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6 Ways To Transform Performance Management To Deliver What Employees Actually Need

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Performance management has room to improve. According to Gartner research, 52% of chief human resource officers (CHROs) believe they are not rewarding the right behavior in employees, and only 32% of HR business partners believe performance management delivers what employees need to perform.

Because of this, in the last five years, 74% of organizations have significantly changed their performance management processes. “Companies are implementing a variety of new practices, from linking pay to project performance to eliminating performance reviews entirely,” says Benjamin Loring, Research Director at Gartner. “The real unlock, however, is making performance management useful to both managers and employees with this six-part roadmap.”

Six ways to fix performance management

Improve performance management by considering the amount of conversations you have, the lens through which you look at performance, and the style of feedback you provide.

Ongoing conversations

No. 1: Encourage ongoing manager-employee feedback throughout the year

Create a mutual understanding of what type of feedback employees need to be successful and enable them to own and schedule feedback conversations by educating them on the types and frequency of dialogue that can occur.

No. 2: Promote discussions beyond individual contexts

To enact this, promote team goal-setting. Encourage team members to reflect and develop their individual goals for teams to review for alignment, impact, relevance and overlap. Similarly, create a space for employees to provide feedback to managers to reinforce employee agency and power in feedback conversations.

Forward-looking reviews

No. 3: Develop a framework for assessing future performance

Assess employees’ development readiness — their capacity, ability and willingness to take on professional development at a given point in time — not just performance, and align coaching conversations, and support to their true needs. This may require evolving how you evaluate growth and reframing the value of the process, while also navigating ambiguous situations and meeting organizational needs.

No. 4: Encourage managers to communicate actions needed for future success

Help managers provide feedback on what skills their employees need for the future, in addition to reflecting on their past accomplishments. Increasing transparency of skills across a team encourages cohesiveness, coaching and on-the-job development.

Peer feedback

No. 5: Gather feedback from co-workers on how employees help fellow team members

A huge part of performance management is feedback from colleagues. Guide managers on how to identify sources of feedback based on who has knowledge of an employee’s work, rather than limiting feedback to the employee’s formal relationships. Peer assessments are a good way to hold employees accountable for demonstrating critical behaviors and get a more comprehensive understanding of their contributions. Just be sure to develop evaluation guidelines that focus on outcomes.

No. 6: Foster an environment of feedback

Encourage employees to recognize their peers’ contributions to create comfort and confidence regarding feedback exchanges. Create a simple approach to seeking and requesting feedback and frequent prompts to focus managers on recognizing and reinforcing good behaviors throughout the year.

 

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Future-proofing the supply chain

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Future-proofing the supply chain

Future-proofing the supply chain

Supply chains matter. The plumbing of global commerce has rarely been a topic of much discussion in newsrooms or boardrooms, but the past two years have pushed the subject to the top of the agenda. The COVID-19 crisis, postpandemic economic effects, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine have exposed the vulnerabilities of today’s global supply chains. They have also made heroes of the teams that keep products flowing in a complex, uncertain, and fast-changing environment. Supply chain leaders now find themselves in an unfamiliar position: they have the attention of top management and a mandate to make real change.

Forward-thinking chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to future-proof their supply chains. And they can do that by recognizing the three new priorities alongside the function’s traditional objectives of cost/capital, quality, and service and redesigning their supply chains accordingly.

The first of these new priorities, resilience, addresses the challenges that have made supply chain a widespread topic of conversation. The second, agility, will equip companies with the ability to meet rapidly evolving, and increasingly volatile, customer and consumer needs. The third, sustainability, recognizes the key role that supply chains will play in the transition to a clean and socially just economy.

Boosting supply chain resilience

Supply chains have always been vulnerable to disruption. Prepandemic research by the McKinsey Global Institute found that, on average, companies experience a disruption of one to two months in duration every 3.7 years. In the consumer goods sector, for example, the financial fallout of these disruptions over a decade is likely to equal 30 percent of one year’s EBITDA.

Historical data also show that these costs are not inevitable. In 2011, Toyota suffered six months of reduced production following the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. But the carmaker revamped its production strategy, regionalized supply chains, and addressed supplier vulnerabilities. When another major earthquake hit Japan in April 2016, Toyota was able to resume production after only two weeks.

