Change Management

I. Statement of Problem Area

Nature of Change

In early 2012 I joined the talent management department of my company. After going through my initial training and understanding my goals for the next few years, I began to evaluate the effectiveness of our performance management strategy. Performance management is critical to the long-term sustainability of any organization. As a talent management consultant, it is my responsibility to evaluate our performance management strategy and make appropriate recommendations. My company recently celebrated 75 years and we spent several months, meeting with department heads, business leaders, employees and other key stakeholders to understand the current state of our processes and what we could do enhance our human capital strategies for the next 75 years. These meetings were eye opening in that we identified several gaps in how we were managing the growth and development of our employees. As result, we identified that we needed to explore the possibility of adopting an informal performance management process. The focus of this new process would challenge our managers to act as coaches engaging in ongoing discussions about their employees’ development.

Issues

Every year we conduct an employee engagement survey. For any corporation, the results of these surveys often are the catalyst for institutional change. For us, we saw there was a significant disconnect between the performance expectations we had of our employees and the expectations our employees had of us. At the beginning of every year we learn about the strategy, we set our goals and go through the remainder of the year attempting to meet those goals. Once a year, the manager and employee sit down and talk about what the employee did well and where they did not meet the mark. This feedback session is probably the most critical component of our process. Subsequently, the manager’s opinion of the employees’ performance is tied to their pay as well as their opportunities for advancement. Our employees’ candid feedback helped us to realize that our employees are not encouraged to respond meaningfully or candidly to their manager judgment of their performance. In fact, if the manager provided negative comments, if the employee responded, their response was viewed as defensive. We realized that these feedback sessions, while critical for pointing out development opportunities, were not adding sustainable value to the employees’ long-term growth. We also discovered that our employees develop a sense of anxiety around their performance discussions because in their minds, the results that focus heavily on the past, determines their future. Our system also asks employees to self-assess themselves before meeting with their manger, which is a daunting task in itself. In turn the manger