[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No, that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]: Hey, thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James, and let’s get started with a question. What can be done to improve employee performance?

[JAMES]: Really? To improve employee performance, we really need to understand how performance management is being used in our workplace. Is your performance management system designed to punish our performance, essentially using it as a control tool? Or are you trying to encourage high performance, turning it into a productivity tool? Control based performance management systems tend to focus on the consequences of poor performance, and, they rely heavily on things like performance improvement plans, where underperformance is called out and pips are used, really, as setting the stage for termination. these forms of performance management systems are kind of a hallmark of poor or even toxic workplace cultures, where productivity based performance management systems, on the other hand, are really focused on setting and managing expectations. They set the guardrails for what people can do within the limits of their. Within the authority of their role, and they provide regular check ins and support to help people achieve the expectations that we set. A lot of how your performance management system is designed kind of depends on how HR is viewed within your company.

[COBY]: Yeah, no, that is a really important point to even just challenge or rethink how performance management and employee performance is viewed in the workplace. Because in, when we talk to businesses and they talk about employee performance, it’s really, they’re talking about mitigating risk, mitigating problems, resolving employee issues through kind of this almost like happy sunshine language of, we’re actually not trying to discipline you, we’re trying to improve your performance. And it’s something that is, you know, when that happens, everyone knows what’s going on. You’re not fooling anybody. You know, you’re putting lipstick on a pig, in a sense. Right? And to me, I always am always like, ugh, that’s not a good sign when we’re doing, when we see it, doing initial assessments, because it’s like you’re just, you know, you’re really just trying to use positive language to address something that you see is very negative, and then it kind of means you don’t really have a plan on how we’re going to actually improve employee performance, how we’re actually going to manage employees performance, to have them do better, reach higher, and, you know, and excel. We’re just using this language of performance management and employee performance as, just as a synonym for discipline.

[JAMES]: Yeah. And typically the tools are often the same. Like, there’s nothing inherently bad about a performance improvement plan.

[COBY]: You’re right.

[JAMES]: Right. We’ve identified that somebody is not meeting the expectations that we have set out in advance and we have provided support to them still failing to meet those expectations. So we are going to put a performance improvement plan in place that says, here is the expectations, here’s what we are going to do to support you. Here’s where you need to be by x period of time, and if you still continue to not meet those expectations, then there will be some sort of consequence. Totally reasonable approach. It’s in how the tools are used and how they’re thought of within the organization that really, makes the difference between control based and productivity based. I, can, like, I have evaluated a lot of performance management systems for clients. And many times when we, like you said, when we’re doing the initial assessments or the early stages of, engagements with clients, we’re looking at what they’re doing and how they approach these things. And many times the only performance management tool they use is a PIP.

[JAMES]: And if the only way that you monitor and manage performance is through corrective action, then you’re not trying to support people to improve their performance. You are disciplining people for failing to meet your expectations. Now, it’s not every time, but the vast majority of time that this happens. Expectations are not clearly set in advance, and there’s not a system in place for supporting people doing the regular check ins, whether that’s quarterly, evaluations to see. Are we on track with our. To meet our goals and what can we do to support you to continue to improve that? It’s a once a year sit down. Or when something significant happens, we slap them with a you messed up, here’s a pip. If you don’t fix it in six months, we’re going to fire you mentality.

[COBY]: And I think maybe it is. This is the heart of it. I feel sometimes that when workplaces try to use again the performance management as a substitute or a softening of discipline, it almost seems passive aggressive. And maybe that’s part of what is that I dislike. It seems a bit deceitful. And again, I know no employee wants to be brought in for a disciplinary meeting, but bringing them in for a performance improvement meeting, that where they’re.

[JAMES]: Being disciplined doesn’t negate the outcome, doesn’t mean anything. You’re still trying to discipline them. You’re just being a little less forward and upfront about what you’re doing.