During the pandemic’s early stages, sportswear maker Nike accelerated a supply chain technology program that used radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track products flowing through outsourced manufacturing operations. The company also used predictive-demand analytics to minimize the impact of store closures across China. By rerouting inventory from in-store to digital-sales channels and acting early to minimize excess inventory buildup across its network, the company was able to limit sales declines in the region to just 5 percent. Over the same period, major competitors suffered much more significant drops in sales.

Supply chain risk manifests at the intersection of vulnerability and exposure to unforeseen events (Exhibit 2). The first step in mitigating that risk is a clear understanding of the organization’s supply chain vulnerabilities. Which suppliers, processes, or facilities present potential single points of failure in the supply chain? Which critical inputs are at risk from shortages or price volatility?

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Huawei’s European factory to boost supply chain efficiency

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Huawei's European factory to boost supply chain efficiency

The China-based tech giants, Huawei, is set to build a factory in France to produce 4G and 5G wireless equipment to accelerate supply chain efficiency.

According to analysts, the new facility will allow Huawei easier access to its telecommunications carriers in Europe, while also easing concerns over alleged spying for China’s government.

Stéphane Téral, executive director of telecommunications research at IHS Markit, commented: “At this stage of the mobile industry, it is critical for Huawei to have a radio communications factory somewhere in Europe to relieve the pressure on the existing ones in China. “We clearly see firsthand the disruption the coronavirus crisis is creating.”

It is expected that the factory will produce €1bn worth of products annually, while also creating 500 jobs.

It is thought that the company chose France due to the country’s ideal geographic position, mature industrial infrastructure as well as its highly educated talent pool. Peter Liu, vice-president analyst at Gartner, said: “The European facility will improve Huawei’s efficiency because the company will be able to integrate itself into the supply chain in Europe.”

The news follows Huawei’s launch of its 5G Innovation and Experience Centre in London which encourages increased collaboration between businesses and innovators in the development of 5G ecosystems. Victor Zhang, Vice-President of Huawei, added: “With the opening of our 5G Innovation and Experience Centre in London we, as a leader of 5G, are taking another important step. What we have opened today will enable true collaboration amongst UK businesses and technologists and showcase the huge potential of 5G applications for both the private and business sectors.”

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DHL: transforming logistics with startup partnerships

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DHL large electirc vehicle

DHL large electirc vehicle

Supply Chain Digital gets an insight into DHL’s partnerships with startups to drive digitalisation and sustinability within the business.

When it comes to innovations at DHL, the company values its partnerships both big and small. In recent years many startups have entered into the logistics industry. Markus Kückelhaus, VP of Innovation and Trend Research at DHL raises the question of why?

“The logistics industry is a very fragmented sector that is still catching up. Which is why this industry is interesting to startups,” says Kückelhaus who highlights that due to the industry’s small attempts at digitalisation, in addition to growing investments into logistics, there has been an increase in opportunities for startups.

Effidence

Founded in 2009, Effidence is a French research and robotics startup that develops collaborative robotic solutionsin logistics and agriculture. DHL has partnered with Effidence to develop its ‘follow me’ robotic trolleys.

Locus Robotics

Founded in 2014, Locus Robotics is an American robotic technology company that develops warehouse solutions to improve productivity. DHL has partnered with Locus Robotics to develop its Aisle picking robots.

University of Aachen

Established in 1870, the University of Aachen strives to drive innovative discoveries that impact global challenges. The German university partnered with DHL in 2012 on a new initiative to combat global warming. DHL worked with the university to develop its own electric vehicles as part of its mission to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050. Currently DHL has 10,000 electric vehicles out on the roads aiming to replace all 55,000 global vehicles in its fleet to electric.

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SEE ALSO:

  1. DHL – the world’s leading contract logistics provider
  2. DHL’s innovation center driving digitalisation and sustainability
  3. DHL: Talent management within logistics
  4. Read the latest issue of Supply Chain Digital here

6 Ways Quality Can Strengthen Supply Chain Profitability

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To thrive in today’s competitive global business environment, manufacturers must have a top-to-bottom quality-oriented approach that infuses innovative thinking into every part of the supply chain in order to deliver world-class performance through products, processes and people.

Some promising news, according to a recently published report by Forbes Insights and ASQ, is that senior executives and quality professionals see a direct connection between the success of their continuous improvement initiatives and the success of their organizations as a whole.

