HR Raging Debates - Experts Weigh In on Industry Hot Topics November 9th, 2009

Sean Conrad

Today, I’m excited to share with you the insights of 10 HR Experts in our HR Raging Debates Roundtable. This virtual roundtable brought together industry leaders including HR analysts, practioners, authors, social media pundits and academics to weigh in on some of the hottest HR and talent management topics currently faced by HR pros, including appraisals, succession planning, managing the generations and weisure.

The roundtable participants include thought leaders: Josh Bersin,President and CEO, Bersin & Associates; Peter Cappelli, Professor of Management at The Wharton School; David Creelman, CEO, Creelman Research; Kris Dunn, VP of People, DAXKO and blogger at HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent; Richard Hadden, author of the Contented Cows leadership books; Lance Haun, Vice President of Outreach, MeritBuilder and blogger at Rehaul; Sharlyn Lauby, President, Internal Talent Management Group and blogger at HR Bartender; Ed Lawler, Distinguished Professor of Business at the Marshall School of Business; Laurie Ruettimann, Blogger at PunkRock HR; and Libby Sartain, former CHRO of Yahoo! Inc. and Southwest Airlines, author, and HR advisor. 

The virtual forum examined 10 questions on a wide variety of topics, many of which are controversial in the HR community, ranging from performance reviews to social media in the workplace.

Each of the participants answered 10 questions on HR and talent management issues, including:

• Should you even do performance appraisals? Do they deliver value or do more harm than good?
• Which is best and fairest: anniversary or focal reviews?
• Should you use profiling or stack ranking to forcibly remove low performers?
• Should you tell an employee they are part of a talent pool for succession planning?
• Is weisure good for business or do we need to maintain boundaries between work and leisure?

I encourage you to check out all of the results to get another perspective on some of the key issues you are probably facing as an HR pro today. If you have a take on one of these issues, we’d love to hear it - comment, vote & voice your opinions on the HR Raging Debates site.

Tags: employee performance appraisal, HR, succession planning, talent management

Guidelines for a Good Peer Review Process November 4th, 2009

Heather McCulligh

I came across this post about peer reviews on the Evil HR Lady blog and immediately shuddered. Who doesn’t recall a time when they have been asked to give feedback on a peer as part of their performance appraisal process and tempered their feedback to the point of uselessness – or avoided the task entirely? To sum up:

Every year we are asked to fill out evaluation forms, supposedly anonymously, about our coworkers… The end of the form has areas for narrative writing about areas of strength and weaknesses. Since we basically know which people are filling out the forms on us, we usually can figure out exactly who wrote what about us. I find this to cause a great amount of stress, divisiveness and unhappiness amongst the coworkers.

Yikes! I can recall that exact same scenario clearly. Early in my career, I was working at a professional services firm with many young, eager staffers. Peer reviews were important because of the project-based nature of our work. But, not surprisingly, peer feedback was way too easy to connect with specific co-workers, often because projects were diverse and situations were specific. Other times you knew because the firm had a highly competitive environment; you already knew who was “out to get you.” Everyone dreaded this part of the review process, and I can’t say it encouraged us to perform better overall. In fact, I think we all just tried to pick our “friends” to complete our peer reviews, and to be very careful what we actually said out our peers when completing their appraisal. Where’s the value in that? It’s hardly strategic from an organizational perspective!

So how can we improve the process? In response to this anxiety, Evil HR Lady has some general good guidelines for a peer review process:

I think that as a general employee review process, that directly impacts raises, bonuses, etc., that the feedback should be collected and given to the manager. The manager then writes the review and uses that information to help him do so, not as a substitute for doing it himself.

An automated performance management solution that integrates multi-rater feedback can address all these concerns and fits the bill exactly for what the Evil HR lady recommends. Raters can be selected by the manager, the results remain anonymous to the employee, and most importantly the extra valuable information that comes from peer reviews is at the manager’s fingertips for consideration when writing the appraisal.

Tags: employee performance appraisal, employee performance management, multi-rater feedback