[COBY]: Yeah. Now what you said before, too, about how we, again, like, you know, how the performance, the employee performance programs are used, kind of bases a bit on kind of the expectations of the organization. And that makes me want to, makes me think that we should go back and talk about something we did in an, episode last season. We talked about kind of, what does HR mean in your organization? Talked about in that conversation, talking about the four, we call the four faces of HR. Basically that HR, the h and the r kind of have a different meaning or, you know, in different organizations based on kind of the mindset and the view of both employee relations and HR departments. And I guess performance management would fall into that. So I think it might not hurt for us to kind of talk about that again and then kind of talk about what does performance management look like in those different environments in hopes that the person listening to this you’ll be able to kind of maybe connect with, yeah, that kind of sounds a bit like my workplace or, yeah, that is maybe some of the mindset issues that we’re struggling with and, and hopefully, again, make some kind of, again, clear understanding for what kind of, how can employee performance be improved based on the type of HR and kind of the governing philosophies around employee relations that kind of are in these workplaces.

[JAMES]: So the first one that I want, that I think is important to talk about is if HR in your workplace really stands for holding red tape, where the intent and really the primary activity of your HR department really is just compliance and making sure that processes are being followed and there’s no real strategy, strategic intent behind it, then honestly, you may, you’re probably not using it as a productivity tool. And honestly, you’re probably not using it as a control tool either. Very likely, it’s just a box that needs to be checked. Right. once a year we have a performance conversation so that we can tick the box that says we have, on an annual basis, done a performance, management criteria. We’ve met our obligations onto the next thing.

[COBY]: Yeah, no, I think that’s bang on. You’re right, because it’s not even that. It’s performance management is used for anything other than it’s a process we have to go through to say that we’ve gone through it. And I’m sure anybody hearing this conversation can remember sitting in a performance management or yearly performance review meeting and you’re like, why am I here? I’m like, sure, I’ll just do what I did. This year, I’ll just do it better next year, or sure, I’ll, you know, and you’re, you and sometimes even your supervisor, you’re both like, why are we even doing this? It’s. It’s a exercise to, it’s administrative exercise. It really has no value on my day, on my daily work.

[JAMES]: And we’ve seen this firsthand in. Right. We’ve seen it where staff sit around a table and do their, performance management, process together, and they recycle the same three to five goals. this year, I’m going to choose this goal because it sounds good. right, there’s that one last year. Right. Like, it just. It becomes a routine activity that has no meaning and no value beyond somebody at head office being able to say, it was done. I don’t care about anything other than check the box. It’s done. Let’s move on.

[COBY]: Right. So the answer to our question, what can be done to improve employee performance in the holding red tape department?

[JAMES]: A lot.

[COBY]: Yeah. Is really anything, not making it a ridiculous activity for all people involved, showing the managers how they can actually make this into a meaningful, kind of like, you know, part of the work again. Start small, start again. because you have to re educate everybody involved that this isn’t an exercise in futility or this isn’t just some, some type of lip service process that you have, that you’re doing.

[JAMES]: I feel for somebody in this situation who wants to make change, because if the way leadership in your company views HR is merely as holding red tape, then you may not be empowered to make any changes, which is a very frustrating place to be. and you’ve probably already identified that there’s a whole number of ways that it can be done better. But yes, Coby, you’re right. That start small within the authority that you have.

[COBY]: Well, and I said this in meetings with businesses, and I’ve said this on the other podcast before, but if employee performance, if performance management doesn’t matter, then employee performance doesn’t matter. And I mean, if. So, if you’re in a situation where you’re, you know, feeling, you know, that, you know, senior leadership or those above you are limiting your ability to be empowered to do anything about this because it’s just an administrative process, then that’s the mentality I suggest you find a way to bring to them. If this is something that is not important, then we’re saying, and we’re living and we’re walking the walk, that employee performance doesn’t matter. And kind of put that on them to say, we can do better. I’ve got a plan to do better, but I need to be supported in my performance to do my job better so that I can help them do their jobs better. But make it very clear, if this whole, the whole process of managing performance doesn’t matter, then performance doesn’t matter. All right, so the next, type of space of HR is when HR stands for the highly reactive department. And this is about when the daily interactions of the HR departments is really just pointing out fires. Sometimes this looks like the kind of HR roles where it’s just about try to fill vacancies. And the majority of all the HR time is spent just trying to, like, you know, put bums in seats because we can’t get enough staff. Or it’s about trying to run around and put out kind of interpersonal fires. And every day is just about reacting to what happened this morning or yesterday or whatever, and it’s really just kind of running from fire to fire and never feeling like you’re ever getting ahead. And this is both depressing and depressingly common.

