HRHeadStart #31: Bias-busting in Performance Management; Chart Skills; Multi-player vs. Single-player game

The Talent Agenda

Performance Management is one of the most enduring (and anxiety inducing) features of corporate life. We spend thousands of hours on the process, but with the outcome that leaders don’t see the value in it and employees feel disgruntled at the end of it. There are many opportunities to redesign the process to make it forward-looking and developmental. However, no matter how you design it, a key success factor is to mitigate biases that creep into the process e.g. gender bias, racial bias, bias towards onsite vs remote employees etc.

Some general principles which can help in reducing bias include:

• Use of analytics can help identify where ratings get skewed.

• Diverse group decision-making is often superior (albeit time intensive) to homogenous group or individual decision making by managers.

• Group calibrations are valuable in reducing bias at the most critical phases of the performance management process i.e. goal-setting and evaluations.

• Standardizing the process, templates and tools for managers/employees and nudging them at the right moments leads to right behaviors and consistency in the process.

Check out this article for some useful ideas (some simple and some a bit revolutionary) for reducing bias in performance management.

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Working Better

Who here hasn’t drawn a data chart! As the emphasis on data analytics continues to grow in HR, we are all creating charts all the time. But how are those charts received by our audience? Do they really convey what we intended to communicate? Were they impactful in telling the story or rather ugly? Here is a fairly detailed resource on the different types of charts and their best usage. Click on the image below to explore each chart type in detail.

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A Productive Workout

A workout is a great way to create mindspace for processing and learning new ideas. And it primes you for creative thinking. For your next walk, run or workout session, check out this video interview with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google & Alphabet (disclaimer: my employer). Apart from being fun and inspiring, the interview contains a bunch of insightful, unconventional ideas in there such as:

• Not knowing how the odds are stacked against you can actually work in favor of accomplishing great things at scale.

• Reward efforts, not outcomes. If we reward outcomes alone, people don’t take bold bets.

• Build a culture where employees (as opposed to leaders alone) are the guardian of core values.

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Tiny Thought

We usually think of life as a multi-player game where we are competing with others. It’s actually a single-player game and your biggest competition is you. You can outperform everyone if you outperform yourself consistently.