. We have focused on two specific topics this week.

• Trends and Considerations around Performance Management and
• Recruiter Cheatsheet for Scrum – a concept that is getting adopted across several technical and non-technical processes.

Earlier this week, I was studying a case study on shipping industry accidents.  In 2017, off the coast of Malaysia, a large tanker filled with nearly 12,000 tons of oil smashed into the side of a US Navy ship.  Shipping industry accidents have become more common than ever before.  It is a puzzling scenario, as the ships involved in these recent incidents are large and well-fitted with radar and navigation systems. There are also GPS tracking, automatic identification systems (AIS), and radio communications. How could such collisions have happened? The Royal United Services Institute was hired to study the causes of poor performance.  They went through a detailed study, and the conclusion was shocking. “Provided you are keeping a radar watch and a visual lookout, then collisions are avoidable,” says Peter Roberts, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). Roberts says he has traveled on commercial ships where sometimes there is no-one on the bridge at all. “An alarm is going off on the radar, and they’re reliant on that alarm waking whoever is on watch,” he says.

This is a fascinating lesson for all of us.  In the day and age where we rely on systems and automation so much, any workforce performance management should be innovative with new-age systems but also should be Human Centric – to be accurate.  Investment an organization makes in Performance Management is not trivial. The burning questions any company faces – how much time in aggregate do employees and managers spend on this process every year? What value do organizations get for that investment?

Different Data Systems Need to be connected:  Our existing performance systems have made our workforce a bit more tactical.  Now the quest is towards taking insights from different data systems and separate performance issues from process issues. Consider a scenario where you are evaluating a resolution accuracy of a technical support person.  Rather than studying the output from a single metric, it is important to map out the building blocks of successful resolution.  Many complex technical support questions have no clear inputs from the customer.  So any incorrect industry-level benchmarks (or within team benchmarks) without fully inspecting the issues around how customers provide inputs may be detrimental. 

Relook at the metrics:  Next-generation Performance Management takes its cues not from history or benchmarking but from organization design. It targets questions like what purpose should Performance Management service in the design and function of an organization? How would Performance Management add value to an organization?Consider a modern-day grocery check out counter or a modern-day call center:  People who want only speed at check-out now can go through self-service.  So the people who come to the manual check-out counters have different service expectations.  Similarly, the call centers of modern digital contact centers.  So metrics like Average Talk Time in call centers should be thought through differently.

Continuous as opposed to Discrete:  A survey showed 95% of the companies conduct formal year-end feedback and review discussions. 63% have formal midyear or quarterly progress reviews. About 63% routinely conduct performance feedback sessions between officials’ performance reviews. But less than half (48%) of employees are satisfied with the quality of the feedback and development coming out of this process. Next-generation Performance Management focuses on feedback relative to a specific goal. Goal setting is at the center of this.

Coaching Should be Case Study Centric:  Many leaders told us that Middle Management coaching is absolutely a key element of the new age performance management.  Coaching should be driven by concrete examples of how the work should be made optimal.  This means that the managers need to be fully aware of external trends in the industry and start understanding the ecosystem in which a company operates

Using Performance Management Systems to Inform overall Reskill Strategy: This is an interesting finding from our interviews.  Many leaders are now wanting to connect the performance management process outputs into an overall enterprise reskilling strategy.  This may mean a combination of digital and leadership skills where the organization is strong and where the organization is limited.  A true skills balance sheet that can be used to inform the reskilling strategy 

Recruiters need to understand what SCRUM is in this day and age. (the true meaning) Here we have attempted to simplify this.

What is SCRUM?

To understand Scrum, we have to understand Agile.  Agile is a way of how teams are organized.  The emphasis is on collaboration.  The two forms of agile are Kanban and Scrum.  Kanban focuses on the visualization of tasks, while Scrum is more prescriptive with specific roles, meetings, and time-based sprints.  The emphasis is on continuous improvement.  There are several roles in Scrum and how Scrum is applied to both technical and non-technical functions.