[JAMES]: Yeah. Well, I think in the reactive mindset, performance management becomes a control tool. Right. Because you’re trying to limit the number of fires that happen. Right. It’s just you, when you’re constantly reacting to situations, it’s hard to act with strategic intent. Right. And to take a, productivity mindset towards performance management, it really needs to be. There needs to be strategic intent behind it. Right. There needs to be, you need to have the ability to, work on things before they become a critical problem that needs to be addressed or reacted to. So I see the, this face, of HR very closely aligning with the control mentality out of that reactive mindset of, well, we just, we need to, as much as possible, control how many fires we are putting out at a time. so when something comes up, we respond. We institute, a performance improvement, plan and give them a timeframe. And if they don’t adhere to it, then we move on to discipline, or termination procedures.

[COBY]: Yeah, well, and one thing that’s really kind of a sad side effect of a HR department or people with HR responsibilities that are, that, are, that are used to constantly being in talent attraction or talent recruitment mode is they will be like, well, if this person doesn’t show us their worth keeping them, we’ll just replace them because we’re pretty good at filling seats.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: And there’s no concept of the retention pieces either. You need to because, because they’re so behind the eight ball and they’re so focused on just recruitment that it’s like if the person doesn’t show up and is problem free, then they’re out. Because we don’t have the bandwidth to help you become good at your job. So you have to come fully formed and problem free. Otherwise we’re just going to replace you because that’s all we have capacity to do. And man, I’ve seen that in so many, I’ve heard stories, especially from, younger employees and stuff like that, that have gotten these jobs. They’re great. They don’t hear anything super concerning. They’re looking forward to their probationary period and they are just let go within the probationary period with very little warning because they just didn’t quite become problem free enough, that it was just easier to replace them to the HR team. And that’s sad.

[JAMES]: It is. And I think it’s important to clearly state and reinforce that this, is not only an HR problem. Performance management is not only an HR problem, it’s a management problem and a management deficit, ah, of management skills. While HR holds the overall responsibility, for the performance management process, let’s be real. It’s the individual managers who should be monitoring, who should be, using the performance management frameworks to support their staff to improve performance. Unfortunately, when that doesn’t happen, it just falls back and creates more work for HR professionals.

[COBY]: Well, let’s be serious too. When HR is stands for the highly reactive department, it’s not just the HR professionals that are in reaction mode all the time. This tends to be an orientational wide thing. And sometimes, and I’ve seen, and we’ve seen this with some companies where, you know, sometimes our first engagement with them tends to be with the HR people just because kind of how we get brought in. But then we kind of see that HR is in a constantly reactive mode and managers are constantly reactive mode and employees are constantly reactive mode and senior leadership is. So it becomes organizational wide thing. So when it’s, again, when I say an employee is not, when they bring a new employee on and they don’t, the manager doesn’t have time to correct the employee performance because they’re, because they’re putting off fires constantly. So they kind of kick the problem to HR. And HR is like, well, either we, you know, do you want to just replace them? Because that’s all we have capacity to do. And then that’s usually how it happens. It’s not someone intentionally going, you know, let’s just leave. Let’s do this with, you know, as a plan. It’s just people trying to keep their head above water. No one has time to get ahead. No one. People are, you’re right, they’re often not trained enough how to actually improve a new employee’s performance, or address, employees whose performance has been, is dipped and is struggling. So it’s, and they don’t have the capacity or the bandwidth to be trained. And HR doesn’t have the capacity to kind of put in some preact or proactive stuff. All this to say that usually the highly reactive problems are not, don’t, don’t just live within HR. HR is often reflective of it, but it’s almost like a lot of the reactive momentum gets built up in other departments and then ends up almost like, you know, being pushed into HR. HR is often more in a reactive mode because everyone else’s reactive problems are now their problems, which kind of increases the problem tenfold.

