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3 Tips for Performance Improvement Plans

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A performance improvement plan is a tool to give an employee with performance deficiencies the opportunity to succeed. It can be used to address failures in meeting specific job goals or to eliminate behavior-related concerns.

Performance improvement plans are a necessary component of our businesses because finding the right employees is hard. Once we hire on a team member, it’s best for our business to keep them versus having attrition.

Be Specific.

Performance improvement plans should clearly define one to three areas of improvement.

If there are more than three areas to improve, I’d recommend thinking deeper about whether the employee is fit for the role.

Are you trying to have a fish climb a tree? If so, then it is not fair to your employee.

Be Direct.

In conversation, directly ask your employee if they understand the areas of improvement.

I recommend you ask them the following questions:

  • How would you rate your performance?
  • Are the challenges you’re having due to a lack of will or skill?
  • How would you make changes for improvement?
  • Are you getting the support you need?

Be Consistent.

Performance improvement plans need to be time bound and consistent.

Check-in dates for improvement need to be set in stone, and reviews for improvement need to be agreed upon.

It is the manager’s responsibility to maintain this plan. Whether you set bi-weekly or monthly check-ins, the tone will need to be consistent. Your employees should understand that achievement of their goals is necessary to avoid further consequences.

You can view many online resources and a sample template here.

If you find that the majority of your organization is on a performance improvement plan, then you need to look at your target setting or hiring benchmarks. If you’re an individual contributor and want to maintain a high level of performance, I recommend reading books on peak performance. I really like Steven Kotler’s book “The Art of Impossible.”

What have you found to be useful in performance improvement plans?

I’d enjoy hearing your strategies in the comments below or on a call.

Encouraging Constructive Conflict in Your Teams

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When individuals come together as a team, their differences in values and attitudes can often contribute to the creation of conflict. However, conflict isn’t necessarily destructive; it can be constructive as well.

In fact, constructive conflict can be the item that elevates your team to the next level of productivity and success. Here’s a great article by Amy Gallo on this idea.  

Given the many advantages constructive conflict can generate, it pays to jump in and work with your team on how to do this. Try these 4 tips for encouraging constructive conflict on your team.

1. Create a Culture of Acceptance

Before constructive conflict can be used for the greater good, it’s necessary to develop a team culture where trying, not just succeeding are rewarded. Fail fast and learn from it.

2. Seek Conflict

Leaders won’t hear conflict unless they seek it and specifically name it. Constructive conflict is the opposite of YES people. If you are a leader and everyone in the meeting is just nodding their head YES, this means we are not utilizing the team’s strengths. It can be helpful if a 3rd party is named as a dissenter, to get the team going.

3. Organize Practice Brainstorming Sessions

Encourage people to work out of their comfort zone. Be creative and give prizes for the wackiest ideas. Most companies I work with are interested in innovation and growth. You want strong new ideas from your teams.

4. Trust Your Employees

You hired them and they work for you. You do need to monitor this activity but like most skills, when constructive conflict is used and understood, this is a very powerful tool for your team.

My two favorite books on this topic are by Liane Davey, You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done and Building Conflict Competent Teams by Craig Runde and Tim Flanagan.

What strategy do you have for constructive conflict?

I’d enjoy hearing your story. Get in touch or comment down below.

How to Handle New Job Offers and Counteroffers

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We all work hard to keep our teams engaged. However, even when we do a great job at this, any employee can surprise you with a resignation letter when they receive a new job offer from another company.

Who got a new job offer? 

If they are a lower or average contributor, then the decision is not so hard–let them go.

If they are a top performer or someone you had high hopes for, then this decision becomes more difficult.

Should you extend a counteroffer?

Most employees who accept a counteroffer only stay for another 6-12 months. If an employee is motivated at one time to look externally, they will look again. A HBR study cites that 71% of senior executives and 67% of HR leaders in the current company would question the employee’s loyalty going forward. This makes sense as loyalty is a component of trust and that is a tough emotion to battle.

If an employee comes to me with a new job offer to counter, then I wish them well and organize their departure as soon as possible. I never extend a counteroffer, but you have to decide what is right for you and your organization, so that there is consistency.

