Are you looking to improve your organization’s performance management and drive the business forward? If so, you’ll want to hear from my guests today: Betterworks Chief Marketing Officer John Schneider and senior content marketing manager Michelle Gouldsberry.
In this conversation, we’re talking about Betterworks’ research, including its State of Performance Enablement report. John and Michelle share the motivation for this research, the findings they’re most excited about and how HR leaders can make work better with performance management.
The Motivation for This Report
Betterworks’ modern performance management software helps companies support transparent goal setting, enable continuous performance and learn from employee insights. Betterworks advocates for rethinking the world of work and HR so that they are more effective and efficient. One area that especially needs rethinking is employee performance.
“When we talk about performance enablement, the concept is we’re flipping the script on it overall,” John says. “We’re trying to enable people to perform at their best, and we believe that people come out of the box as human beings wanting to do that.”
Betterworks wanted to look past what people should have done based on past performance and more on support and development — in other words, performance enablement. John and the team quickly realized that there wasn’t enough detailed data to help HR leaders establish this concept of performance enablement. Betterworks needed to find that data and share it.
The State of Performance Enablement report “isn’t about talking just to Betterworks customers. It’s a broad-based, random survey including the U.S. and the U.K., and it’s people that are 18 years of age and older,” John says. “And we try to balance for gender and age, so we try to get a really broad swath of individuals coming from different perspectives.”
Managers Need Help to Develop Great Teams
Improving employee engagement starts with enabling managers. However, Betterworks finds that most managers don’t get the support they need. Almost all managers want to do a good job, but they often lack the coaching know-how or don’t understand the company’s core values well enough.
And what do employees want most from managers? “Career development and coaching,” John shares. “It wasn’t about their performance feedback and things of that nature, and so that really gets to the point about what HR can do to wire that relationship between managers and employees.”
Employees also want to feel that they’re being fairly evaluated, although many don’t trust their organizations on this front. “If you have processes that are perceived by the employee as being biased or unfair, what’s going to happen? They’re going to feel that they’re not valued, they’re not cared for,” Michelle says. “They’re going to be less trustful, and that’s when they start disengaging. The productivity goes down, you get the quiet quitting.”
HR’s Role in Driving Performance in the Business
Despite the very real trends of quiet quitting and other causes of turnover, Betterworks found that 75% of employees would rather stay put — if they knew there was value in doing so.
“The grass is not always greener on the other side if — and it’s a big if — they feel that they’re being treated with fairness and care by their current employer,” Michelle says, “and they’re being given real opportunities for professional growth and advancement in their current roles.”
To improve performance within organizations, it’s up to HR leaders to take the initiative. Look for opportunities to improve the business through better processes, technology and training. If you’re a chief HR officer, get in the ear of the CEO. “Who else in the C-suite can really be the voice of the customer but also advocate for the business’ objectives to be achieved?” John says.
“I couldn’t be more optimistic about the role of HR,” John adds. “If they frame their careers as business enablers, they’re empowered to have an impact on not just the performance of employees, but ultimately what drives the business.”
Even as HR advocates for performance enablement at the highest levels, they also need to give managers the help they need.
“I think it’s really critical to develop formal supports and training programs for the managers so that they can be the effective levers in the organization that you need them to be, and so they don’t feel that they’re on their own and always stressed out,” Michelle says.
People in This Episode
John Schneider: LinkedIn
Michelle Gouldsberry: LinkedIn
Transcript
Laurie Ruettimann:
Punk Rock HR is sponsored by Betterworks. The world’s most dynamic organizations rely on Betterworks to accelerate growth by supporting transparent goal setting, enabling continuous performance and learning from employee insights. Betterworks is on a mission to help HR leaders make work better. Discover how they can help you by visiting Betterworks.com today.
Hey, everybody. I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is John Schneider and Michelle Gouldsberry from Betterworks. John is the chief marketing officer and Michelle manages content, and they’re on the podcast today talking about research that Betterworks conducted around traditional performance management practices — and really the way to move that forward and create a culture of performance enablement.