[JAMES]: Yeah. And that’s, that’s often where this mindset comes from, is a lack of strategic intent and operational, thought throughout the organization, which forces HR to react to situations, because nobody in the organization is actually taking a strategic mindset in what they’re doing.

[COBY]: Yeah. So then the question of what can be done to improve employee performance in the highly reactive department, it’s, it’s a tough situation because you’re struggling to keep your head above water. And the. So what we would say is that any type of ability to work with the management team, to build some level of proactive employee support, to improve performance, to give people more opportunity and to, to have structure, have clear expectations, so that, that way the employee performance can actually be improved and not be, either you’re perfect or you’re gone, kind of, you know, either or kind of situation. Anything that you can do to allow employees to actually have the chance to actually improve with some kind of clarity and support and clear, with clear expectations is really going to, it’s going to serve you very, very well. I know it’s a tough thing to say. Just, you have to do more work in order to answer it. When you’re in a highly reactive department.

[JAMES]: What needs to be done is you’re right. there needs to be more intent around what happens right from the very top, from the senior leadership level. there needs to be, managers need to be provided training on how to actually manage m performance, not just, monitor or restrict or react to poor performance. and it may involve finding external.

[COBY]: Resources to support you yeah, yeah. And we won’t lie. That’s something that tends to be kind of a catalyst for some of the work that we do is we need this to change. We don’t have the bandwidth internally to change it. We have the desire and we have, and we have the commitment to do it, but we just don’t know where to start because we’re just, every day is just putting out fires. So sometimes just having someone else take that off your plate and guide you through the transformation is often the only.

[JAMES]: You need to find capacity somewhere. Either it’s going to come from picking up more work or offloading some parts to somebody else, and it’s going to be up to you, and your company to decide what’s the best fit for that.

[COBY]: But the one thing we always really try to make clear is that the cost savings of moving from a highly reactive department towards something with more strategic intent is substantial.

[JAMES]: The next one, if the third phase of HR is when HR stands for hovering and restricting, and this one, as you can probably guess just from the name, is very control based. Right. It’s the idea that HR is big brother is always looking for. When things are going wrong and provide corrective action in and of itself, not a bad thing, but when that is the focus of HR in your organization, it creates a lot of challenges. And again, it tends to be, very much a HR is the bad guy HR, you know, it’s the toxic side of HR, or the HR is not your friend mentality. Don’t share or say anything to HR because they’re just going to use it against you. These sentiments that we hear very frequently from employees, if you’ve spent any time talking to employees, you may have heard these. This, mindset is again, quite prevalent. and it tends to view performance management as a mechanism for restricting, what employees can do rather than powering them to do better.

[COBY]: Yes. And one thing that is probably worth just quickly mentioning too, is that, when organizations try to evolve from a highly reactive department without increasing capacity and without getting external support or without trying to get proactive, they tend to get more restrictive, they tend to make harsher, more punitive rulings. They tend to focus more on suppressing people as a way of just trying to keep their head above water, as.

[JAMES]: A way of suppressing the number of fires that they need to react to.

[COBY]: Yeah.

[JAMES]: Right. It, it is. I want to use the language of it’s a logical progression. but it’s not really a logical thought pattern.

[COBY]: No, it’s an unfortunate progression and easily.

[JAMES]: And an easy progression to fall into. Yes.

[COBY]: Yeah. So, so it can be what happens when you’re highly reactive and you’re not too sure how do you get out of it. You’re, so we’ll just squeeze everyone tighter. That tends to be where you move into. And again, another way to kind of think about this too is going is just the idea of, you know, like I say, it’s, it’s big brother. So big brother is, is trying to, you know, use performance management as a way to, again, maintain the suppression, maintain the restriction. It is about, you know, like you cross this line, we’re going to put you on this passive aggressive pip. So that way that you, you know, you don’t think we’re the bad guys, even though we are, you know, tinting our fingers in the background. you know, that, that’s kind of some of the way that people feel about, you know, about this. And often where we see this negative idea around Pip tends to kind of come from this hovering and restricting focus of HR.

