If 2020 was the year of agility and pivoting, 2021 should be the year of driving performance. The past year has seen organisations scrutinising their operations to meticulous detail and streamlining their business to achieve optimum performance. As we move forward, how can we take our employees and teams on the journey of driving performance?
The BTN hosted a VIP roundtable, in partnership with 10x Psychology, for some of the most forward-thinking People leaders across industry to discuss the evolving impact that technology can play in organisational performance and how to better understand teams and individuals.
The evolution from ‘bricks to clicks’
The scope of the role of the leader has been stretched throughout the past 12 months as the focus is imposed on the softer skills that one can utilise within a remote environment. This evolution from an ‘in-person’ employee experience to a ‘virtual’ employee experience has had impacts on how leaders need to understand individual and organisational performance through managing by output, rather than presence. When working remotely or in a hybrid environment, technology must become the enabler to facilitate discussions around performance. Some of the attendees highlighted that they had led dispersed teams with ease before across countries and beyond but now teams who are normally physically close in location aren’t meeting up, this has had a psychological impact on the social side and is directly impacting performance. We need to learn to engage our employees in different ways and as leaders, become better at being outcome-driven. This can be facilitated by technology as People leaders will “need to be prepared to do more with less time, money and resources” (Sage, 2020). The evolving hybrid world of work will need to align with managers and colleagues not ‘falling back’ into old methods, we must continue with the good stuff.
Look back, look forward and look at skills
The need to understand skills at an individual level has never been more vital. ‘One size fits all’ models are a thing of the past as the capabilities of technology starts to bear its fruit. The world of online shopping and marketing has been reaping the benefits of personalisation for years but this has yet to transpire into the employee lifecycle and the impact on training, learning, development and coaching. Some of the People leaders spoke around the role of OKRs to help us understand where our employees are on their individual learning agenda. There were discussions around the role out of EQ-i testing to analyse emotional intelligence in a 360-degree manner on leadership tasks, enabled diagnostics to measure the program, allowing for individual development and developing training as a whole. How can we truly understand what is best for each individual without actually having the data and the conversation with each individual and team? Examples were discussed around what organisations had done to truly understand what good liked like through activities like leadership model analysis, team chartered activities and baselining alongside a check-in process every month. However, this stemmed back to the case that organisations can enable all the tools and provide the theory but how can we ensure they are adopted and our leaders become the best ‘people managers’?
Cultural challenges have been at the forefront of organisational challenges across 2020 with organisations struggling to determine what their ‘virtual culture’ actually wants to be. The use of psychometrics was presented as a means to map for the desired culture, whereby organisations can understand development areas to focus on.
The conversation was always brought back to the core of data and ensuring what we do as organisations with the data, actually drive the focus. If we could create a list of behavioural skill elements for employees, then build a list of features that will have the most impact on their career and ultimately their performance, we can create truly personalised experiences. Understanding what good looks like and what is important, alongside embedded psychometrics, can facilitate more effective coaching & learning development profiles.
How can we start to evolve ourselves around skills and as a result, reward for those skills?
We experience individually so we create an individual experience
The conversation moved to the employee experience and the role of delivering learning & development. Learning and coaching have transitioned from a traditionally physical model to be completely digital and this will undoubtedly evolve again to become a blended model.
The group agreed that there is a fear of losing the ‘social’ elements of training and that methods need to be evolved to ensure that we aren’t simply trying to transfer what we did before into a digital environment but adjust reimagining. Learning is notoriously push learning, with nudge emails and potentially even forced modules, our cultures of learning should ideally be one of a lifestyle of learning, where it is more pull focused. Can we take our organisations’ context and the individuals context and provide individuals with completely tailored content to facilitate career growth? The role of online employee training is basically a must, with the area developing towards personalised, self-paced courses that fit employees individual learning needs.
How can we entice people to want to learn? The average employee has only 24 minutes to learn a week (Josh Bersin, 2020) so we need to make emotive, focused experiences and try to induce as much social interaction as possible as we move entire workforces to hybrid environments. Understanding individuals behavioural aspects on a recurring basis will help to form these experiences.
The group concurred that coaching has really come into its own in a virtual environment as it has eliminated any logistical challenges that may have historically been present and truly elevates the personalised experience. Everyone’s experience of the pandemic has been completely individual so a cohort experience would not align or appeal, therefore we need to ensure we don’t try and create a one size fits all performance experience.
If we, as People leaders, can understand what good performance looks within your existing teams and start to comprehend where development needs to take place, we can drive positive behavioural change and ultimately performance improvement. Understanding our employees and teams is the challenge first and foremost and that should be step 1.
