That’s because when someone is satisfied with their job, every day matches exactly what they expect. They still have to deal with unexpected problems or situations, but their overall workday, week, and year generally match what they expect. Measuring job satisfaction is measuring the gap between an employee’s expectations and the reality of their job.

Let’s break this down and cover some job satisfaction statistics that are essential knowledge in 2024.

What is job satisfaction and why does it matter?

It’s important to differentiate job satisfaction from a term that’s often used interchangeably: employee engagement.

Employee engagement describes the connection an employee has with their employer and how that keeps them motivated and committed to doing their best work. Meanwhile, job satisfaction describes the gap between an employee’s expectations and what they’re actually getting at work. 

Job satisfaction can lead to higher employee engagement, which can create confusion.

Why does job satisfaction matter?

Put simply, job satisfaction has a massive impact on both employees and organizations. Here’s how high job satisfaction can affect employees:

• Better overall performance: It’s hard to do your best work when you’re constantly dissatisfied with your job. Employees who feel like they’re getting a fair shake are usually more motivated to get things done.
• Greater engagement: Job satisfaction leads to better employee engagement because employees who feel they’re being rewarded justly for their work will be more committed to the organization’s goals.
• Better mood: Dissatisfaction makes it hard to show up to work in a good mood. Or be in a good mood throughout a meeting. Or take a performance review particularly well.
• Better work relationships: Uneven levels of job satisfaction within the same team are pretty easy to spot. You’ll get more conflicts, more complaints within the team, and projects grinding to a halt.

As for organizations, widespread job satisfaction can lead to:

• Less turnover: Employees who are dissatisfied for long enough will leave as soon as a better option presents itself. By keeping job satisfaction high, you can keep your teams from looking for greener pastures.
• Increased productivity: An employee who doesn’t feel satisfied at work is more likely to do the bare minimum to get by instead of going the extra mile. Satisfied employees get more done in less time and push the whole organization forward.
• More ambassadors: Employees who are really satisfied with their job won’t stop talking about it. They’ll help your recruitment efforts by referring people in their network and bringing in customers.
• Higher customer satisfaction: When your employees are satisfied with the work they’re doing, that trickles down all the way to the customer. No matter what you’re providing and where those employees are in the supply chain, their work will have an impact on the end product and how the customer feels about it.

Now that we’ve covered the ins and outs of job satisfaction, let’s cover some important stats.

Overall job satisfaction is at one of its lowest points in 16 years

Gallup’s yearly employee engagement survey tracks several metrics around engagement, including overall job satisfaction. One question in this survey asks how employees would describe their overall satisfaction at work.

In Gallup’s 2024 survey, only 18% of employees said they were extremely satisfied with their organization. Gallup has data for this question going as far back as 2008, and that number was only ever so low at a single other point: 2022. That highest point? January 2009, when 30% of employees were extremely satisfied.

Organizations can blame several factors for this. Runaway inflation, a tightening job market, and even geopolitical events. But one thing is for sure; you’re fighting an uphill battle when it comes to job satisfaction and the fight has rarely been more important.

Source

High-paid employees are more likely to be satisfied with their job

It might be one of those facts that seem somewhat obvious in retrospect, but employees with higher incomes are more likely to say they’re extremely or very satisfied with their job, their benefits, and opportunities for advancement, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

But it’s not just about being paid fairly for your work, what this stat seems to suggest is that employees are more likely to be satisfied when they’re higher-placed in your org chart.

The takeaway? When you’re trying to get an accurate image of job satisfaction at your organization, make sure you get opinions from the entire organization. With too much of a focus on your c-suite or your VPs, the end result might be a little skewed.

Source

More employees are satisfied with their relationships than their opportunities

When you break down the different parts of a person’s job, you can find out what they’re most satisfied with. If you’re dealing with a downward trend of job satisfaction at your organization, this breakdown becomes essential.

In a survey from the Pew Research Center, job satisfaction was broken down into nine categories, from relationships with coworkers to commutes and paychecks.

The single best category for job satisfaction was an employee’s relationship with their coworkers. The worst? A near-tie between how much they were being paid and their opportunities for promotion at work.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you absolutely need to give everyone a raise to make them more satisfied with their jobs, but feeling like they’re not getting paid enough is definitely going to contribute to a downward trend in job satisfaction.

Source

Fewer than a third of employees feel like they can do what they do best

There’s nothing more satisfying than looking back on a job well done. And the best way to get that feeling over and over again? Work on tasks that match up with what you’re best at.

Unfortunately, few employees feel like they’re able to do what they do best. According to Gallup’s survey, only 30% strongly agree they can get that chance in their work, the lowest percentage since Gallup began tracking this in 2008.

This may be linked to unclear roles and responsibilities, as more and more employees find themselves taking on all sorts of work instead of exclusively dealing with the kind of task they were hired for. As more organizations become short-staffed in tough labor markets, roles can sprawl and bleed into each other, contributing to employee dissatisfaction.

One way organizations can prevent this from being a growing issue? Have a clear understanding of what your teams are best at and try to match them up with the right work.

Source

Fewer than half of U.S. employees know what’s expected of them at work

Employee expectations are a key part of job satisfaction. So when employees don’t have a clear sense of what’s expected of them, then their expectations of what they’re supposed to do won’t match what their employer actually delivers. That may lead to some misunderstandings around compensation and promotions, as well as day-to-day work that’s vastly different from what employees expect.

Where an employee works can have an impact on this as well:

• 50% of on-site employees have a clear understanding of what’s expected of them in their role.
• 47% of fully remote employees can say the same.
• Only 41% of hybrid employees know what’s expected of them.

So what can you do? Clearly delineate roles and their responsibilities from the hiring onward, and revisit them regularly to ensure they’re still accurate. If you have hybrid or remote employees, address their expectations with extra care and clarity.

Source

Older employees are more likely to be satisfied with their job

The difference between generations is noticeable according to the Pew Research Center, with 66% of employees 65 and older saying they’re either extremely or very satisfied with their job. Compare that to 51% of employees between 30 to 49 or 44% of employees between 18 and 29.

What can we draw from this? Well, employees 65 and older might be more settled into their given career, especially when compared to those who are under 29. Perhaps they’ve reached the peak of their income-earning potential, or they’ve become semi-retired, allowing them to pursue work they enjoy rather than just chasing a higher paycheck.

Either way, this is a demographic element to pay attention to when working on job satisfaction initiatives.

Source

Almost half of Gen Zers use TikTok in their job search

It’s probably no surprise to you that Gen Z is all over TikTok. But why pay attention to this job-searching trend when you’re trying to improve job satisfaction for your current employees?

Expectations are a big part of job satisfaction, and many of your employees are getting some of these expectations from social media.

If Gen Z turns to TikTok for advice in their job search, they’re likely following creators in their field when they have a job, too. That means you may need to keep an eye on TikTok to get ahead of trends that could affect job satisfaction at your organization.

Source

How to measure employee job satisfaction

To understand exactly how your employees feel about their job, you’ll have to do a little bit more than just casually ask around. Whether you’re leading a team of 50 or managing HR initiatives for an enterprise-sized organization, here are some of the most common methods for measuring job satisfaction:

• Employee engagement surveys: These surveys are useful for getting a sense of how employees feel about their work across a number of areas, from how meaningful their work is to how safe they are bringing their whole selves to work. That makes these surveys a great way to gauge job satisfaction, and performance management tools like 15Five are purpose-built for this.
• Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): HR teams use eNPS to gauge how an employee’s satisfaction and engagement with the organization affect it as a whole. Employees who are highly satisfied with their work are known as promoters, because they’re hyping up the organization and referring potential hires. Passives are lower on the scale, content but not necessarily promoting the organization. Finally, detractors are generally dissatisfied with their work and might leave the organization or even cause others to leave.
• One-on-One performance reviews: A performance review is the best way to get a ton of information about a single employee’s satisfaction with their job. Managers can pick specific, pinpoint questions to gauge what areas an employee is most satisfied with, from income to relationships with co-workers. They can also focus on any conflicts or issues that arise to try and turn things around if they find someone on their team is particularly dissatisfied.
• Employee focus groups: At large organizations, widespread surveys and deep performance reviews might not be entirely possible. If you still want to get the best of both worlds in a way that’s scalable no matter how large your teams are, then a focus group might be your best bet. You’ll need to do a bit of work to build a sample that represents the broader workforce as accurately as possible, but once that’s done, you can go as deep as you need to with your questions.