[JAMES]: This is a natural evolution of the other two, like you said, with a, the reactive mentality. But also, if you are shifting your HR from merely holding red tape without that, strategic intent of what HR can be, this idea of we’re going to bring in more HR supports to monitor, to correct, actions, to kind, of restrict what people can and can’t do. It is an evolution of both the holding red tape and the highly reactive models.

[COBY]: You’re right. And so, like when the, and sometimes it’s when the high, the holding red tape department is in an organization that views employees as expenses and liabilities, and they just, and that the way that they see kind of the human resources is using humans as resources and that more commodity type relationship that they have with the employer, then they kind of can jump right from holding red tape to hovering and restricting. If they’re like, well, employees are liabilities. We have to manage them, we have to suppress them. We have to restrict them because they’re a cost center. There are liabilities and expenses. So we have to mitigate that risk. So going back to the question, what can be done to improve employee performance in the hovering restriction department? I don’t think I got an answer for that one.

[JAMES]: Well, it’s a mindset shift. It is a struggle, because when the intent of your department is to hover and restrict, you use control tools to do that. Right. It’s a natural outcome, or it’s embodied in the very way that we view HR in our organization. So to change that, we need to change how HR is viewed in our organization. Right. Because this hovering and restricting model is entirely about control. Whether that stems from a fear of employees taking advantage of us, whether that comes from a lack of understanding of what, of how employees, can be treated when treated as an asset rather than a liability, can really enhance our entire business model. If you are in the hovering and restricting mentality, you probably are not going to approach performance management as a productivity tool because it’s about control. So if to how do you do it better in that situation, in that mentality is that you need to change, you need to shift the mindset and what HR means in that organization away, from focusing on restricting actions to empowering performance.

[COBY]: There is no trust between employees and management, and employees and hrtaine in the hovering and restricting environment, there’s just not, So employee performance is going to be about how do I stay out of trouble and how do I keep off the radar of HR and my manager is a survival mode. And you cannot improve performance in that kind of environment in any kind of sustainable way. It’s something that, it’s just you’re always going to struggle with employee performance because employees are only going to give you enough to stay out of trouble.

[COBY]: Because they don’t trust you. They are probably looking for a new job right now and keeping their heads.

[JAMES]: Down to collect a paycheck.

[COBY]: Exactly. So the priorities are not aligned to improve employee performance. So let’s move on to the last one, which is the fourth face of HR is what we recall, the humans required department. And this is basically the polar opposite of the hovering and restriction department. This is where the organization values human capital. HR is more the employee advocate. They’re about seeing employees as assets. They’re about providing resources to humans. And it really is about that idea of, we get that you are a person who we need to nurture and support to if we want you to achieve great heights. So we’re behind you and we’re going to help you do that. And if you work in this kind of department or real organization, you are lucky because you are not in the majority. But there’s a lot that can be done to improve performance. Ah, in this organization.

[JAMES]: Yeah. This idea of humans required really exemplifies that. from a business perspective, we understand that if we treat people well, they will perform better. If we treat people like human beings, we empower them to do their job. We trust them within the authority of the position that they have we invest in them, because we, as they get better at what they do, that will make all of us better at achieving our organizational outcomes. It is the mentality that we personally push in through all of our work when we’re working with clients. It’s all about shifting the mindset to this idea that if we can focus on improving the employee experience, then that will have a direct impact on our organizational outcomes. It will improve productivity, it’ll improve, performance, it’ll improve retention rates, it will help us attract talent, to our organization, and it will increase our profitability, it will increase our market share, it will increase our ability to innovate and pivot as new situations arise. Right. It has a direct impact on your bottom line, but it requires a lot of work and effort.