Now, if you work in human resources, you manage teams, you manage managers, you know the crazy chaos that accompanies many organizations around performance management. And you think to yourselves, “Why can’t this be better?” And in the research that Betterworks has conducted, they’ve really done a full-scale understanding of what’s happening in the world of work and what people need to hear from leaders, from managers, in order to stay and to do great work.
So if you’re really looking for a path to motivate, retain, develop the best and brightest workers in your organization, well, sit back and enjoy this conversation with Michelle Gouldsberry and John Schneider about the research on performance management and performance enablement. That’s what we’re talking about on this week’s Punk Rock HR.
Hey, everybody. I’m so excited to host this special edition of Punk Rock HR. Today, I have two amazing guests from Betterworks, and I’m going to start by asking the first guest to introduce themselves.
So John, can you say hello and tell us who you are and what you’re all about?
John Schneider:
It sounds great. Thank you, Laurie. My name’s John Schneider. I’m the CMO of Betterworks. I’ve been on board for almost a year and a half now. It’s a fantastic company focused on HR professionals and helping them. I’m very excited about talking to you today, and I come from sunny San Diego.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Ooh, very nice. Well, we are joined by your colleague, Michelle. Michelle, why don’t you tell us who you are, what you’re all about and maybe where you’re joining us from today?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
Well, I am joining you from the metropolis of San Jose, California, and I am the content marketing manager, so I handle all the content strategy and tactics for Betterworks, and I have been there since July and I absolutely love it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I’m pleased to have you both here. Betterworks is an amazing sponsor. I know you’re an advocate for really rethinking the world of work and the world of human resources, and you’ve been prompted to do some research around the field of both performance management and performance enablement. So John, maybe we can start with you. What motivated to do this research and what is this research?
John Schneider:
Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned a performance enablement. To frame it overall, the point of view that’s been very strong within Betterworks since its founding is this notion that the traditional processes — that are all backwards-looking and compliance-driven HR processes around how you evaluate somebody’s performance — not only does not effectively boost performance, but it actually can hinder it. So when we talk about performance enablement, the concept is, we’re flipping the script on it overall. We’re trying to enable people to perform at their best, and we believe that people come out of the box as human beings wanting to do that, so it’s all a question of support and development as opposed to, “Did you do exactly what you were supposed to do seven months ago according to what you could in your old performance system?” So that’s a little bit of the framing there.
And when we’re looking at the notion of this type of a report, I didn’t see something this precise. I see the Gallup high-level stats, but then I don’t see the detail. And so what this report has, and it is over 2,000 respondents. It isn’t about talking just to Betterworks customers. It’s a broad-based random survey including the U.S. and the U.K., and it’s people that are 18 years of age and older, and we try to balance for gender and age, so we try to get a really broad swath of individuals coming from different perspectives. And the only other qualifier is that we look for people that work at companies that are a thousand or more employees.
And so we did it a year and a half ago, and now we’re doing it another year, because it actually turned out to be a very valuable report. Lots of people accessed it, so that’s why we’re here again.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I love it. Michelle, you’re a natural storyteller, and I wonder, what did you discover in the research and what surprised you?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
So I would say what surprised me most is that, despite what we hear about quiet quitting, rage applying, any number of things that seem to get spun up become their own firestorm and then they become real. And despite all that, what we found in the report, which really surprised me, was that 75% of employees actually would prefer to stay and grow where they are planted, in their roles. So that’s an opportunity for businesses to look at how to improve the employee experiences so that employees have more reasons to stay than to go. And everyone is worried about retention in this market.
I mean, that’s not to say that things like quiet quitting and job-hopping are not a thing. They’re happening. 40% of people in our survey are still considering leaving their companies in 2023 according to the findings, but people are not necessarily looking for the next best thing. The grass is not always greener on the other side if — and it’s a big if — they feel that they’re being treated with fairness and care by their current employer, and they’re being given real opportunities for professional growth and advancement in their current roles.