My Strategy 

Very few employees will leave over salary increases alone; here is a great article from SHRM on this. I’ve found that when organizations have top performers bringing in new job offers, they have missed out on having career development conversations with their employees. The employee feels that the only way to further their career is to show their manager that someone else wants them.

The process that I promote in my organization is for employees to schedule a meeting with their manager to discuss their career especially before job shopping.

If I cannot provide the career path that’s best for the person, then I commit to helping them find their next job. This keeps them engaged as an employee and leaves a positive impression of the organization.

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but through this process, employees have gained a new appreciation for the company and stayed.

Have you found a successful approach to new job offers and counteroffers?

I’d enjoy hearing your approach in the comments below or on a call.

3 Steps to Improve Your Glassdoor Profile

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Whether you love it or hate it, Glassdoor is the standard for online company reviews and salary information. This makes having a detailed Glassdoor profile imperative to your hiring.

Why Are Reviews Important?

An article in Fast Company states that “a single comment about a particular issue may just represent a single person with an axe to grind, or it may represent someone with a legitimate but aberrant complaint.”

Because Glassdoor carries a substantial amount of weight, your company reviews can either benefit or hinder your hiring. Here are ways to impress possible candidates even if you have a bad review in the mix.

Improving Your Glassdoor Profile

First Step: Claim your profile and fill in all of your amazing information. An unclaimed Glassdoor profile communicates that you are not serious about your brand in the recruiting space.

Second Step: Gather an appropriate amount of reviews for your company. If you are a company of 1000 people with only 5 reviews on Glassdoor, then that will raise a red flag to candidates. How do you fix this?

You might be inclined to send a company wide email asking for people who are willing to add a review, but you don’t want 30 company reviews to come in during one week. It will look suspicious to candidates.

A better approach is to ask one functional group per month to do reviews. You also do not want to break trust with your employees, so the request to complete a review needs to be done as a totally open request with no financial incentive or spiffs.

Third Step: If you have a volume of reviews with some expressing concerns or negative activities in the company, then put together a plan to correct that issue. Over time, you can ask for company reviews that balance the issue.

Even if you don’t get reviews that off-set the negative information, you are able to explain to the candidate the actions the company took in your Glassdoor profile. More info can be found in this Forbes article.

Bonus Step: Some candidates may make a note of bad company reviews, and save them for the interview. I always ask candidates what information they looked at before submitting their application, which allows me to know if there are some “gotchas” I need to explain later in the interview without defensively jumping into an explanation.

With a little time and attention your company’s Glassdoor profile can go from zero to hero. Do you have a great Glassdoor story? Share in the comments below or get in touch.

How to Attract More Online Job Applicants

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Finding the best applicants for each role is the key to success for many employers. Since most applicants find you online, you need to improve your online presence to increase your applicant flow.

Through your hiring process, you put online job applicants through a series of actions in order to find the best, and it should come as no surprise that online job applicants do the same.

This means that you need to make the best impression on these applicants, and you achieve that by improving your online presence.

What does your online presence tell candidates?

Research from SHRM tells us that candidates choose opportunities based on: company culture (23%), career progression (22%) and benefits (19%).

How to Improve Your Online Presence:

To boost your likelihood of having candidates apply to your company, you need to take a critical look at these three items and make adjustments as you see fit.

1. Do you have a dedicated careers page that allows applicants to search job location and job type?

You want to catch the “just browsing” candidates and get them to look at something specific.

2. On your career page, do you have a variety of real pictures and video testimonials from several employees who enthusiastically talk about their experience?

Showing career growth and diversity examples are great. Do not use stock photos! Invest in good photography within your company.

Also, video is king, so if you’ve not taken the leap into video, it is time. Millennials and GenZ are the largest workforce to attract, and they want video. Here are 6 specific examples of great videos.

3. Do you make it easy for them to apply?

If you have an ATS system that requires online job applicants to cut and paste each of their resume experience versus a single resume upload, then you will lose out on a percentage of online job applicants. We need to lower the obstacles of an online application.

What are your tips? 

If you have other best practices for attracting more online job applicants, I’d enjoy hearing them in the comments below or on a call. Happy Hiring!

7 Tips for Conducting a Structured Interview

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Finding the best person for a role means comparing apples to apples not apples to oranges in your candidates; structured interviews can help you achieve this.

What’s a Structured Interview?