[COBY]: Absolutely. So when we talk about what can be done to improve employee performance when you have a humans required department, well, I think what I’m going to do is going to drop a little bit of psychology on people just to, help accentuate the depths of what can be done when you have the benefit of a human required department. So there is a concept called the Pygmalion effect, and it’s psychological bias where higher expectations can lead to higher performance. Or on the other hand, lower expectations can lead to lower performance. Basically, the idea of a self fulfilling prophecy between what you expect of people and what they will provide you. Now, what’s interesting about the Pygmalion effect is that it requires that the kind of sincere expectation. So it’s a matter of saying that, if you have a boss who says, hey, I’m excited for you to take on this new project, I want, you know, so you have my support, you let me know what you need. I know, I know you’re going to achieve great things, and that boss walks the walk on that, and then you’re like, wow, they really believe in me. Well, I’m going to try a little bit harder. I’m going to, you know, I’ll take them up when I need the help. Like, you know, they’re, they’re putting, they’re putting a lot of faith in me. So I’m going to meet that faith that, you know, then that what that creates is, you know, a great situation where your behaviors are aligned and you put more effort into it and you achieve greater things than if your boss said, hey, here’s a project, just do your best. it’s about setting the bar, but then supporting that bar being met. And it’s a pretty interesting concept in a way that it’s also a bit of an obvious concept, but it’s surprising that there is real science and real kind of cause and effect relationship behind the self fulfilling prophecy of pygmalion effect, because it really does work. If you create high expectations and support those high expectations, you’re going to achieve a higher outcome. And this is an idea that’s a lot easier to understand in the humans required department than it would be in the other three types of HR departments.

[JAMES]: Yeah. What was interesting for me when you first introduced, ah, the concept of the pygmalion effect to me is that it sounds like just common sense, right? If you set high expectations for people and support them to achieve it, they will rise to the occasion. If you set low expectations for people and you don’t give them any support, they will lower their performance to meet your expectations. Knowing, that it’s an actual psychological, effect or theory or whatever you called it, is interesting because if it is rooted in psychology, then it makes it a bit more tangible. If it’s a bit more tangible, then something that we can manipulate, not manipulate in a negative sense, but understanding that there’s actual psychology behind it allows us to use this or deploy it, within what we do around performance management.

[COBY]: What’s interesting is that by knowing it’s a real thing, it’s not so much that you can manipulate it, that you can replicate it.

[JAMES]: Right? Yeah.

[COBY]: That you can rely on it is that it’s something that will work again and again and again. It’s not just a one off. Hey, in just this one rare situation, it just happened to work coincidentally. It’s. There’s some consistency behind it because this is how human brains work.

[JAMES]: So what’s interesting is that all of the, like, the best performance management, programs that we’ve designed and that we’ve reviewed all inherently do this. M. Right. They set, they tell, they set the expectations. They set high expectations for people, right. But right from the very beginning, people know how they’re going to be evaluated in the role. They know what success looks like. They, ah, you know, there’s regular check ins to ensure that, they are on track to meet their, performance metrics. They are supported with what they need to either get back on track or to continue to meet their expectations. And we see this time and time again when this perform, this type of productivity, focused performance management framework is being utilized, people will regularly rise to the occasion and meet the expectations that we set. We can set high expectations, we can expect a lot out of people, but we have an obligation to support them to achieve those outcomes.

[COBY]: And that’s the key right there, because I’m sure when I first, explained it, someone’s like, okay, guys, I don’t believe you. I’ve had bosses that have just set this crazy, ridiculous bar, and I wasn’t any more motivated to achieve it. I wasn’t able to reach that bar, and I end up failing. and if that was, that was you, I apologize. That’s awful situation to be in, but that’s not what we’re talking about. The Pygmalion effect requires that the conditions that you work in are supporting that performance and expectation, that you’re being properly utilized and being given the opportunity to achieve it. And there’s a bit of, a practical use of the skills that you have. And then you’re being set up in a situation to be successful, and that you’re given feedback and encouragement and redirecting and realignment when required. And if those three things don’t exist, then you’re. Then it’s. You’re not being given high expectations with support. You’re being set up to fail. M and that’s something, that is a big difference. But you’re right. The Pygmalion effect is more talked about with high expectations and higher performance. But it is about. It’s actually a neutral idea that it’s about people rise to the expectations and support that you give them. It’s probably a better way to define it in a more neutral way. A great story. that kind of summarizes that is, when I was working in an organization, this was fairly early in my career. I, worked in a satellite office for this large organization. And there was an employee who worked in the organization with me who had a job. And I don’t know what she did because, man, she didn’t do a whole lot. And her boss was this kind of, like, whatever, stew stuff, don’t do stuff like. Like, laid back to the point of, like, really ineffective. And so I never really knew what this person did. This person was in this job for, like, for like a year or two. And these were contract jobs that had to be renewed by, like, it had to be renewed on an annual basis. And at one point, the position that this woman was in was going to be discontinued because of how ineffective she was. And what happened was, her boss ended up getting fired because of his lack of ability to manage. And her project being unrenewed was one of the many straw that broke the camels back, in a sense. A new manager came in and said, okay, so I’ve got a year of this project left, and it’s already been canceled. So, I’m going to bring somebody in who, let’s see what they can do with this job, because there’s no real floor on this job, because the job is already, the position’s already been seen as a failure. So whoever I bring in is going to kind of have free reign to do something cool because they got to burn off the rest of this contract. And let’s see what can happen. And what’s interesting is the person that this new manager, who wanted to prove herself in the position, brought in what she brought in you, James, this guy?