When the survey’s employees ranked fairness is their top concern for a good employee experience, and when we asked them what would cause them to leave, or alternatively, what would they stay for? Internal career advancement was number two. Pay was number one. Pay is always far and away the number one —
Laurie Ruettimann:
Right.
Michelle Gouldsberry:
— but career advancement was number two, and that had come up from last year. So I think we’re getting out of that pre-pandemic malaise and employees are motivated, and they’re refocusing on the things that they used to focus on before we all went through this horrible cathartic experience of the pandemic.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m fascinated by that number, the number of how many people would stay in their current organization, especially if given the opportunity to develop their careers. And I wonder, John, what’s the message for HR professionals in that statistic alone? What should they take away from that?
John Schneider:
It’s funny because a year and a half ago, when we did the last study, something very supportive of this notion was that we found that when people were quiet quitting and leaving the company, they would say positive things about their company. They’re not even upset with the company itself, and so I think that the message is that, from an HR perspective, we know that a lot of them are reporting that HR is making changes. They are doing things, but somehow the entire connection is not there.
HR professionals, first of all, should not be shy to disrupt things. If they know something is not working around the employee experience specifically, they need to make bold decisions, no one else can do it for them, and the idea of being cautious or reserved or incremental doesn’t always get the job done. The HR leaders in general, the ones I see that are highly effective, tend to be very data-driven and they mix voice of the customer and the data.
So when they go to the C-suite, they talk to their CEO when they’re trying to implement a big change. The way they need to rally people is both on the rational logic and also on the qualitative and personal side of the equation. No one else is positioned to answer those types of questions. To me, that’s the exciting part of this whole thing. Who else in the C-suite can really be the voice of the customer but also advocate for the business’ objectives to be achieved? Nobody can marry those two forces together, and if you only do it from partial portions, you’re not going to get the whole equation done, so those are just a few of the recipes that I think are really important in terms of how they would do something about it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Michelle, I saw you nodding your head. Did you want to get in there?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
Yeah. To that, I would just add that the CEO should want their HR leader at the executive table, having a role in the strategic business decisions. Now, the CEO is looking at very big-picture issues around business resilience, inflation, supply chains, labor shortages, the potential for a recession, the agility to pivot as the competitive landscape evolves. Plus, they’re also looking at, of course, at the issues of attracting and retaining talent and hybrid and remote work, and the effect of that on productivity, but they’re really focused on a lot of other issues.
But it’s the CHRO who is laser-focused on what is going on at the people level and who understands the impact of these potential business issues and decisions on the employee. So it’s the CHRO who can help the CEO link the strategic business issues with the people aspect to enable a workforce that is engaged and willing to go the extra mile. That’s why HR needs to be front and center with the CEO. One of the things that is said by our CEO, Doug Dennerline, and our VP of transformation, Jamie Aitken in their upcoming book, which is called “Make Work Better,” is that the CHRO is really your team of rivals and your team of teams all in one.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I love that perspective. And now that you’ve had this research, and you’ve done your exploration of the top-line stories and the themes and all of that, if we were to splash some headlines on The New York Times for work, what are the headlines from the research? What do you want people to know? And John, maybe we can start with you.
John Schneider:
The first one that I would bring up is, if you’re talking about helping employees to be more engaged, more successful in their jobs, you really don’t have to look that much further than how well you enable your managers. And if you think of it, obviously, that’s pretty obvious. Managers are essentially the linchpin of any successful performance enablement program. They’re the ones that talk to the employee on a regular basis, but the report definitely shows that we do not do enough for the manager.
And so, employees today don’t need to be told what to do. I mentioned that notion — employees do come out of the box wanting to achieve and have impact. It’s only an ineffective organization that makes them not feel that way, and so helping employees thrive means supporting them, not micromanaging them. And there were two interesting sub-statistics to this: One would be the most important thing employees wanted out of a manager was career development and coaching. It wasn’t about their performance feedback and things of that nature, and so that really gets to the point about what HR can do to wire that relationship between managers and employees — frequent conversations structured around thoughtful questions that can help them to better facilitate the success of that employee.
