3 Things HR Should Stop, Start and Continue Doing in the New Year
Annual performance feedback for leaders in human resources to help drive greater business impact in 2020
Hello HR Leader,
As you know, our organization engages in a time-tested annual performance review process for our valued team members. Every January, right after the holidays, when people are most focused on work, we set aside time for you to step back from the day-to-day grind and have an opportunity to reflect on our opinions about your performance over the past year. Empowered by these insights, you can then have a deep and meaningful one-hour conversation with your manager to set action-learning goals that will drive professional growth and even stronger performance in the coming year.
How to use the following report:
This report synthesizes feedback from your managers, peers, direct reports, and customers, regarding the performance changes they would like to see in 2020. You should meet with your manager to discuss this feedback in more detail and to agree in-role growth goals.
To encourage a focused, productive, and supportive dialogue about your unique strengths and development opportunities, this report utilizes a structured framework to share feedback on 3 key areas of performance: what you should (1) stop doing, (2) start doing, and (3) continue doing, in order to be even more successful this year than last year. And last year, you really nailed it – so we have great expectations of you in 2020!
2020 ANNUAL PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK REPORT
#1—Stop: Name-Dropping AI, Machine Learning, and Neuroscience
The currency of the day for HR is business impact. Better people decisions can be enabled by cool new technologies, but new tech does not guarantee business results. HR leaders can maximize their impact by developing effective talent strategies to support the most critical business challenges. To deliver on these talent strategies, we expect HR leaders to focus on tools and processes that can get the job done well, fairly, efficiently, on time, and on budget, and that are easy to buy and implement.
In 2020, HR leaders should move beyond the initial infatuation with the sexy new kids on the HR Tech block – artificial intelligence, machine learning, and all things brain- and gene-related – and get back to the basics of demonstrating impact on their business through measurably better people decisions. If a new tool doesn’t actually improve workforce capability, it doesn’t matter that it’s AI. Or Neuroscience.
HR leaders should refocus on how technologies help them further the mission of the business with better people insight and better people investments, not be led astray by vendors claiming game-changing “powered by” products that may not solve any real problems.
Better people decisions can be enabled by cool new technologies, but new tech does not guarantee business results.
#2—Start: Redefining “Talent” from People to Teams
This subtle reframing of talent as a portfolio of capabilities assembled across a group of people – instead of finding increasingly rare perfect-match individuals – will help HR Leaders unlock the power and value of alternative labor models (e.g., contingent, temporary, contract, and freelance “gig” workers) and new organizational structures (e.g., functional outsourcing, virtual teams) as competitive tools.
A new definition of talent that enables HR leaders to look at skill- or competency-based team staffing could also transform corporate training and development strategies, including how we diagnose training needs and how people access and get rewarded for employer-sponsored learning.
#3—Continue: Using Data to Support Evidence-Based People Decisions
In 2020, HR leaders should continue their “digital transformation” and keep moving along the path of using data and analytics to diagnose the health of our talent management programs and to quantify the impact and ROI of HR investments.
The business trusts HR leaders to identify high-value leading indicators, to figure out how to get feedback faster, to determine meaningful process- and outcome-oriented metrics, and to conduct stakeholder analyses to identify other sources of data with which to evaluate talent programs’ broad impact on the organization and our teams.
Thank you, HR leaders, for all your valued contributions. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do next!
Sincerely,
HR