[JAMES]: Yeah. it’s funny that you’re telling my story. yeah. So I guess to kind of clarify a few things, early in my career, yeah, Coby and I, we work together for the same organization. and I was brought in on a. I was told right from the beginning, you’ve got nine months left in this contract. The contract’s already slated to be, the funding has already been pulled. so basically you’ve got a nine month contract position, then you’re done. My manager in that time, I’ve talked about this person in a, few different times in, our podcast and in our work, because this person is still one of my favorite human beings. Because the way that she managed, my performance and supported me to do cool things, really elevated my career trajectory. so, yeah, we had nine months to do whatever we want. Funders didn’t really care because the, performance on that program was already so low for the previous, like, three or five years, that, they were riding out the contract. What was cool was working with my manager and her having the faith in my ability to just come to me with something cool that you want to do. We still need to hit the broad outcomes, but the method that we use to get there can be completely different. It allowed me to research and design a new way of, doing business development, through this organization, to support businesses with their recruitment and attraction, efforts. And what’s kind of amazing is that in the first six months of that nine month dead contract, we were able to produce, enough results that the funding got extended. We went from a nine month dead contract to within six months, it being renewed for another year, within, another six months of that. So three months into the new, newly renewed contract, we were producing such results that we were actually able to wrap that into core funding. eventually, that program that I designed became a provincial standard for employer engagement programs, through these types of agencies.

[COBY]: Yeah. So what’s really great about one, it’s kind of a cool story of how you turned a absolutely dead job.

[JAMES]: I’m always happy to talk about myself.

[COBY]: But it is very impressive that you turned an absolutely dead job that everyone had written off and moved away from it to the new provincial standard in how to provide that type of support to businesses. So that’s just a cool thing. I’m going to give you applause on that. But it is also a great story that exemplifies both sides of the pygmalion effect. Your predecessor and her boss were a great example of, if you set low standards and you don’t create the conditions that support high productivity, you don’t utilize fuel effectively and you don’t, provide good feedback, they will meet that poor expectation with poor results versus when your boss came in and hired you. She set high expectations for you to achieve something. She gave you the conditions and the support to do that. She properly utilized your skillsets and gave you the feedback and the course corrections you needed in order to achieve high performance. And you even blew her expectations out of the water. And that is what can happen with a mindset shift. And by leveraging the pygmalion effect, you can resurrect the dead in a sense.

[JAMES]: but walk back from that statement.

[COBY]: Yeah, maybe. Yeah, we’ll cut that out in editing, but honestly. But you can achieve great things by this, by this idea. And what’s so funny is you’re like, well, when I first explained this to you, you’re like, well, isn’t that common? Shouldn’t that be common sense? And I’m like, yeah, but it’s not. But it is something that is not common enough to be common sense.

[JAMES]: Yeah. So this is just not common.

[COBY]: Exactly. So I think that one of the ways that we can, tee this up a little bit, too, is the way that we utilize this focus around conditions, utilization and feedback is something that is built into how we rebuild performance management tools and programs. So a lot of the work that we do when we go into organizations going to help them with their talent transformations is trying to build some type of system that creates the kind of conditions similar to what you experienced early on in your career, but has been proven to improve portfolio performance. Leveraging the Pygmalion effect and a lot of the ways we talk about that is a really simple way we talk about it, in terms of rules that empower, creating the benchmarks and the goalposts and the expectations that let people kind of hit those high peaks that, again, leverage high expectations to turn into high performance. And it’s in, I think we have a program where we talk about that. and maybe it’s called the autonomy Freeway, and maybe we can do an episode about that down the road because we’re kind of running low on time now. But I would like for us to kind of just steer this Pygmalion effect, human required rules that empower kind of, and talk about it in terms of the more common realities of remote teams and multiple location organizations.