We often talk about flow of work. Where is this actually happening between the manager and employee in which they need to offer advice or suggestions or create follow-up? It’s not going to be something where they watch a video and then, three months later, they come back into a performance review and discuss what they can do. It’s at that moment of kinetic energy where the employee really needs something to feel effective. Did the manager deliver on the coaching that helped them be more effective? And that’s what creates the bond between the employee and manager, an inseparable bond, and we all know it. That manager that really helped us in our career, that’s what we’re describing, is the person who actually was there for you at the time you needed it, and they weren’t punitive. They weren’t backward-looking. They wanted the person to grow to the next level. And so, big headline, we need to do so much more for our managers.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, that’s a huge headline and it just makes me reflect back on my own strengths and weaknesses as a leader, and also about all of the people that I’ve dealt with throughout my career who have been amazing or have been deficient as managers. And I just wonder, in this moment right now, if there is anything you can say to a manager, “Hang on, hang tight. The cavalry’s coming,” what are the optimistic messages we can give to managers to let them know we care and we have their back? Do you have any advice for them, John?
John Schneider:
I think absolutely. I mean, I think that it starts with the manager’s manager. Again, another person that is often not particularly well-equipped. It’s the hardest job in the entire company when you’re promoted to manage managers. Now, not only do you have the expertise that got you the promotion, but now you have to become a coach of coaches. That is a skill set, and I think the thing that the cavalry has to start with, have you even given your managers the guidebook on shared values that are lived by the C-suite and everyone down in ways in which a manager or the manager of managers feels like they have a gut instinct around the right decision just because of the values?
And again, just like an employee trusts them, managers want to do the right thing, too. It’s not any different than employees want to do the right thing. They come out of the box. Well, managers may not know how to coach, but being put in that position, there’s very few managers out there that are put in that position that don’t try to develop a team. They want to, they just may literally not know how to do it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I like your optimistic turn on all of that. And I wonder, Michelle, if you have a top-line headline from the research that really moved you that you would love to share with us, as well?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
I’ve got a couple. So fairness really matters to the employee. That was what was No. 1 important to them in their work experience. So therefore, if you have processes that are perceived by the employee as being biased or unfair, what’s going to happen? They’re going to feel that they’re not valued, they’re not cared for. They’re going to be less trustful, and that’s when they start disengaging. The productivity goes down, you get the quiet quitting. It’s not rocket science. And then they eventually look elsewhere. Maybe they’re passive at first, then they’re purposely looking.
So you can do things in HR. You can implement programs like programs to improve wellness, programs to improve benefits, things that provide flexibility, and those are all great, but they’re initiatives. What are the big levers that influence employee experience? And what we found is, if we’re talking about bias and all the sentiments around that that I was just mentioning, what employees were saying was, well, less than one in three thought that performance review process, the performance management process was completely fair.
The other two-thirds think it’s either somewhat biased or completely biased. So if I as an employee think, “I’m not getting a fair shake from my manager because maybe he hasn’t talked to my colleagues and gotten the feedback, even though I’m working cross-functionally with them, or he or she is asking me to talk about something I did nine months ago. I mean, I can barely remember what I did a week ago. And if that’s what they’re judging me on is the past, and maybe the goals weren’t clear, I’m going to feel it’s unfair, and then I start to disengage.”
So to me, figuring out those things in your workplace that are huge levers of fairness and all those other related employee sentiments that then affect productivity and engagement and retention — all the things that the business cares about. Go look at what is really not working in your workforce. Ask people, do the surveys. Go talk to your stakeholders. In HR, your stakeholders are really — I mean, they’re your executives, but primarily, they’re your employees. So interview your employees, go on a listening tour, do surveys, say, “Hey, what’s working? What’s not? Why isn’t it working? What would you like to see done differently?” And figure out where those big holes are and where the big levers are on moving that employee sentiment. Because wellness programs are great, but maybe if you change the performance management structure so that you’re enabling employees rather than judging them for their past efforts, maybe that would’ve had a bigger impact.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, here’s where I see the link between culture and fairness, because if your employees perceive your performance management process to be unfair, that is a leading indicator that they perceive a lot of things to be unfair within your organization. So broken performance feedback almost always to me, as an HR consultant, correlates to broken culture. I don’t know. What do you think about that, Michelle?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
I would have to agree because the performance enablement plan should come out of the values of the company, and the values of the company should be attached to culture, as well.
