMS. We know how hard it is to juggle the demands of your position as well as knowing all the features and tools in DOTS.
This webinar focuses on Everything about managing your users, but were afraid to ask.
• Keeping your user data up to date via user imports
• Adding users manually
• Displaying your user admin processes within DOTS LMS
• Searching for users and performing user actions
Kathleen Bosworth of DOTS Talent Solutions will be hosting this session.
Block out one hour in your calendar on Tuesday 8, October.
You can register by sending an email to dotsinvitation@dotstalentsolutions.com
Your registration will be confirmed by email with a link to the online webinar.