Measuring job satisfaction regularly is essential for getting ahead of troublesome trends like high turnover and increased absenteeism. No matter how you do it, you just need to make it a priority. 

Build a reputation for satisfaction

Any organization that doesn’t make job satisfaction a priority will struggle with high turnover, making it difficult to build a healthy, lasting company culture. While some of the stats above may seem grim, here’s another way of looking at it; there’s nowhere to go but up. With historic lows in job satisfaction, your organization has a chance to become a beacon for high-performers and highly motivated individuals to show up, do their best work, and reap the rewards.

The post 7 Top Job Satisfaction Statistics You Need to Know appeared first on 15Five.

The problem rarely comes from the employees themselves. Usually, they just don’t have a clear goal to shoot for. They’re given a list of tasks, they check them off, and then they check out. Compare that to someone who has a clear goal to aim for all quarter (or all year) and who knows exactly how their day-to-day work contributes to that goal. They’re motivated, they’re on task, and they’re innovating.

If performance management is a big priority at your organization, you don’t just need the right tools, you need to give people goals they can aim for. 

But what about when you have a fully remote or hybrid workforce? How are you supposed to set goals or track progress with employees you don’t even see most days?

Let’s find out.

Challenges of managing remote employees

Before diving into setting goals for remote and hybrid employees, we need to cover the challenges inherent to these styles of working.

Remote work comes with some significant advantages, both for the employees and the business, but like anything else they don’t come free. Here are some of the challenges that come with managing remote employees.

No spontaneous interactions

Spontaneous interactions—bumping into someone in the kitchen or deciding to have lunch with someone you’ve never met—are an inherent part of building up relationships in the office. They don’t just lead to potential innovation or collaboration, they also help people get closer to their coworkers, often outside the boundaries of their team or department. 

These interactions don’t happen when everyone’s working from home. That doesn’t just make it harder to build those relationships, it also makes it difficult for managers to check in on goals.

That means you’ll need to make them happen. Introduce icebreaker sessions, team mixers, inter-department events, and the like. They’ll lose a bit of their magic—along with spontaneity—but you’ll help improve camaraderie.

Less visibility on important work

For some managers, not having their team within view can make it incredibly difficult to know who’s working on what and how well they’re doing. This can create uncertainty around deadlines for important projects or, worse, actual anxiety about remote employees not putting in as much effort. Some companies even resort to using employee monitoring software to counter this, even though more than 70% of employees believe it has little to no impact on performance.

The solution? Better metrics, better reporting, and more emphasis on creating visibility in everything you do. For managers, that means using tools that give you an accurate picture of someone’s performance instead of screen-watching. You can also encourage employees to go out of their way to share what they’re working on, the progress they’re making, and where they’re stuck. Software development teams, for example, often use a daily stand-up meeting to cover this.

Less motivation

According to some research, remote work can create feelings of isolation, decrease belonging, and lead to more misunderstandings between coworkers. That can lead to people feeling less motivated in their day-to-day work, being less productive in meetings, and overall just checking boxes until their workday is done.

Leaders who want to reverse this trend at their organization—or prevent it from establishing a foothold in the first place—can only do so by knowing what makes their team tick. Remote work can be de-motivating to some and empowering to others, and not everyone in your team will feel motivated by the same things. When setting goals for remote workers, you need a deep understanding of what they need to shoot for the stars.

(Not-so) clear communication

When everyone works in the same office, there are endless ways to communicate. You can call a quick all-hands meeting and be reasonably sure that everyone will attend. You can tap someone on the shoulder and ask them if they have a second. Even communicating in chat apps is easier in the office when you’ve got your intended recipient in your line of sight. When working remotely, everything you need to say lives or dies by the technology connecting your team. Bad wifi, audio issues, and full calendars are all obstacles to communicating clearly with your team. How are you supposed to keep tabs on their progress towards their goals?

Asynchronous communication (i.e. communication that doesn’t rely on both parties being present at the same time) is king in remote work. Sending messages in chat apps that can be answered whenever the other party has the time or adding comments to your project management tool will usually yield better results than trying to book meetings for everything. Just make sure to write as clearly as you can or send audio clips through these platforms.

Proximity bias

Proximity bias leads managers to think more highly of the places, people, and events they encounter more frequently. Many managers aren’t even aware that this bias exists, which can seriously disadvantage remote employees. That makes it harder for these employees to get ahead, and managers may deal with a constant sense that they just aren’t performing up to their standards—when in actuality both are trying to outrun a cognitive bias.

To counter this, focus on hard facts instead of gut feelings and impressions. Are your remote employees actually getting less done than their in-office counterparts? Or are you just getting a feeling that they are? Look at how many tickets, tasks, or projects they’re closing compared to the rest of the team. Build metrics into your review process and you’ll have a better sense of what they’re really contributing.

Challenges of managing hybrid employees

While many of the challenges that come with managing remote employees are also present for hybrid employees, their being in the office part-time can create unique challenges, which all make goal setting more difficult for hybrid employees.

Onboarding

When your organization is half in the office and half out of it, properly onboarding employees can be challenging. Even if you make them come to the office for the duration of their onboarding—or even their entire probationary period—hybrid work complicates things. Expectations might be unclear the minute an employee takes their first remote day, team relationships might get iffy, and newer employees may not be as likely to reach out for support when working remotely. This makes hitting those early performance goals much more difficult.

Unclear policies

Many hybrid workforces only became so after being forced to go fully remote during the pandemic. Once the pandemic died down, organizations had to decide whether they wanted to bring everyone back to the office full-time, keep everyone working remotely, or set up a hybrid system. Many have gone for the latter, but have struggled to put clear policies in place. How often can people work from home? Can they work remotely from anywhere? Are some employees exempt from in-office requirements?

Misunderstandings around these policies can cause friction between employees and their managers, which can impact their goals. Managers may be more critical than necessary during reviews, leading to employees feeling less motivated to pursue those goals.

Timing

Getting everyone in the office at the same time for an important event can be difficult with a hybrid workforce. You never know who’s working remotely on a particular day, who might have to suddenly stay home because of an emergency, and so on. For some managers, this is an especially frustrating part of hybrid work, and employee performance toward specific goals can suffer.

Many hybrid teams try to line up their in-office days to avoid this, planning important meetings for these specific days. It’s not a perfect system, but at the very least it gets most (if not all) of the team in the office around the same time.

Difficult meetings

When only a portion of your team is in the office, running productive meetings can be challenging. Hybrid meetings have several potential issues, from inadequate audio and video equipment in the office to uneven participation from team members. This can make it difficult for remote and hybrid employees to participate equally in projects and discussions, setting back their progress toward important goals significantly. Soon you’ll find yourself cancelling more and more meetings as you realize they don’t really bring any value to the team.

So what can you do?

Having fewer meetings isn’t a bad start. By prioritizing asynchronous communication—through chat apps and project management tools—you can ensure everyone has their part to say, no matter where they’re working from. For those meetings that are absolutely essential, put extra time into planning them so everyone can contribute equally without worrying about technical issues.

6 tips for setting goals for remote and hybrid employees

Now that you know the challenges of managing remote and hybrid employees, let’s go over some tips managers can use to help them set better goals.

Use the right goal-setting methodology

With remote and hybrid employees, goals need to be crystal-clear, robust, and measurable. Whether it’s to combat proximity bias or just to get a better sense of how employees are working towards their goal when you can’t check in on them at the office, using a goal-setting methodology is essential. Here are three of the best.

• OKRs: Stands for Objectives and Key Results. You help your employees set a broader objective (e.g. “Be a reliable expert on paid marketing.”) and measurable key results (e.g. “Contribute to two paid marketing campaigns with 3% CTR”).
• SMART: This methodology breaks down lofty goals to make them Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
• HARD: Goals set with this methodology are less concrete than others but are more suited to channeling an employee’s passion. The acronym stands for Heartfelt, Animated, Required, and Difficult. 

You’ll want to match the methodology to your employee. Some employees prefer the hard metrics and precision of SMART goals while others use OKRs to feel like their contributions matter to the broader organization.

Encourage participation when goal setting for employees

One of the mistakes many managers make when setting goals for their team is thinking of it as a top-down process. They set a goal, hand it to their employee, and expect it to get done by a specific time. Unfortunately, that’s usually a great way to ensure that goal isn’t met.

Your employees need to feel like their goals represent where they want their career growth to take them. That’s why you need to encourage them to participate in goal-setting processes, especially if they’re remote. You’ll want to work with them to strike that fine balance between goals that move the organization forward and those that push that employee’s career forward.