John Schneider:
And then you have a further problem, which is when fairness is not present, it erodes trust. And anytime you’ve ever been in an environment where the culture does not have trust built in, that means that the majority of employees are looking at the half glass empty all the time. You’re guessing the CEO’s behavior to be wrong. You are not trusting your HR professionals. And I won’t give the stat — you have to read the report — but it’s not great, this trust level in HR, so goes the view of everybody in the organization.
Do you even trust your manager? If you don’t feel like the cards are stacked fairly, how do you trust anything that you’re doing? And so it’s a hard thing to break. Be bold, be disruptive. And you know what we see with our customers and HR leaders is, even if you make a mistake, people will forgive you for it. Employees aren’t there to be punitive back at HR or other leaders. What they want to see, they want transparency and humility. They want to know that you’re trying, and if something has gone wrong, if you’re listening and you try to correct it, you get more credit than having ever tried before. So shyness isn’t going to get the job done with these things.
Laurie Ruettimann:
That certainly makes sense. Michelle, any final thoughts on top line headlines? Anything we might have missed, anything that comes to mind?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
Yes. Following through on what John was saying earlier about coaching the managers and enabling the managers, they’re critical to internal career growth and development, which as we said earlier is No. 2 on the employee’s list of reasons why they would look elsewhere, or alternatively, why they would stay. So if the manager’s the primary enabler for the employee, and if managers need to be better equipped with the right tools and resources to coach for career development, then there’s also a tie that this gets to caring. So if I, as the employee, am asked by my manager, “Hey, what do you aspire to do in your career? What would you like to achieve? What are you thinking about?” And I explain what that is, and then my manager says, “Hey, let’s build that into your performance plan and monitor your progress.”
Well, then I, as the employee, am not only going to feel like they are caring about my career development, and I’m going to get the career development and the advancement I want, I also feel that the manager is watching out for me. I feel that I’m cared for. I feel that what I do is valued and matters, so that gets to all those softer sentiments around, “I’m putting in as the employee, and I’m expecting back. I expect people to care and respect me, and if I get that advancement, then I feel like this organization wants me there. I feel that sense of inclusion and belonging,” and all these are tied together.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah. That certainly resonates with me. John, as I think through the research, and I think through what you’ve shared with me today, I wonder what some key takeaways are for human resources leaders. What are some things that they could do tomorrow, in the next 30 days, in the next 60 days, to really get us on track and start to think about performance enablement as a way to move the organization forward? So what’s a key takeaway for HR? What can they do with this understanding of where performance is going in the future?
John Schneider:
Absolutely. I mean, first I would say, I couldn’t be more optimistic about the role of HR. If they frame their careers as business enablers, they are empowered to have an impact on not just the performance of employees, but ultimately that drives the result of the business. So I want to start there because, if you don’t have the frame of mind, then you’re not going to start out right.
The other thing is you don’t know what the next big disruption is or challenge, but when you see the program that needs improvement, it goes back to the employee experience comment. If you’re unrelenting in your quest to make employee experience better, you have to look at all the three dimensions, and so I would say you have to break down the people, the process, technology. And put it on a whiteboard or whatever you have, and honestly answer it to yourself, “Are these working cooperatively or is one weaker than the other?” Because it’s a hard job, but you have to look at all three, and you have to be advancing them towards the same purpose. If you leave one of those pillars down, you won’t get across the finish line.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, That’s well said. Michelle, how about you? What are your thoughts on what HR can do to help move the organization forward and to really tackle some of these issues that we’ve discussed today?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
To me, the first thing is to, I think I mentioned it earlier, is to go on a listening tour with their stakeholders. Find out what’s working, what’s not, what processes and systems they find helpful, what ones work against them, and why. And as part of that listening tour, you’re also doing surveys to better understand the weaknesses. And then coming up with a plan of action that you carry out and you measure, and you continually improve upon, and you communicate what you’re doing to your employees and why you’re doing it. You’re really trying to move the needle on the experience for them. The other thing that I would say is, managers are so key — and I was reading a statistic from the Workforce Institute at UKG that 46% of managers want to quit in the next year because they are stressed out. That is a huge percentage.
