Category Archives: Performance Management

New Business Performance Management Solution from InsightSoftware.com Offers One System for Optimal Visibility

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New Business Performance Management Solution from InsightSoftware.com Offers One System for Optimal Visibility

InsightSoftware.com, a leading provider of reporting, budgeting and reconciliation solutions for Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards, today unveiled three new products designed to empower business users with the information they need to directly impact business performance, while also helping them realize a new level of value from their existing enterprise software systems. The products, announced today at COLLABORATE 2014, include two new additions to the award-winning InsightUnlimited product suite – InsightUnlimited Planning and InsightUnlimited Reporting for PeopleSoft – and a new business performance management solution called Hubble.

“New technology does not always equal business gain. Our goal with these new solutions is to help users gain a new level of value, not only from the data in their ERP, but also from their existing software solutions,” said Paul Yarwood, General Manager for InsightSoftware.com. “Data and technology is meant to empower – not slow you down. Hubble and our expanded InsightUnlimited solutions empower users with their information and their software so they can do their jobs better and directly impact business performance.”

With Hubble’s complete visibility, users can collaborate across multiple departments and through various levels of detail. Hubble also allows users to:

  1. Connect finance data from multiple sources into a single consolidated view;
  2. Easily search for metrics, discussions, workspaces and even people;
  3. Create an intuitive layer of organization, without the burden of traditional file structures, using innovative tagging capabilities;
  4. Share data with people inside and outside the organization without having to worry about permissions and privileges; and
  5. Make data powerful with infographic-style metrics that define goals and highlight important corporate milestones.

Thank you for reading, feel free to leave a comment if you have any opinions or send us a message.

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Zappos is going holacratic: no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy

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English: This is a picture of Tony Hsieh, CEO ...

English: This is a picture of Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Zappos is going holacratic: no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy

During the 4-hour meeting, Hsieh talked about how Zappos’ traditional organizational structure is being replaced with Holacracy, a radical “self-governing” operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. The term Holacracy is derived from the Greek word holon, which means a whole that’s part of a greater whole. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, there’s a flatter “holarchy” that distributes power more evenly. The company will be made up of different circles—there will be around 400 circles at Zappos once the rollout is complete in December 2014—and employees can have any number of roles within those circles. This way, there’s no hiding under titles; radical transparency is the goal.

What do you think about this style of management? If you happen to be in Asia, do you think this kind of style is suitable for Asian culture? Feel free to leave us comments or contact us for discussion.

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How to Develop a Performance Management System

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(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How to Develop a Performance Management System

Performance management involves more than simply providing an annual review for each employee. It is about working together with that employee to identify strengths and weaknesses in their performance and how to help them be a more productive and effective worker. Learn how to develop a performance management system so that you can help everyone in your organization work to their full potential.

  1. Evaluate your current performance appraisal process
  2. Identify organizational goals
  3. Set performance expectations
  4. Monitor and develop their performance throughout the year
  5. Evaluate their performance
  6. Set new performance expectations for the next year

Setting performance expectation for the next year is one of the important keys. What is your new year’s resolution? Feel free to leave us a comment or send us a message.

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Using Performance Management to Motivate a Disaffected Team

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Using Performance Management to Motivate a Disaffected Team

If you’re in charge of a team, you’ll appreciate that they’re rather tricky animals. At times, all appears well, but you’re achieving little. At other times, you’re reaching your targets, but there’s unhappiness and resentment. If your team has become disaffected, then it’s time to rely on performance management to set people straight again. Following a four-step program should ensure success.

Investigate

It’s vital to establish why a team is disaffected. Usually, it’s related to performance – of the entire team or of an individual. The cause may be that the wrong objectives have been set. Perhaps your team members feel their objectives are not achievable or not realistic? Performance management will help you to review these targets.

Implement Performance Management

Performance management works best when there is an atmosphere of honesty and openness. Try to encourage this in your people. Clear objectives also need to be set. Ensure they are SMARTER (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluated and re-evaluated). This useful mnemonic was developed from George T. Doran’s comments in Management Review and has been in use ever since.

Set Goals

Ensure that any targets are clearly aligned to your company’s objectives. The work that your teams carry out should be considered within the work of the company as a whole. Make this as explicit as possible. Your employees need to know that their work matters and has relevancy within the company.

Praise

As soon as objectives are met, ensure you praise, reward and promote. Your team members must see that you, too, have an eye on their targets. The promise of promotion is a real motivator.

Appreciation and motivation are one of the keys to increase performance, and to align any targets to company’s objectives. If you have any opinion about this topic, feel free to leave us a comment or send us a message.

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What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?

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What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?

Obviously we need a new system. And what can we say about the new system that would serve us better? Well, the specifics of the system will depend on the company, but we do know that it must have the following six characteristics, each of which follows logically from the one preceding.

First, it must be a real-time system that helps managers give “in the moment” coaching and course-correcting. The world we live in is unnervingly dynamic, where we are on one team one week and another the next, where goals that were fresh and exciting at the beginning of Q1 are irrelevant by the third week of Q1, and where the necessary skills, relationships, and even strategies have to be constantly recalibrated. In this real-time world, batched performance reviews delivered once or twice a year are obsolete before we’ve even sat down to write them.

We need much more frequent check-ins—weekly or, at most, monthly. Luckily, we now live in a world where most of us are armed with a device that knows exactly who we are, and into which we can record pretty much anything we want. This device—your mobile phone—will enable you, the employee, to input what you are doing this week and what help you need; and, because it knows you, it will be able to serve up to your manager coaching tips, insights, and prompts customized to your particular set of strengths and skills.

Second, it must be a system with a super light touch. Third, it must feel to the individual employee that it is a system “about me, designed for me. Fourth, and crucially, it must be a strengths-based system. Fifth, it must be a system focused on the future. Finally, it must be a local system.

If you have any question about performance management, or would like to have a discussion about performance management, leave us comment or send us a message.

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Why should leaders care about performance management?

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Why should leaders care about performance management?

A consistent track record of sound results is the best indicator of leadership potential and capacity. Top-rated leaders are those with a history of repeated high impact results across a variety of contexts and complexities.

Consequently, performance management should be a central issue in every organisation. Sadly, in our experience, this is not so – in a significant number of cases we see leaders covering their incompetence and poor results with blame shifting.

Performance review meetings are seldom welcomed. They are widely regarded as the event about which most employees get no sleep the night before, and most leaders get no sleep the night after. We have observed many organisations in which performance management has been reduced, if not entirely relegated, to a once-a-year paper exercise for a mandatory input for annual salary reviews. We have also seen organisations where the performance appraisal is a one-sided affair in which the manager does all the talking, wanting to get one more unnecessary administrative formality out of the way as quickly as possible. Does this sound familiar?

Helping people achieve the very best results possible is a primary challenge for every leader and lies at the heart of effective performance contracting, reviews, correction and reward.

Here are five tips to improve your management of performance:

1. Reframe the purpose

2. Reframe the label

3. Reframe the timing

4. Reframe the model

5. Reframe your role

Performance is a crucial aspect in management. If you are interested in how to leverage your performance management, feel free to contact us.

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