Use the right tools

While a spreadsheet or a Word document might be enough for some employees, it’s not going to work for an entire team—especially if they’re only in the office a few days a month. That’s why you need a dedicated performance management platform, and there’s none better than 15Five.

With a tool like 15Five, you can give managers robust, actionable data they can use to set goals, track progress, and manage performance throughout their entire team—even if they’re remote or hybrid.

Your performance management platform is essential for building goals that work for everyone and rewarding employees based on their real performance rather than a manager’s gut feelings.

Check-in with employees frequently

When your entire team is in the office, it’s easy to check in with them about anything. A tap on the shoulder, a quick spontaneous meeting, or even just a glance and a nod can be enough to get a sense of how someone on your team is doing.

These are all things that you can’t really do when working remotely. Managers need to be intentional about dedicating time to check in on their remote and hybrid employees, even outside the rhythm of their regular 1-on-1s.

Document everything

Every single conversation and update about an employee’s goals should be documented somewhere, whether that’s in a performance management tool, a project management app, or even a Word document. The contents of these conversations are essential for keeping employees on track, communicating progress to key stakeholders, and helping promote career growth throughout the team.

It’s a little bit of extra work, but it goes a long way.

Meet those goals

Remote and hybrid employees work with notable advantages over their in-office peers, from less time spent commuting to being able to work in their pajamas. But there are situations where working from home even some of the time can affect their growth, and that’s especially true when setting goals. Managers should remember to account for these challenges when setting goals, and check in on progress regularly through communication channels that fit remote work.

That way, they can learn to rely on all their top performers, no matter where they work from.

An easy way to track OKRs 

Visibility is everything when you’re leading teams toward great things.

15Five’s centralized platform makes it easy to see how your company is progressing towards its most important objectives. You’ll be able to set company OKRs, break them down for teams and individual employees, and easily track progress. 

Our OKR tool gives you a birds-eye view of how people are progressing towards your most important objectives — and the key results that will get them there. 

Check out how you’ll see OKRs within 15Five now. 

The post How to Set Goals for Remote and Hybrid Employees appeared first on 15Five.

How?

As more and more HR tools adopt this technology, AI-powered performance management will soon become the norm.

In a nutshell, performance management covers the practices and processes you use to track each employee’s performance, build realistic goals for them, and help them along their journey as they grow with your organization. It’s an essential part of managing your workforce, but it’s also labor-intensive.

Here’s where AI comes in.

What is AI-powered performance management?

AI-powered performance management uses AI to enhance the way you empower employees to hit their goals. In some cases, that’ll mean using specialized tools that add AI functionality to processes you’re already using, like 15Five’s Spark AI assistant for HR leaders. In others, it’ll mean using AI tools that aren’t necessarily linked to HR processes (e.g. a chatbot like ChatGPT) in ways that support your performance management efforts.

If some part of your performance management process is automated, you’re likely using AI, even if you don’t realize it.

Let’s explore that further.

Performance management using AI: key applications

While there are some obvious applications of HR tools in performance management—like asking ChatGPT to write parts of your performance reviews—there are a lot of other ways they can be used.

• Finding top performers and struggling employees: As they work, your employees create tons of data. Data about how they meet their deadlines, who they’re collaborating with, and how much time they put towards specific tasks. AI tools can crawl through all of that data, turning it into insights managers can use to identify their top performers and help those who need it most.
• Analyzing employee strengths and weaknesses: Beyond just finding your top performers, AI can also figure out what makes them top performers. AI-powered performance management tools use robust metrics to help managers identify strengths and weaknesses for everyone on their team, giving them the info they need for performance reviews and similar conversations.
• KPI recommendations and tracking: Key performance indexes (KPIs) allow employees and managers to quantify performance, devising and tracking metrics that chart progress month to month, quarter to quarter, or year to year. AI can help recommend the right KPIs (by analyzing performance data) and automatically track the right activities to reveal how well your employees are doing.
• Analyzing past performance data: If you’ve used mostly manual processes to manage performance in the past, you probably have a ton of data you don’t know what to do with. An AI tool trained on this data can run a thorough analysis that would take humans weeks to do and produce recommendations on the fly.
• Automating the employee review process: While you don’t want to hand off the entire employee review process to an AI (otherwise what’s the point?) there are steps you can automate or even enhance with the right tool. Sentiment analysis, for example, allows AI models to analyze your writing to help you determine how it’s likely to come across. This can help you refine your performance reviews so they communicate exactly what you’re trying to say.
• AI-powered coaching: Having a human coach is the best way to grow as an employee. They can help you spot your weaknesses, work on your strengths, and find the resources you need to keep moving forward. But these coaches aren’t always available for one-on-one support, especially when organizations are short-staffed. An AI coach can answer some of the most common questions from employees, guide them through self-assessments, and even provide necessary resources for growth conversations.

These are just a few of the essential applications for AI-powered tools in your performance management process. There are countless ways you can use AI tools to streamline, automate, and enhance the way you help your employees grow.

The benefits of merging AI and performance management

No matter which facet of this important process you apply AI to, you’ll see some serious benefits. After all, there’s a reason these tools have become incredibly popular in the past few years, even after the initial hype died down. Here are just some ways using AI in performance management can transform the way you work:

• More time for everyone: At the very least, even just using a tool like ChatGPT to handle some of the brainstorming and writing tasks involved in performance management will save your team a ton of time. Specialized, AI-enhanced performance management platforms can save you even more on tasks like data collection, analysis, and progress tracking.
• Less human error: We’re all human, and every so often we make mistakes. Whether it’s as simple as a typo when entering data or a complex analysis error, these mistakes can have serious repercussions when potential promotions are on the line. AI can eliminate many of these errors, which means less time spent reviewing performance management tasks, too.
• More accurate performance reviews: The amount of prep work involved in the average performance review can be a serious challenge. Managers comb through a ton of data to get the insights needed to get an accurate view of an employee’s performance. AI can gather that data automatically and translate it into information managers can use without manually flipping through it all. That creates better performance reviews for everyone.
• More real-time feedback: As much as a manager might love to give feedback as soon as their team needs it, that isn’t a particularly realistic expectation. The average manager just has too much on their plate. AI tools, however, have nothing but time. AI-powered metrics and dashboards can tell employees exactly where they’re at growth-wise, meaning there are no surprises when it’s time for their annual review.
• Increased productivity: Implementing AI tools in your performance management processes doesn’t just make your HR team and managers more productive, it can lead to productivity gains with employees, too. Copilots and similar chatbots can help employees find the resources they need when they run into issues, meaning less time spent in back-and-forths with managers.
• Increased employee engagement: A performance management process that feels more personal and gives more actionable feedback can significantly contribute to increased employee engagement. Managers working with large teams face an uphill battle when trying to make everyone feel heard and supported. AI gives them the leg-up needed to make it happen.
• Better employee retention: When your performance management process is consistently providing employees with the next step they need to take to grow, they’re more likely to stick with your organization. Many organizations struggle to give employees clear growth plans that combine personal goals with the company’s broader objectives. AI can crunch through all sorts of data to find those natural places where employee and organizational priorities meet.

How to responsibly implement AI technology

There’s no talking about AI without addressing the elephant in the room. AI is an emerging industry, which means there are ethical and moral considerations involved that haven’t always been addressed by the companies producing these tools. That means any leader looking to implement AI in any process has to research these tools first. Once an AI tool has been implemented, its impacts have to be reviewed regularly to avoid any potential problems.

Here are some things to watch out for.

• Data privacy: AI models crunch through a ton of data to learn what to do, how to improve, and how to give you a better result. But do you know where that data comes from? Or how it’s used? More important, how do these models treat your data? When managing employee data, it becomes even more important to ensure your AI tools only have access to what they need.
• Transparency: Many of your employees will likely have some reservations about having AI play a hand in their performance reviews. That’s understandable. Be completely transparent about the tools you’ll be using, how you’ll use them, and what employees can expect. This will help alleviate their fears.
• Replace vs. enhance: Tons of folks are worried about AI coming for their jobs, and it’s hard to do your best work with that fear hanging over your head. When implementing AI, the goal should always be to enhance what human workers are already doing, not to try and replace them. But while your leaders know that, your workforce might not necessarily realize it. It’s important to not just follow this principle but to communicate it, too.

Where 15Five + AI Meet

AI isn’t a savior, come to deliver us from all the admin work taking up our days. But when you implement AI in these processes, you will save your teams a ton of time while giving them access to more accurate data from multiple sources, giving leaders a better view of how each collaborator is performing. Employees win, too, since they can get better feedback more often, even when their managers are super busy.