The Forbes Insights/ASQ research surveyed 1,869 executives and quality professionals from around the world and focused on the links between quality efforts and corporate performance, as well as the evolving business value of quality and its relationship to the supply chain. Thirty-six percent of enterprises surveyed said that they regard themselves as an established quality organization, while 39% reported that they are still developing their quality programs and 25% said they are struggling to implement quality in their companies.

For those organizations that do have established quality programs, more than half say their initiatives already encompass a range of key corporate functions, including operations and supply chain management.

This focus on quality for the supply chain is especially crucial when one recognizes that supply chain management is often motivated to achieve the least cost when identifying and qualifying new suppliers. Supply chain leaders are often rewarded for these cost-savings. But then extra costs are incurred once the final product is manufactured and delivered and it is discovered that reworks are required due to the focus on price and not quality.

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A Portrait of the Supply Chain Manager

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It’s been written that a career in supply chain management can be like climbing a mountain.

While there is often a map for the path forward in professions like accounting, medicine and the law, in supply chain management – as with mountaineering – there are any number of paths that can reach the summit.

Those were among the findings from a research series conducted for the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) and published in the July/August 2015 issue of Supply Chain Management Review, and reinforced by research conducted by McKinsey & Company and Kuhne Logistics University.

The latter, for instance, found that while many supply chain management executives had experience in logistics, procurement and sales/marketing, “… a surprising number of supply chain executives are appointed without any previous exposure to SCM…in our sample, supply chain executives spent 88% of their previous career span outside the SCM function.”

Are those findings consistent with readers of Supply Chain Management Review and members of APICS Supply Chain Council? And, if so, who is today’s supply chain manager? And, how did he – or she – navigate to their position on the mountain?

Did they start out in the supply chain going back to their college days, or, as in the McKinsey study, did they come into the profession from other parts of the organization?

Moreover, what are their duties today and how do they see the job changing?

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The Future Of Performance Management Is Not One-Size-Fits-All

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In 2013, CEB research found that 86% of organizations had recently made significant changes to their performance management system, or were planning to. In 2014, a Deloitte survey found that 58% percent of companies surveyed did not think performance management was an effective use of time, and many media outlets jumped on the opportunity to air their grievances.

Finally, the rising wave of discontent seemed to crash in 2015, as a slew of large organizations like GE, Accenture, Netflix, and Adobe all scrapped their age-old annual performance management processes in favor of more continuous feedback systems. And many others followed suit.

But, was it the right move for everyone?

Last summer, I wrote an article on this topic myself, urging business leaders to really consider the implications of following these organizations. The issue, in my opinion, is not that these organizations did something wrong. Rather, the risk is that many leaders misinterpreted these stories to mean that they should abandon performance management altogether.

One thing is clear: the future of performance management in the American workplace is still very much in question.

For more insight into this important topic, I recently sat down with a handful of thought leaders in the performance management space, including Rob Ollander-Krane, Senior Director of Organizational Performance Effectiveness at Gap, Inc., Nigel Adams, Global Chief Talent Officer at Razorfish Global, and Amy Herrbold, Senior Director of Organizational Development at Kellogg. Together, we discussed the future of performance management to understand, from their perspective, why changes to this process are long overdue.

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Two thirds of buyers not managing supply chain risk effectively

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Almost two thirds of buyers think their organisations are not managing their supply chain risk effectively.

Responding to a mini-poll held during a webinar organised by Supply Management in association with business information publisher Bureau van Dijk, 63 per cent of listeners said they didn’t believe their organisations managed threats in the best way.

Ted Datta, BvD’s strategic account director – London, said a majority of negative response underlined the increasing awareness among companies and buyers of the key importance of good supplier risk management. This was increasingly important because legislation was covering new and wider areas, said Datta.

“Know your suppliers, business partners and third parties,” he said, emphasising buyers needed to be up-to-date with new risks as situations changed every month. Datta said as there was so much information to monitor, companies could segment their supply base to identify key strategic suppliers and monitor those suppliers ‘in real time’ or as frequently as possible depending on their resources. Others could be reviewed in a more structured way, he said.

David Lyon, head of procurement at Cancer Research UK, told the webinar, Enhanced supplier due diligence: the implications for supplier risk management, reputation was vital for a charity and it had to ensure suppliers were aligned with its core purpose. “As an organisation that spends 80 per cent of every pound donated on our core mission of research, we must work hand in hand with all our suppliers,” he said.

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