A structured interview, also known as a standardized interview, is a quantitative research method commonly employed in survey research. The aim of this approach is to ensure that each interview is presented with the same questions in the same order and by the same people.

According to Data Driven Recruiting, a LinkedIn eBook, “Data matters for finding talent faster and more efficiently. Talent acquisition teams with mature analytics are two times more likely to improve their recruiting efforts and three times more likely to realize cost reductions and efficiency gains.”

How to Create a Structured Interview:

Here are my 7 tips for establishing a structured interview process:

  1. Craft a deeply detailed job description that has behavioral components not just skills.
  2. Create role-specific questions that capture skills and experience.
  3. Create interview questions that explore interest and culture.
  4. Choose a rating scale for these questions.
  5. Train interviewing team. They have to be expert at the questions they are going to ask.
  6. Conduct the interviews.
  7. Evaluate candidates based on the rating scale.

The next step is to gather anyone who is a stakeholder for this role.

Who Makes a Great Stakeholder?

You want to have people who really know the role that you are trying to fill. SHRM has many great articles on this, but I especially like this one.

If you do not have 100% agreement on hiring the person, it is best to pass. Why do we need 100% agreement? Because if we hire a person and there is not complete agreement, then over time as this person is in the organization and makes a mistake or isn’t performing, you will have the dissenting person vocalizing “I did not want to hire that person, or I told you so,” or other derogatory remarks. This never works out.

You want each and every stakeholder to be fighting for this person to succeed in their role.

What level of interviewing structure do you have and is it working for you? Please let me know in the comment section below or contact us if you need more support.

Do you have the right mindset for hiring the best candidate?

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You should always look for the best candidate when hiring. This can take time. However, with the right mindset, you’ll understand why holding out for the best candidate ultimately benefits your team.

The idea of having the right mindset for hiring was really solidified for me thanks to the following two concepts.

The Law of Diminishing Expertise:

In the world of hiring, experts, or 10s, hire 9s, 9s hire 8s, and so on. Martin Jacknis refers to this as the “law of diminishing expertise” in an Inc. Magazine article.

With this idea in mind, it wouldn’t take long before we have a bunch of underperforming 7s running our organization. This happens particularly in organizations that do not have a high functioning culture.

So when hiring, you should focus on finding the right fit for your team. Someone with the same level or a higher level of expertise.

Build a Team of 10s:

The second concept directly deals with combating the issue of hiring people who are less capable.

I had the privilege of attending a conference where Jim Koch spoke about top performing teams. Jim created Samuel Adams beer in 1984 and has since been known as a founding father of the American craft brewery movement.

During the conference, he spoke in depth about the hiring process that he developed over 30 years. When a team wanted to hire a person, he would ask his last and deciding question: “Will this person raise the average of the team?”

If the hiring team responded with no, they would pass and move onto another candidate. He sometimes said that they would wait a year for the best candidate who would RAISE the average of the team. In his structure, putting in a person that lowered the average did not make sense–the cost of a mis-hire was too costly to compromise.

The Cost of a Mis-Hire:

Most mis-hire calculations estimate that turn-over of a $12 hourly employee will cost the about $4,000. The cost of an executive mis-hire can run twice their annual salary. Click here for the Predictive Index disengagement calculator.

Does your mindset when hiring focus mostly on who is available versus raising the team average?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.

3 Tips for Handling Difficult Conversations with Employees

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Many people leaders struggle handling difficult conversations with their employees.

If you haven’t been in this situation, then it’s only a matter of time. Here are three tips you can use next time you discover an employee problem that needs addressing.

1| Addressing Skill-Based Problems

Is the problem skill based, like someone consistently submitting an expense report late or with errors?

If the issue is skill based, then you can approach the person and say, “I know you are so skilled at your job, and I don’t doubt that skill. However, I do see that you consistently struggle with turning in your expense report accurately and at the agreed upon time. Can you tell me a little about what is happening with your current process?”

By doing this, you decrease the chances of them reacting defensively.

2| Addressing Personal Problems

Is the problem personal, like an employee who consistently shoots down other team members’ ideas in meetings?

When the issue is personal in nature, you can approach the person by letting them know that one of your top priorities is having them be successful and that you need to share information that is sensitive.

By sharing that you want them to be successful, the person is more likely to take the information with a more constructive mindset.