That’s where Spark AI comes in. This first-of-its-kind AI assistant available within 15Five is designed to streamline administrative tasks and drive measurable improvement in engagement, performance, retention, and manager effectiveness.

Spark AI helps you close the measurement-to-action loop even faster by supporting HR and Managers with things such as:

• AI synthesized feedback insights from engagement surveys, reading through thousands of open-text comments and providing themes, insights, and next steps
• Reduce bias and save time writing manager reviews with AI-assisted Reviews
• Providing managers with an AI Manager Copilot for real-time assistance within the flow of work so they can support their teams with things like creating more effective 1-on-1s

Learn more, or book a demo with the 15Five team.

The post Using AI in Performance Management: The Keys for HR Success appeared first on 15Five.

But just like any other objective, there are right and wrong ways to build a workplace culture that promotes diversity.

I’m Andrew Adeniyi, CEO of AAA Solutions and author of The Circle of Leadership: A Framework for Creating & Leveraging Culture. My mission is to empower leaders to build a culture that works for everyone, and I recently talked about this on the HR Superstars podcast.

Company culture starts with leadership

While a leader’s first instinct is often to empower their team to build a culture of diversity from the ground up in their daily actions, that’s not how you build culture. Author John Maxwell said it best in The 360 Degree Leader: “Everything rises and falls on leadership.”

I’ve seen this as well in my work. In organizations with poor culture, you can typically point at leadership—or a lack thereof—as the main cause

Employee engagement is essential to building and maintaining a company culture rooted in diversity and belonging, and companies with lackluster leadership generally have lower engagement.

As a leader looking to build that culture, that starts with a statement about how committed you are to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion while acknowledging that you don’t have it all figured out yet—but you’re going to keep trying.

Feedback is a big part of this too, and leaders need to be ready to receive it. When Stefan Larson, former CEO of Ralph Lauren Polo, led Old Navy decades ago, he turned things around by going back to its core values. The biggest one? Innovation, a big part of why Old Navy was founded, wasn’t the norm when he became CEO.

To make innovation the norm again, Larson incentivized open sharing through systems and processes, added vehicles for getting feedback, and was transparent about acting on that feedback. All to return the company to that core value.

Your leaders need to do the same thing with diversity. It starts with them, but they need feedback from the team at large.

Encourage diverse viewpoints to create belonging

When people feel psychologically safe to speak up with their diverse opinions, they’ll start to feel like they belong. That’s essential for building a vibrant, diverse culture.

I’m a keynote speaker for a global CEO peer group organization and in one conversation, I was midway through a presentation on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) when one individual spoke up, saying he didn’t “like this DEI stuff.” From his perspective, it was causing division rather than bringing people together. He asked me to explain why it was important.

First, to feel like he could even voice that opinion—far from a popular one—there had to be some significant psychological safety in that room. Second, the way that conversation ended demonstrated the culture of belonging I’m talking about. There was no shouting match, no awkward laughter, no complaints filed. He asked questions, I asked questions, we shared our perspectives, and we came to a common understanding.

That’s what you need to build. You want everyone in your organization, no matter where they are on the org chart, to feel safe enough to bring their perspective to the table, to push back when needed, and to share a competing viewpoint. Too many employees are scared to share opinions that go against an executive’s strong opinions, and that needs to change.

A big part of championing diversity is creating an environment where people aren’t afraid to speak their minds; they think more about sharing ideas that move the needle instead of playing it safe to maximize career growth.

Hire according to your values

When diversity becomes a priority for organizations, they have a tendency to overcorrect. Suddenly every hiring decision hinges on an applicant’s background and seminars about microaggressions get booked into everyone’s calendars before any conversations about what diversity means to your organization are had.

But just like you need to build the foundations of a diverse culture by covering the basics of diversity, equity, and inclusion before you dive into more complex topics like microaggressions, your hiring decisions need to go beyond an applicant’s background, their being differently-abled, or their gender identity.

Like, for instance, how their values align with yours.

Building a truly diverse culture is a long-term investment, full of consistent effort, and you need teammates to do that. The only way to keep those teammates around—beyond just compensating them justly—is to have alignment on values. If you work in a fast-paced environment where people are expected to move fast and break things, but you hire someone who’s looking for something more stable with a regular to-do list, your relationship isn’t going to last long.

When hiring the key players in your diverse workforce, ask them about their values. Match those against your organization’s values. Hire people who’ll be a good cultural fit. You’ll see your organization grow more diverse, with employees who feel like they belong, more than if you just went out trying to check boxes.

Remember the platinum rule

Every leader, both within and outside HR, knows about the golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. But while that’s a great place to start, it doesn’t really work in the workplace, especially if you want to build a strong culture of diversity.

There’s a simple reason for that; not everyone wants to be treated the same way. Your core values aren’t the same as someone else’s, your experiences have made you a different person, and your needs are different. So if you’re a leader who thrives on chaos and sees an opportunity in every problem, but the star player in your team needs more stability, the golden rule won’t be enough. You’ll make decisions that create more stress for that person without understanding why because you see things through the lens of your own experiences.

The platinum rule is at the core of everything DEI: treat people the way they want to be treated. By accounting for different experiences, backgrounds, and values, you can better understand what drives the people at your organization—and you’ll have what you need to build a diverse workforce.

Treat people the way they want to be treated. And be curious enough to find out what that actually means.

Build strength into your culture

A culture of belonging is essential for a workplace where anyone can bring their full self to work, where diversity of thought is encouraged, and where everyone pulls together towards a common goal. To do that, you need leaders that get the ball rolling, a workplace that safely engages with differing viewpoints, common values, and the platinum rule.

Then you can build something truly amazing.

About the Author

Andrew is the Founder and CEO of AAA Solutions, a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) & Organizational Culture Consulting firm based out of the Greater Indianapolis, IN area. Andrew is a first-generation Nigerian American from South Bend, Indiana and obtained his bachelor’s degree in Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington. He then went on to complete his Master of Science from Michigan State University in Management, Strategy & Leadership. With over 10 years of executive level management experience, Andrew has helped dozens of clients improve their diversity, employee engagement and overall sense of belonging within their organizations.

The post How To Create a Workplace Culture That Truly Embraces Diversity appeared first on 15Five.

For one, there are four main types of artificial intelligence HR teams can work with:

• Generative AI tools use massive banks of data to create human-equivalent text, images, and other types of content.
• Machine learning platforms analyze data to pull out insights that can teach machines to perform tasks the way a human might.
• Natural language processing tools can review the text people write and draw conclusions like the sentiment or ideas it expresses.
• Predictive analytics is exactly what it sounds like. These tools use historical data to pick up on trends and help their users predict how these might change in the future.

These AI tools can be used independently (like ChatGPT for generative AI) or be bundled into existing HR tools (like 15Five’s Spark for natural language processing).

Now let’s cover everything else you need to know about using AI in HR processes.

How is artificial intelligence used in human resources?

AI can help streamline all sorts of processes, saving you time, improving employee experience, and freeing up HR resources for more important tasks.

Here’s a quick list of ways HR teams can use AI tools in their everyday work.

Candidate pre-screening

When you’re getting dozens of applications across multiple job postings each week, you need a bit of a helping hand. Automated candidate pre-screening has already been in use by HR teams for years, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It automatically picks up on desirable traits and characteristics to filter out candidates who aren’t a good fit for a job posting.

Creating job descriptions

Writing job descriptions is repetitive but necessary work that involves taking information from multiple sources and compiling it into a single piece of text. A perfect task for AI.

You’ll still want some human input here—as you do with most AI-assisted tasks—but you can get a quick first draft done in minutes using generative AI tools.

AI-powered transcription and note-taking

There’s nothing worse when meeting with an employee or candidate than forgetting a crucial piece of information. You don’t want to have your head buried in your laptop, but you also want detailed notes. Good thing there are AI tools built specifically for this.

A tool like Otter can automatically join all your meetings and transcribe what’s said for your review later. You can also feed it audio recordings from calls and other conversations it can’t join so you have notes for everything.

Flagging anomalies in financial transactions

You might not think you need AI’s help for reviewing financial transactions, but how often is HR the frontline when employees have questions about their paycheques or benefits? Smaller teams often have HR professionals running double duty, answering questions and performing tasks that would otherwise go to an accounting team.

AI tools can not only help you answer these questions and close out these tasks, but they can proactively pick up on discrepancies that could become problems later on, actually reducing the workload associated with the organization’s finances. 

