Future Work/Life is my newsletter in which I explore ideas focused on the future of work and how to build legendary companies & careers. If you find it interesting, please share it!
Performance Management
It’s performance review season. Which has always struck me as a bizarre idea.
One time of year during which everyone’s performance is scrutinised?
One time to decide on promotions, pay rises and bonuses?
In more dynamic times, surely we’ve moved on?
For many companies, sadly not, as I’ve discovered during many hours of calls on the subject of performance management recently.
And frequency isn’t the only issue. There’s also a fundamental lack of insight into who is contributing value.
Pilita Clark does a nice job in the Financial Times of highlighting why ‘Performance reviews are awful yet unstoppable’, particularly for those for whom blowing their own trumpet doesn't come naturally:
I have worked with many of these hidden gems. I doubt one was ever properly recognised by an annual performance review, or the continuous feedback reviews a lot of companies now use, let alone forced ranking.
Many were useless at office politics. Most despised smarming up to the boss. Some suffered from the visibility bias that leads managers to rate people they can see above those they can’t.
Plus, based on data shared by Confirm’s Josh Merrill, “for every 7.5 minutes employees spend writing self-reflections for a performance appraisal, managers spend eight seconds reading them.”
Depressing.
The real problem here is that managers and their teams lack a simple way of tracking and sharing their progress throughout the year. I’m working on something to help solve this, so contact me if you’d like to hear more.
(You can see a paywall-free version of the article here.)
Burnout
One major issue contributing to poor performance management is managers’ excessive workload, leading to a lack of time, and misalignment of priorities, as this excellent write-up in The Economist reports:
A recent survey of workers in 23 countries by Adecco Group, a recruitment and outsourcing firm, found that 68% of the 16,000 managers in the sample suffered burnout in the past 12 months, compared with 60% for non-managers, and up from 43% the year before.
Doesn’t sound good, right? Particularly as the significance of managers increase:
As firms in knowledge industries automate routine tasks and rely on the same digital tools—Amazon Web Services, Gmail, Microsoft office software, Salesforce customer-relationship programs—it is increasingly better management, rather than investments in technology, that can give them a competitive edge. Poor management can blunt it, by dampening productivity and increasing staff turnover. According to a Gallup survey conducted in 2015 around half of Americans who left a previous job did so because of a bad manager. Last year McKinsey, a consultancy, found that a similar share of job-leavers said they did not feel valued by their managers.
None of this is helped by too many meetings, emails and IMs:
A study by Microsoft of 31,000 corporate users of its 365 office software in 31 countries found that in March 2023 the average person participated in three times as many Teams video-conferencing meetings and calls than in February 2020. In roughly the same period the typical user sent 32% more chat messages.
All of which means we need to train communication, collaboration, and emotional intelligence skills, while being brave enough to rethink HOW we work, including prioritising outcomes (more on this to come over the coming weeks).
Management Skills
What can managers do to adapt to the ever-evolving workplace?
According to Jennifer Howard-Grenville and Laura Empson, writing in Harvard Business Review, there are three ways to prepare for the future of work.
If leaders hope to understand and adapt to the forces that are reshaping work, they’re going to need to start thinking more specifically about three important areas of concern: 1) the future of workers, 2) the future of working, and 3) the future of work itself.
In other words, the who, the what, and the why of work.
How?
Lead collectively through uncertainty
Expand collective insight
Contain emotional uncertainty.
Ultimately, we all want to belong to something greater than ourselves that is worth committing to. But the organizations we belong to have changed, and so have we.