3| Practice Makes Perfect

My third tip is to practice this conversation, so you appear comfortable having it. The more relaxed you are, the better the conversation will go.

Of course the worst thing to do is nothing. Issues like these will not go away when we ignore them.

Keep in mind that meetings can turn into difficult conversations as well. If a meeting goes off track and is no longer productive, you should stop the activity and bring the group back to purpose.

On the other hand, if the conversation turned unproductive to the point where the group needs a break, then there’s no shame in rescheduling the meeting.

My favorite book, and I read it at least every 18 months is, Crucial Conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high by Patterson, Grenny and McMillian.

What do you do for difficult conversations? Comment below or get in touch.

4 Important Steps to Add to Your Onboarding Process 

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Even the most promising new hire needs an adequate amount of support during the onboarding process when they first start working for your company.

I frequently talk about finding the BEST person for each role, but that’s only half the battle. Once you’ve found the right candidate, it’s time to give them a big dose of your company culture through an effective onboarding process.

Ensure Your New Hire Starts Off On the Right Foot

Onboarding and training are two different processes that require a different approach.

For onboarding, you need to put yourself in a new hire’s shoes. They’re making a big change, so onboard them to your company by rolling out the red carpet–literally!

An article by Social Talent informs us “when employees go through a structured onboarding process, they are 58% more likely to remain with the company after three years.”

Important Steps for Effective Onboarding

1. Engage with the person a week ahead of their start date. A short email or text message letting them know that you are excited to have them on the team can put them at ease. For extra points, have the hiring manager or senior executive do a “Welcome to the Team” Video.

2. Provide a 5-day schedule 2-3 days in advance. This tells a new employee that you are thinking of them, and your organization is buttoned up. The schedule should be educational, and people based. Bonus Tip: PLEASE do not stick a new person on 8 hours of video learning.

3. If you are in an office environment, have a welcome committee that lets the new person know that the whole team is excited they are joining the team.

4. Have EVERYTHING ready for the new team member on their first day. This includes their computer, account log-ins, business cards, coffee cup, badge, workspace, etc. I mean, you HUNTED for this person. You should show them that you want them and you are serious about making them successful.

How’s Your Onboarding Process?

Many organizations overestimate the effectiveness of their onboarding process. In a survey carried out by OfficeTeam, 54% of employees said that they’ve experienced a mishap in their new job.

Putting the effort into a structured onboarding process will pay off. Ask any new hire that has joined your team.

Do you have any important steps you’ve added to your onboarding process?

Comment below or contact me. I’d love to hear it!

Avoid Unstructured Interviews to Make the Right Hiring Decision

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Hire Beyond the Interview

Have you regretted hiring an employee that appeared promising during the job interview?

If you have, then you’re in good company. Many of us in charge of hiring make decisions based on a positive interview, but we may regret it three months down the line.

There’s a lot of ground to cover on the topic of unstructured interviewing, so let’s get started.  

Acknowledge Their Point of View

We need to acknowledge that the person in front of us is modifying their behavior to be what they think we want them to be.

This behavior is very similar to how someone acts when dating someone new. The person is “putting their best foot forward” based on their interpretation of the job, their impression of who you are, and what you want. The person is not doing this maliciously. They simply want the job.

Overcome Your Biases

You need to overcome all the biases that we all bring to the recruiting process. There are over 300 biases, but the top 13 to watch during an interview are the following:

  • Confirmation bias
  • Affect heuristics
  • Expectation anchor
  • Halo effect
  • Horn effect
  • Overconfidence bias
  • Similarity attraction bias
  • Illusory correlation
  • Affinity bias
  • Beauty bias
  • Conformity bias
  • Intuition
  • Judgement bias

Structure Your Interviews

Our gut is our own worst enemy, and there are many research studies to back this. One such study, shows that our intuition is wrong more than 55% of the time. (Should You Trust Your Gut in Hiring? Arlene Hirsch, SHRM May 1, 2018)

The way to correct this is through structured interviews, which we’ll discuss in a future post. (Skill in Interviewing Reduces Confirmation Bias. Powell, Hughes-Scholes, & Sharman, 2012)

For now, can you think of why you thought your worst hire seemed to be the best hire during the interview process?  

As always, feel free to contact me for help in streaming your hiring process or comment down below.

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