Turning unstructured data into insights

HR teams have a ton of data at their fingertips. A project management tool might reveal a lot about an employee’s performance, for instance, while an HRIS system like ADP is used to report on just about everything else. But more data isn’t always better, especially when you don’t have the technical knowledge or expertise to process it.

That’s where machine learning platforms and predictive analytics come in. These AI tools can take all that data and pick up trends in a fraction of the time it would take an HR professional.

Streamlining internal requests with chatbots

As your organization grows in size, your HR teams will quickly be drowned in more requests than they can reasonably handle. Many of these requests will be repetitive too, with employees asking for the same documents over and over again, or asking questions about new initiatives that you’ve already answered multiple times.

An AI-powered chatbot allows HR teams to filter these incoming requests so they’re only spending their time on requests that actually need their input.

Assist in onboarding and training

By combining machine learning and chatbots, HR teams can create a streamlined, optimized onboarding process that only requires their input when it’s absolutely necessary. Everything from automatically sending policy documents to making training suggestions based on performance data can be handled by AI tools. Pairing this with human judgment can create a first-class onboarding experience that scales with your organization without needing to double the size of the HR team.

Automating other repetitive tasks

What comes to mind when you think of repetitive tasks in HR? Writing emails? Informing applicants of the status of their application? Processing payroll? Managing performance reviews? The right AI tool can do it all. By feeding all these tasks to an AI tool, you can free up more time for working on initiatives that make more of an impact on your workforce.

4 challenges of pairing HR and AI

While AI can be a game-changer for HR teams, there are some pitfalls to watch out for. Some may only hamper your productivity slightly while others can actually harm the work your employees do.

Adopting AI too quickly

This might be less of an issue than it was a year or so ago, but adopting a tool just because it boasts robust AI features isn’t the way to go. Adopting an AI tool quickly without doing your due diligence can lead to a chunk of your budget going down the drain when the tool doesn’t work out (at best) or a critical project completely failing (at worst).

Like any other tool, you’ll need to do a bit of research before you pick a platform. Get buy-in from the right stakeholders, and try a pilot project before you deploy a tool to the entire organization.

Applying AI to the wrong processes

AI can be a great help in many HR processes, but it’s not necessarily suited to all of them. Repetitive tasks that barely need human input are the best candidates for AI help, while anything that requires human input should probably stay in the hands of humans. But finding out if a task fits in one bucket or the other isn’t always so obvious.

Using AI in the wrong processes can lead to frustrated employees, befuddled HR teams, and a ding on the organization’s culture.

Opaque processes

AI tools aren’t always very transparent about how they work. HR teams aren’t the most qualified to dig into an AI model to understand the impact it could have on the broader organization, even if they’re the ones who end up using the tool the most. This can lead to nasty surprises when you deploy a tool that doesn’t do exactly what it advertised.

Employee trust

Mentions of AI can make employees inherently nervous. Some are worried about losing their jobs to AI while others are more concerned about a perceived decline in the service they’ll get from HR if AI tools are implemented.

When adding AI tools to your processes, do what you can to mitigate these fears. Employees need to trust your team, and that trust is hard to win back if you don’t introduce AI in the right way.

4 benefits of using AI in human resources

While properly implementing AI tools in your HR processes can be challenging, it comes with some undeniable benefits that make it all worth it.

Mitigating unconscious biases

Try as you might, your HR teams will have some unconscious bias that can affect everything from who you employ to what your leadership team looks like. AI tools can take on processes that are especially affected by these biases to mitigate this.

More efficient HR processes

The single best advantage of using AI is making your processes more efficient. Saving time on the repetitive, redundant tasks that barely need human input means everything gets done faster. Tasks that might have taken half a workday take minutes, and HR teams can put their focus back on more important aspects of their work.

Better access to data

Not all HR teams are the most data-savvy, but all of them need to process tons of data to do their best work. AI tools can give you the leg up you need to do more with your data, meaning all that money spent on performance management tools doesn’t go wasted.

ROI boost on HR initiatives

When AI tools can pick up on trends you should be acting on, take on repetitive tasks, and even evaluate the potential success of your work, every HR initiative inherently has a better return on investment (ROI). That makes it easier to get buy-in from stakeholders and make a lasting impact.

AI-powered HR

AI tools, both standalone and built into other HR platforms, can create a huge productivity boost for HR teams while surfacing insights that would go otherwise unnoticed. Just remember to research them appropriately and introduce them with tact. Once that’s done, you’ll reap the rewards on just about every single HR process.

Here at 15Five, we truly believe that AI has the power to transform HR for the better, and we launched Spark AI to make that a reality for our customers. Spark AI is the first-of-its-kind assistant for managers and HR leaders, designed to drive measurable improvement in engagement, performance, and retention.

Seamlessly integrated into your daily workflow, Spark AI leverages cutting-edge generative AI technology to help managers and HR leaders drive impact through the HR Outcomes Flywheel – from outcomes to actions – at scale.

Spark AI helps you close the measurement-to-action loop even faster by supporting HR and Managers with things such as:

• AI synthesized feedback insights from engagement surveys, reading through thousands of open-text comments and providing themes, insights, and next steps
• Reducing bias and save time writing manager reviews with AI-assisted Reviews
• Providing managers with an AI Manager Copilot for real-time assistance within the flow of work so they can support their teams with things like creating more effective 1-on-1s

And we’re just getting started. Spark AI is continually evolving, harnessing the power of AI to develop innovative ways to assist employees, managers, and HR leaders.

Learn more at 15five.com/spark

The post How to Implement Artificial Intelligence in Human Resources appeared first on 15Five.

Watching important tasks go undone, having to work through lunch to hit deadlines, and feeling like promotion opportunities have gone the way of the dodo all take their toll on your workforce.

No matter how much work you put into your hiring plan or how closely you watch attrition and turnover, your organization will likely be short-staffed at one point or another. When this is the case, you’ll have a larger part to play in maintaining employee engagement on top of an increase in requests and complaints from employees.

That’s why HR professionals and managers need to work together to proactively develop employee engagement strategies that can see the organization through these periods. Without a plan in place, employee engagement will continue to steadily decrease. If you’re short-staffed long enough, morale will start to go down, too. Employee engagement software can help with this, but you still need the right plan.

Here’s a comprehensive guide on how being short-staffed affects your business and what HR professionals can do to keep engagement from slipping.

How does being short-staffed affect your business?

Whether it’s due to a wave of layoffs, high turnover, or broader market conditions, short-staffed organizations quickly start to feel the pinch of their situation. After all, your employees might not necessarily know you’re short-staffed with any certainty, but they can quickly recognize the signs, such as:

• Too much work and not enough people to do it.
• Increased responsibilities without promises of advancement or promotion.
• Shelving of once-important projects after reprioritization.
• Drastic changes in the organization’s overall strategy.
• Increased monitoring and micromanagement from leaders.

Being short-staffed doesn’t just impact your team’s workload. Here’s how it can affect your organization as a whole:

• Lower employee engagement: While being short-staffed itself doesn’t decrease employee engagement, its impacts on their workday will. When they see their to-do list grow and grow, warn their managers about it, and see no change, they’ll grow frustrated. If high-performers see their work rewarded with more tasks rather than growth opportunities, they’ll wonder why they’re putting so much effort into their day-to-day.
• Declining employee morale: Employee engagement describes the drive and determination of employees at work, while morale is how they feel about that work and your organization. Low morale can have widespread effects on your organization, from decreased communication to increased absenteeism. It can even ratchet up turnover, exacerbating problems caused by being short-staffed.
• Decreased productivity: Your organization will see productivity decrease across the board if there aren’t enough people to take on everything that needs to get done. Similarly, individual employees will often be less productive since they’ll often become overworked with little hope of a change.
• Decreased customer satisfaction: Any issues your organization faces often trickle down to your customers. When you’re short-staffed, that can mean support tickets take longer to resolve, escalations take longer, and a customer might never even get through to someone on your team and decide to stop relying on your product or service.
• Missed growth opportunities: Short-staffed organizations rarely hit their growth targets. Unless you have a strategy for turning things around and growing your workforce to where it needs to be, your organization will start to stagnate.
• Increased workload for HR: When employees feel like your organization is short-staffed, irritants that wouldn’t affect them for more than a day start to stick around. These irritants will turn into issues that your HR team will have to deal with. You’ll field more requests, have to arbitrate in more conflicts, and need to address issues with policies and processes more often.
• Shaken trust: This isn’t always the case, but depending on how you ended up short-staffed, you might start to find trust issues growing between employees and the organization. If it’s due to a wave of layoffs or a series of high-performing, veteran employees leaving, short-staffed organizations might have some trust-building to do.