[JAMES]: Yeah, so, a, lot of our clients, have multiple locations. Ah, so managing performance across multiple locations, or managing performance with teams that are, whether they’re multiple locations being others, like satellite offices, or they work from home, it doesn’t really matter what, we tend to do. I use the language of guardrails earlier. so perform a really robust, excellent, performance management system is going to very clearly set the expectations of, here’s what you’re expected, here are what your responsibilities are, here’s how we are going. Defining success, in this role. And on one side, that becomes your guardrail, on the other side, it’s. Here are the things that you can’t do, right. Here are the, don’t cross these lines, these boundaries. But the, your opportunity to do cool stuff rests in between those two guardrails of expectations, clear definitions of success and rules that empower. Setting the limits of, as long as you’re not doing x, y, and z, you’re good to go. Right. That framework becomes very, very powerful motivational tool and performance management tool, because you also need to temper, that with regular check ins. Right. How are things going? We’ve set the expectations. We know how we’re going to measure, the success in your job. So, on a, if you’re managing a remote team or people, who work from home, you’re probably going to want to do the check ins a little more often, whether that’s bi weekly, to see. Okay, here’s what we’ve stated is, our metrics for success. How are you in achieving those? Okay, what do you need from me as your manager to make sure that you can achieve those goals bi weekly basis? 1520 minutes conversation. Regular check ins can make all the difference in the world. If you have these guard weight guardrails in place that focus people’s energies, it’s just again, it’s one of those things that it makes sense and should be common, but it’s not commonly applied. but we see this as a, we not only see it, we have seen it in action with clients. We regularly see this in action improving the way that managers, are able to manage teams, whether that is multiple location, whether that is work from home, and really improve the overall performance of individuals, of teams, and of organizations when this mentality is taken and applied throughout a company.

[COBY]: Absolutely. And a lot of what is fundamental to making a lot of these stuff work is being prepared to manage people a little bit differently. This isn’t your grandparents way to manage people. This really is about what works in today’s workforce climate. So we’re going to do a really quick recap. I think this has been a good conversation. So what can be done to improve employee performance? Well, again, the big question is, how are you viewing performance management? Are you seeing it as a tool of control, or are you seeing it as a tool for productivity? That is kind of the foundation. First thing you need to really be asking yourself when you’re trying to increase employee performance, because how we view employee relations and HR has a lot of impact on the way that we, again, utilize systems to manage employee performance. Are we trying to just hold people to a generic standard of checking boxes by holding, having a holding red tape department? Are we just trying to put out, fires and mitigate the problems because we have a highly reactive department? Are we trying to suppress people through a hovering and restricting department? Or do we actually have a humans required department? That is about trying to achieve, optimal performance and optimal productivity through investing in people and using people, and providing resources to humans. We need to be more aware of looking into the Pygmalion effect and the impact that higher expectations can become a self fulfilling prophecy towards higher performance if we have the conditions, utilization, and feedback to get them there. Ultimately, if you want to talk about improving employee performance when it comes to remote teams in multiple locations, we have to be prepared to manage differently. Look at rules that empower, look at setting clear expectations, set the guardrails that will help people kind of achieve what they want. You know, what they need to in order to optimize performance. But we have to realize that this, a lot of this, this sounds like a big change to you. Then going through, seeing this as potential, a transformative process might be the reality of it. And those things aren’t necessarily quick, cheap, or easy, but if you want to actually do something about employee performance if they may be necessary. All right, so that about does it for us. For a full archive of the podcast and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel, visit www.roman3.ca/podcast thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]: For more information on topics like these, don’t forget to visit us at www.roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth, a version to the sound of James voice desire to find a better podcast.