HR needs to come in and figure out how to rescue these managers, how to help them be managers. And Josh Bersin said the other day in a webinar, being a manager is a completely different skill set. And it is a huge responsibility. And doing it right doesn’t come to most people naturally. It takes mentoring. It takes formal training so that the manager is not learning and hit-and-miss on the job and it’s three years hence before they really become a good manager, and they’ve not really been helping their people in the three years previous. So I think it’s really critical to develop formal supports and training programs for the managers so that they can be the effective levers in the organization that you need them to be, and so they don’t feel that they’re on their own and always stressed out.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, if Josh Bersin says it, it must be true, so I’m absolutely down with that. You’ll never hear me disagree with Josh Bersin. As we wrap up the conversation, I’m wondering, John, if you can share with us an example of one customer of Betterworks because you work with many, you’re very proud to work with them, who’s absolutely nailing it on performance enablement, someone who really could be a pillar that we could study as a case study on how to do it right.
John Schneider:
Yeah. I mean, you could look no further — the conversation with Josh Bersin was actually with one of our customers, Rivian. And Ben Putterman joined him in one of our — you can get it on our resources section of our website, it’s called a People Fundamentals Webinar. It’s a series we do, and Ben really goes into the core of how he handled explosive growth in terms of the number of employees at Rivian, going from small population to capable of what they are now producing, which is one of the leading electric vehicles. I would say that I would put them pretty much at the top in terms of how he addresses it and has a winning culture.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I love that as a resource. We’ll make sure to include that in the show notes. And Michelle, anybody come to mind for you?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
I was going to say Rivian, too, but another one I would say is University of Phoenix, because they had a very traditional performance management process. And they decided to do away with that, make it very transparent, make it more often. And they’re really focused on the conversation element in order to build the trust, so they have, I think, quarterly conversations with their employees to talk about what they’re working on, what they want to see done differently. And it has done a lot for their culture to build that sense of trust and authenticity in the organization.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, really great examples. I’m so pleased to learn about the research around performance enablement, the future of performance management, how HR can build trust in an organization, the role of culture. I mean, we talked about so much today. John, where can we find this research? Where can we go?
John Schneider:
Yeah. It’s free and available, betterworks.com, so that’s where you can grab it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Great. And if people want to connect with you, John, learn more about who you are and what you’re all about, where can they go to learn more about you?
John Schneider:
John@betterworks.com. I keep it really simple.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, you do. Well, Michelle, how about you? If people want to connect with you, are you on LinkedIn, what’s the best way to find you?
Michelle Gouldsberry:
I am on LinkedIn. If you can figure out how to spell my last name, it is also Michelle.Gouldsberry@betterworks.com. So find me on LinkedIn, or send me an email, either one is fine.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I want to thank you both for being guests today. John, Michelle, it was a real pleasure to talk to you about the future of work and fixing it for other people. Thanks again for being guests.
John Schneider:
Thank you, Laurie.
Michelle Gouldsberry:
This was fun.
Laurie Ruettimann:
This episode of Punk Rock HR was brought to you by Betterworks. When work is better for people, companies thrive. If you’re interested in learning more about today’s show, you can visit punkrockhr.com. There you’ll find show notes, links, resources, and all the good stuff. Now, that’s all for today. Thanks for joining us, sharing this episode and leaving thoughtful comments on Instagram and LinkedIn. We appreciate your support. This and every week on Punk Rock HR.