Strategies to keep employees engaged and motivated (even when short-staffed)

When you’re short-staffed, employee engagement becomes more important than ever. You have fewer people to manage a growing list of tasks, so you need to help them bring their best selves to work consistently, even through difficult times. With that in mind, here are some things you can do to reignite that fire for your teams.

Adjust expectations accordingly

If managers and leaders still expect a team to have the same level of output after losing half of their members, you’ll be dealing with a tug-of-war that’s sure to see more people leaving. While it can be frustrating to see productivity decline when short-staffed, adjusting expectations to your current situation is essential. As an HR professional, you can help leaders understand the true impacts of being short-staffed while empowering managers to protect their teams from an ever-increasing workload.

Reprioritize tasks

Watching a project you’ve worked on for months get descoped so resources can be put elsewhere is frustrating. But without radically re-prioritizing projects and tasks, your organization will struggle to accomplish anything, let alone its most important goals. While HR professionals won’t usually be responsible for this change in priorities, they will have a role to play in reinforcing just how important this work is.

Maintain effective and open communication

Too many organizations clam up when things get difficult. Messages from leadership are worded much more carefully, managers rarely give straight answers to important questions, and employees feel like they’re constantly in the dark. Likewise, employees might be less likely to communicate issues as they come up, especially in situations where staffing issues were caused by layoffs. That means managers, leaders, and HR will have to work harder to keep communication channels open.

Be mindful when delivering feedback

What usually counts as constructive criticism might come across as unreasonable expectations when you’re short-staffed. It can be difficult for an employee to prioritize their growth when they feel like they’re constantly putting out fires. While you do want to give employees a clear image of their performance, it needs to come with an understanding that they’re doing the best they can in difficult circumstances.

Promote skill development

While being short-staffed means employees are working in tough conditions, that doesn’t mean their growth should be paused completely. In fact, you should find ways to help them develop skills that will help see them through being short-staffed, such as project management, task prioritization, and time management. If you can reward them for any progress they make in these areas, all the better!

Actively track employee satisfaction

You should already be using software that lets you track employee satisfaction, but this becomes doubly important when you’re short-staffed. Whether you’re actively trying to replace employees who’ve left or you’re learning to make it work with a reduced workforce, retaining employees should be a high-priority task. By actively tracking employee satisfaction, you can spot people who are more likely to suffer from low engagement and make a plan to act.

Make more time for recognition and reward

When an organization is short-staffed, it’s easy to miss opportunities for rewarding your teams when they move the needle. Everyone’s so focused on just getting through the day and closing out another week that initiatives like employee recognition fall by the wayside. Don’t let this happen. As an HR professional, you have a role to play in empowering leaders to reward employees in meaningful ways for sticking it out, hitting targets, and overachieving.

With the right strategy in place, you won’t just be able to maintain employee engagement while your organization is short-staffed; you’ll actually be able to improve it.

How 15Five supports employee engagement

Like anything else, measuring employee engagement can be difficult without the right tools. Patching together spreadsheets, form-builders, and your HRIS (human resources information system) doesn’t cut it. At best, you’ll miss opportunities to pick up on and solve employee engagement issues. At worst, you won’t even be able to determine just how low employee engagement is or what you can do about it.

15Five is a performance management platform that’s easy to use, full of essential data, and robust enough to meet all your employee engagement needs. It empowers HR professionals to build, dispatch, and analyze engagement surveys, measure what actually matters, and build custom dashboards relevant for every level of the org chart.

Curious to see how this works? Book a demo with our team here.

Engagement short-list

Employee engagement should always be a priority since it leads to stronger performance across the board and makes it more likely that your organization will hit its goals. But when you’re short-staffed, you need to double down on this priority. As an HR professional, you’ll have to help manage expectations for overwhelmed employees, encourage leaders to re-prioritize their goals, and empower managers to better support their teams when the organization is short-staffed, seeing them through to the other side.

The post How to Keep Employees Engaged When You’re Short-Staffed appeared first on 15Five.

To maximize individual and team performance, you need to learn how to deliver performance review feedback that helps people clearly understand their strengths, weaknesses, areas for improvement, and, most importantly, how they can succeed in their job roles. 

There are two types of feedback in the workplace: objective and subjective. Each has a purpose for delivering effective employee feedback during a performance review, but the type of feedback you share will depend on the subject matter and the employee. 

Objective feedback helps employees clearly see their performance in relation to metrics, while subjective feedback acknowledges soft skills and unique contributions that can’t be measured by numbers or metrics.

For example, a data scientist is more likely to receive objective feedback, whereas a creative copywriter is more likely to hear subjective feedback.

Understanding the differences: subjective vs. objective feedback

Objective feedback

Objective feedback is based on observable and measurable facts. It aims to be unbiased, impartial, and free of personal feelings and opinions while using quantitative statistics and data to form the basis of the feedback.

The goal of objective feedback is to provide insights that are:

• Clear
• Specific
• Actionable
• Fair
• Measurable

By ensuring that feedback is clear and specific, there’s no “gray area,” and employees should understand exactly what they’re doing well and areas that need improvement.

Measurable objective feedback also promotes consistency and fairness while helping minimize biases because employees are all measured on the same criteria.

However, objective feedback sometimes overlooks performance management’s personal or emotional aspects. It can also come across as too structured by neglecting creativity or interpersonal skills.

Relying too heavily on data can also lead to missing situational context, which can impact employee happiness because individuals whose contributions aren’t easily measured by numbers may feel unrecognized for their efforts.

Subjective feedback

Subjective feedback is based on opinions, interpretations, and feelings. It reflects a personal viewpoint or experience and is driven by emotions, reactions, and perception.

The goal of objective feedback is to provide insights that are:

• Holistic
• Developmental
• Relationship building
• Motivational
• Reflective

Subjective feedback is less data-driven than objective feedback. It relies on assessing behaviors and attitudes rather than numbers or metrics. For example, focusing on creativity, interpersonal skills, communication skills, and leadership qualities.

However, because subjective feedback lacks data and facts, it’s more variable and can differ depending on who provides it and the context in which it’s shared. 

Subjective feedback can also be influenced by biases (conscious or unconscious), leading to inconsistent and potentially unfair assessments. For example, a male leader could be prejudiced toward women and deliver more critical feedback to that group.

Because subjective feedback is based on emotion or feeling, there’s a risk that people’s perceptions will vary. For example, leader A might think X and leader B might think Y. But without hard data or facts to back up claims, it’s easy for conflicting, unclear feedback to arise, which damages employee morale.

How to deliver objective feedback in performance reviews

When writing an employee performance review and wanting to deliver objective feedback, use evidence-based statements. Avoid general statements that are vague, and be specific about examples and instances.

For example, “In the past quarter, you hit the sales target 95% of the time,” or “The six-month social media campaign you managed generated a 30% increase in audience engagement”. 

Keep your language neutral and professional. Don’t use emotionally charged words or phrases that can be interpreted as biased or judgmental. Instead, focus on actionable outcomes.

A good template to use is “You [did this] by [doing this].”

For instance, “You improved the web development workflow by reorganizing the way we manage JIRA tasks,” or “You improved employee engagement by holding well-structured one-to-ones.”

How to deliver subjective feedback in performance reviews

Subjective feedback is often open to interpretation, which means you need to be even more cautious when writing performance reviews.

Always use specific examples and add context to explain your feedback, which will help your employees understand more about your opinion. 

Incorporate “I” statements in the feedback to share perspectives without placing blame. For example, “I feel like there’s been a drop in team morale recently, and I want to discuss how we can improve dynamics together.” 

Encourage employees to share their thoughts and perspectives on the feedback. It’s okay if you don’t agree. What’s important is that you encourage self-reflection, deliver the feedback in a calm, respectful manner, and ensure that it’s not confrontational.

How to avoid bias in performance reviews

Writing performance review feedback opens you up to the concept of bias, which is when you hold a conscious or unconscious prejudice toward an individual or group. 

In the context of performance reviews, bias can lead to unfair evaluations based on personal characteristics or irrelevant factors rather than actual job performance.

Here’s how to avoid bias during the performance review feedback process:

• Establish and use clear metrics: Define specific performance metrics for evaluating employee performance and focus on quantifiable numbers where possible. 
• Standardize performance appraisals: Use the same performance management software to ensure consistency across different teams and departments.
• Gather feedback from multiple sources: Collect 360-feedback for a detailed overview of employee performance. 
• Connect regularly with employees: Don’t wait for annual appraisals. Hold regular check-ins, one-to-ones, and meetings with employees to help understand them better.
• Focus on behaviors and outcomes: Look beyond personality traits and concentrate on performance. Always back up performance review feedback with robust examples that contain context or use data and numbers.
• Learn and reflect: Become aware of your biases and consider how they manifest in the workplace. Aim to minimize and eradicate any bias you might have during the performance review process.

Easily manage performance review feedback

Objective and subjective feedback play a critical role in performance review feedback. They provide a balanced and fair assessment that focuses on measurable performance and personal attributes while highlighting achievements, strengths, and unique contributions to improve employee performance and morale.

Make managing performance review feedback easy. Try 15Five today.

The post Subjective vs. Objective Performance Review Feedback: Which Works Better? appeared first on 15Five.

Traditional performance management has long been a top-down process, where employees would meet with their manager one to four times a year. This mostly involved managers talking “at them” about their strengths, weaknesses, and where they needed to improve before the next review. The result of these reviews? A one-sentence description of the employee’s performance: exceeds expectations, meets expectations, or does not meet expectations. Employees might also get an answer about whether you can expect a raise in the future or not.

No wonder they don’t work.

By contrast, continuous performance management fills the gaps between your annual or quarterly performance reviews while encouraging two-way conversations instead of monologues. 

More frequent check-ins—sometimes no less than a month apart—allow managers to guide employees along their growth plan and give feedback they can actually work with. Even better, some organizations using this sort of performance management share feedback as often as daily, giving employees a better understanding of their performance on day-to-day work. Continuous performance management also involves using the appropriate tools to track performance over time, saving the manual work that would usually be involved in this process.

So why continuous performance management? And how should your organization implement it? Let’s dive in.

8 benefits of continuous performance management

Continuous performance management comes with many benefits, especially when compared to its traditional counterpart. But don’t be fooled; employees aren’t the only ones who benefit. Your organization can see some significant improvements from implementing this process. Here are just a few of them.

• Better employee engagement: As noted previously, few employees find traditional performance management particularly inspiring. Conversely, getting the daily feedback that’s usually common with continuous performance management makes employees 3.6 times more likely to say they’re motivated to do outstanding work according to Gallup data. That helps push the entire organization forward.
• Better employee retention: When half of your employees are ready to quit for the right opportunity, you need to work twice as hard to retain them. Managing their performance in a way that makes sense for them can be a massive cost-saving strategy while making your workplace a better place to work.
• Efficient goal management: When your organization sets a goal, does it only check in on its performance once a year? Since continuous performance management both increases the frequency of check-ins with employees and relies on stronger data, you can help guide employees if they stumble while going after their growth targets.
• Constant opportunities for development: Traditional annual reviews have some distinct disadvantages. They demand a ton of preparation from managers and only cover performance in a shallow way. With continuous performance management, managers have a more complete view of how well employees are doing and what their goals are. That helps them find more growth opportunities and ensures they’re a good fit.
• Real-time employee growth: When you only check in on an employee’s progress one to three times a year, it’s tough to get a good read on their progress. You might have a few metrics that let you track how they measure up against the organization’s expectations, but both you and the employee have little visibility on that growth during the rest of the year. With continuous performance management, you can get an updated, real-time snapshot of those important metrics, helping them reach their potential.
• Better alignment between employee and company goals: Having yearly or quarterly reviews makes it difficult to ensure an employee’s goals and priorities actually contribute to the organization overall. With more frequent check-ins, managers can keep their teams abreast of what the organization is aiming for and help correct employees who get off-track.
• Streamlined performance reviews: When managers give a single performance review a year, they need to do significant prep. They have to go over every project an employee has contributed to, gather feedback from stakeholders and team members, and review any past conversations about performance. With continuous performance management, there’s a lot less to review each time since your feedback sessions are more frequent.
• Less biased performance reviews: In traditional performance management, everything moves through a single manager, which can make implicit biases especially damaging. Continuous performance management relies more on a constant stream of data, meaning managers and employees alike can base their conversations on metrics rather than hunches and best guesses.

There are two main differences between traditional approaches to performance management and this method: frequency and data-based decision-making. Employees get a stronger understanding of their strengths and can better communicate their impact on the organization. For managers and organizations, having better data and more frequent reviews means they have a better understanding of how each employee contributes to larger goals. That helps them find their high-performers and keep them longer while supporting everyone else with the right growth plan.

How to implement continuous performance management

If you’ve been using traditional performance management for some time, adopting continuous performance management will take some getting used to. You’ll have to make changes bit by bit, testing out how they work in your organization before adopting any wide-sweeping policies. Here are a few ways you can start implementing this type of performance management progressively.

Increase manager check-in frequency

In many organizations, employees don’t get frequent check-ins with their managers. At best, they might get in-depth conversations with their direct manager in a 1-on-1 once a quarter, with no real meetings with VPs or department heads.

For continuous performance management to work, that frequency needs to increase significantly. You might not immediately be able to get all managers to meet with their team members once a month, but that’s the target you should be aiming for. This frequency allows employees to make meaningful progress between meetings while giving managers a more accurate view of that progress.

Implement skip level 1-on-1s

Many organizations struggle to give leaders visibility into what’s happening within teams they may not directly supervise but definitely affect their responsibilities. Yet few roll out any processes to improve this.

A skip-level level 1-on-1 allows individual collaborators to meet with leadership that’s usually one or two seniority levels above their own direct manager. That means even a junior collaborator might meet with a VP or department head. These don’t need to be as frequent as regular 1-on-1s, especially considering the busy schedules senior leadership and executives have. However, these meetings can help employees get a better understanding of what they need to do to have a serious impact within their organization, while leaders get a sense of what teams need to perform better.

These meetings are a powerful tool, especially in organizations that are in the middle of a serious growth spurt.

Encourage employees to create a work portrait

A work portrait is part briefing, part self-assessment. It allows employees to express who they are and how they work from their perspective. Managers can then step in and, with what they know about that employee, make corrections or challenge certain points as needed. Here’s what a work portrait will typically include:

• The employee’s goals: Where does this employee see themselves in five years? In 10? This allows managers to know which opportunities motivate that employee to grow.
• The employee’s greatest strengths: What is this person an absolute superstar at? This can (and should) include skills directly tied to their work as well as soft skills.
• The employee’s main weaknesses: Where does an employee struggle? This allows managers to know where (and how) they should step in.
• The employee’s work style: Some people like to keep headphones on all day while others live for the buzz of collaborating at the office. Managers should know where their employees fall on this scale and more.
• Paths forward for both employee and manager: A work portrait should have a plan for employees (covering how they’ll grow) and for managers (covering how they’ll support that growth).

A work portrait doesn’t solve all your performance management problems, but it creates a baseline from which you can build up your strategy. Use it as a reference point whenever you check in with an employee or build out next steps for their growth.

You’ll want to refresh work portraits about once a year to reflect how your team has grown. New employees should make a work portrait as part of their onboarding.

Build a growth plan with each employee

A growth plan is essential for continuous performance management. It gives an employee a North Star to aim for, the milestones they need to cross off to get there, and a glimpse at the rewards that will come from that growth.

One of the most challenging things for a manager in this regard is providing a realistic reward that’s still inherently motivating. You can’t promise promotions that aren’t there, but you need to give people some kind of incentive to keep growing.

But putting some time into building this plan proactively with your employee will tie their personal development directly to broader organizational goals. This means every check-in and performance review has a roadmap both parties agree on, making it easier to review concrete improvements and missteps.

Use a performance management platform

Tracking, reporting on, and verifying all the data you need for continuous performance management can be a slog if you do it all manually. Spreadsheets can help, but they’re full of formulas that are too easy to break and still involve a serious amount of work. And while an HRIS (human resources information systems) tool can help automate some of that work, it’s not quite what you need. 

A dedicated performance management platform like 15Five doesn’t just put all the data your managers need at their fingertips, it gives them a real-time glimpse at everything performance-related for their team.

How? Let’s dive in.

How 15Five supports continuous performance management

15Five transforms data into action and action into results. Pull all the data you need into a single platform that you can treat as the command center for everything you need to implement continuous performance management. Here’s why 15Five is the platform of choice for this.

No more prep

One of the toughest parts of running the regular performance reviews and check-ins essential for continuous performance management is the prep. 15Five makes this a breeze with easy-to-use templates that give managers a headstart by simplifying the overall process while giving them the resources they need for each review.

Turn 360 reviews into measurable growth conversations

360 reviews allow employees to get feedback from a group of their peers, helping to eliminate the effects of biases too common in traditional performance management. 15Five gives managers a single place to dispatch, receive, and analyze 360 reviews to give employees a more thorough and fair evaluation of their strengths and achievements.

True data (not hunches)

When your performance management process hinges on a single person’s perspective, your employees are bound to feel like their work isn’t accurately represented. 15Five’s data-based approach creates a holistic measure of performance that employees can trust and refer to as they grow. It’s fair, integrated directly into OKRs and performance goals, and deep enough for even the most data-obsessed managers.

Better decisions

Making decisions around promotions and raises can be stressful for managers and employees alike. Don’t make it a guessing game; be confident about your decisions. 15Five offers insights, built on all the data from your performance management process, that help managers make better calls around growth.

Make your process a top performer

Continuous performance management can be difficult to implement, tough to maintain, and costly to deploy at scale. But when you have the right platform, you can roll out specific initiatives that are guaranteed to lead to more motivated employees, more high performers, and better results for the organization as a whole.

Want to see how 15Five can make this process real for your organization? Book a demo with our team here.

The post What is Continuous Performance Management? appeared first on 15Five.

I’m Katya Laviolette, Chief People Officer at 1Password, and I dove into this topic with 15Five on the HR Superstars Podcast. Here are some highlights of that conversation.

Begin by codifying your values

In anticipation of a big wave of incoming growth at 1Password, we set aside some time to reflect, recalibrate, and write out our core values in a way that would be easy for folks to remember—and most importantly, to embody.

It took 18 months. We conducted focus groups with a diverse set of individuals—new hires, customers, our founders, investors, and veteran team members. We wrote them out over and over again until we settled on just three:

• Put people first.
• Lead with honesty.
• Keep it simple.

Values help to drive a team’s performance. When teams understand how their work ladders up to a company’s mission and vision, as well as how they themselves are being evaluated against the company values, everything from internal communications to customer interactions becomes more cohesive. 

HR should translate to business growth  

The days of focusing on top line growth exclusively are behind us. The shift to a combination of top line and bottom line growth, combined with healthy levels of cash flow, has become a core focus in business—and HR should help enable that. 

Doing so requires viewing HR as a critical driver of business growth rather than a supporting function. Unfortunately, organizations tend to talk about culture and people in one room and profits and growth in another. But the reality is that profits don’t do the work—people do. 

A business’ success begins with the people who power it. HR then plays an integral role in helping to build businesses that not only give back to investors and shareholders, but also treats both employees and customers with a high degree of care, while preserving critical elements of the workplace culture. 

Iteration is your friend

Software developers use iteration to build better products, making small changes over time—and reverting them when they’re not as positive as first intended. The same approach should be applied when nurturing your company culture.

Treat your company culture as a product you’re responsible for building and make it grow as your company does. Treat it as something to iterate on, meaning that you recognize it isn’t perfect but you’ll continually work on it.

If you look back to the company values we settled on at 1Password, ‘keep it simple” actually wasn’t one of the original ideas we submitted to our founders. Through an iterative process, it came about as a more simple option that our employees could easily relate to.

Know when to pump the brakes

When you’re in a season of growth, people can easily become excited and begin launching into how they can best contribute to the next big step. 30-minute meetings start turning into 60-minute meetings, culture pillars get eroded in favor of being more efficient, and leaders spend less time with their teams. HR’s role in moments like these should be the champion of the check-in. 

HR has a responsibility to know when to pump the brakes, ask questions, and realign people with the company’s core culture. Make meetings more efficient, ask how “mission-critical tasks” contribute to the business’ core values, and rein in tangents that seem worth exploring on the surface, but are really pulling people away from the company’s North Star.

Be intentional about resolving conflict

As companies grow up, it becomes all too easy to sweep conflict under the rug or ignore them altogether. But that doesn’t always work—especially when you’re remote.

1Password has been fully remote since 2005, so we have to be very intentional about how we address conflict. In a remote environment, you can’t catch someone in the hallway and apologize for a comment you made in a meeting earlier that day. That means an apology or discussion might not happen immediately—it might not even happen at all. Worse, there might be back-channels on both sides that ultimately add fuel to the conflict.

At 1Password, we’ve set up employee resource groups (ERGs) and employee community groups (ECGs), regular office hours, dedicated Slack channels, and more, to allow employees to have open discussions and resolve conflict as it happens. The best part? As your company grows, you have more opportunities to create these open spaces for your people.

Conflict is inevitable, and unless you proactively give people ways to resolve it, it will linger and potentially lead to larger problems down the road.

Don’t grow at all costs

Growth is exciting, but it doesn’t have to come at the cost of your company’s core culture. Building a winning culture that scales with your bottom line requires codifying your core values, approaching HR with a business lens, embracing an interactive approach, and not shying away from conflict. It’s possible to get growth without the growing pains.

About the Author

Katya Laviolette is a fully bilingual (English & French) business-oriented people leader with over 25+ years’ experience in talent, culture change, global rewards, organizational effectiveness, real estate operations, health and safety, and M&A.

Katya currently holds the position of Chief People Officer with 1Password, the leader in human-centric security and privacy. Prior to that, she held executive and senior level positions at SSENSE, TC Transcontinental, CBC|Radio-Canada, Rio Tinto, Bombardier and CN. Katya is also a Board Director.

The post Keeping Your Core Culture Intact as Your Company Scales appeared first on 15Five.

Only 2% of CHROs think conventional performance management practices are actually working. 

Ouch.

The conventional approach has been stagnant for decades, but the last thing HR teams need right now are more needless tactics added to their already overburdened plates. 

That’s why we’re so excited to announce a major platform evolution for 15Five, giving HR teams a powerful new way to understand the intersection of employee performance, engagement, and retention data, implement strategic action plans, and track measurable impact.

Every performance review, employee engagement survey and other HR program yields a wealth of untapped insights. 15Five is giving HR teams the power of their data, helping them see and identify what matters most, broker action through managers, and track the impact at every step.

A strategic command center for performance management

15Five’s HR Outcomes Dashboard is further evolving as a strategic command center for performance management programs, empowering HR leaders to easily explore their own data and develop strategic action plans with leaders and managers.

Our newest capabilities include:

• Trending insights and data visualizations: Historical trend lines for employee performance, engagement and retention are automatically generated from existing people data. This creates a shared understanding across the entire organization, clarifying what’s working and what’s not.
• Demographic and performance filters: New filters give HR teams total control over analyzing how HR outcomes vary across demographic attributes such as age, gender, and department, as well as by performance designations and engagement levels. These filters provide deeper insights into specific groups, enabling more targeted and effective HR strategies.
• Executive dashboards: HR teams can customize and share executive level dashboards with the rest of their leadership team, creating real-time views of performance, engagement, and retention metrics alongside the biggest opportunities for action. This streamlined view helps HR leaders align their leadership teams around swift, impactful decisions tied to key business goals.
• Centralized, strategic action planning: Once HR leaders commit to a recommended course of action, they can organize their team’s efforts into coordinated campaigns aimed at specific HR outcomes. HR teams can assign specific strategic actions to relevant managers, including tailored 1-on-1 talking points or on-demand manager training aimed at specific skill gaps. From there, HR teams can track progress, hold people accountable, and measure impact.
• Progress and impact reporting: Enhanced reporting tools show detailed changes in how HR programs are performing, allowing HR leaders to track the impact of their actions over time. By seeing the direct correlation between HR actions and outcomes, leaders can validate their strategies and make necessary adjustments to drive continuous improvement.

Accelerating manager effectiveness with AI-powered assistance and flexible coaching and training

Strategic HR programs can only scale by successfully activating people managers to build engaged, high-performing teams. 15Five is going further to help HR teams scale manager effectiveness programs with Transform, our manager training and coaching solution delivered live and on-demand. 

Our newest capabilities include:

• 15Five’s Manager Copilot, an AI-powered assistant designed specifically for managers, now features open chat interaction to support managers and maximize their effectiveness within the flow of work. Manager Copilot leverages data flowing through 15Five to answer a manager’s questions 24/7 about team engagement levels, ways to improve 1-on-1 meetings, offer recognition that drives motivation and growth, and more. 

• Custom learning journeys with the option to include on-demand content from featured leadership experts, making manager training even more tailored to their unique needs.

Learn more about how 15Five can help your HR team maximize the impact of your existing performance management programs.

The post Introducing 15Five’s Evolution as a Strategic Command Center for Performance Management appeared first on 15Five.