The pandemic has forced leaders to recognize that they need to make changes to manage hybrid and remote teams effectively. One of these changes is moving away from using quarterly or annual performance reviews that relied to a great extent on presence in the office and following best practices to revise the performance valuation process. That’s the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to revise the performance evaluations to manage hybrid and remote teams.

Video: “Revising Performance Evaluations for Hybrid and Remote Teams”

Podcast: “Revising Performance Evaluations for Hybrid and Remote Teams”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article about revising performance evaluations for hybrid and remote teams
• The book Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage is available here.
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course 

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. And today, we’ll help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions about how you manage hybrid teams and remote teams, specifically, through performance evaluations. That’s what we want to focus on. You want to make sure that your hybrid team members and your remote team members are accountable. And it’s challenging to do so through traditional performance evaluations. Why is that? Well, traditional performance evaluations, here’s what happens. They’re usually done annually, semi-annually, more rarely per quarter. And what they usually rely on is the supervisors sense of how much time the supervisee, the employee has spent working, has spent doing stuff, they’re poorly suited for hybrid remote work naturally, because you see the supervisee, much less the supervisor does not observe the supervisee, nearly as much. So it’s much harder for the supervisor to say how much time the supervisor has spent working and how productive they were, and what their accomplishments were. So that performance accountability metrics are really often they have been throughout the pandemic, this has been a real problem, and a source of great anxiety for supervisors and supervisees alike, especially supervisor revisers. So the supervisors have not been sure how to evaluate their supervisors. Their supervisors don’t think as much about supervision and evaluation. But the supervisors, the bosses, the leaders, they have had a lot of struggle with knowing how to evaluate their supervisors, their employees, their team members, during this period of time. And now that we’re moving into the future of work with hybrid work with remote work becoming the norm, becoming what will be the future going on Word, long after the pandemic, this is the future of work, we need to really answer the question of how do you update the performance evaluation system for the future of work. And how you need to do that is to revise to really actually measure performance, and not measure time work, but measure performance in the form of accomplishments in the form of deliverables in the form of actually how productive each employee is, in doing their individual tasks to the individual things that that are assigned to work on. And the work that they’re doing with team members, collaborative tasks, cross functional team projects in the same team, whatever all of these things that they are working on, in terms of collaborating with others also needs to be measured and evaluated. You probably heard the phrase that what gets measured gets managed? Well, if you measure people’s time spent working, that will be what gets managed people work a long time. But if you can’t observe their time spent working well, really, you’re not going to be able to manage that right? That’s obvious. And honestly, do you really need them to be working? Or do you need them to produce stuff? Do you need them to do deliverables to get the accomplishments done, you need them to get the accomplishments done if you don’t need them to actually just spend their time working. So the focus shouldn’t be on deliverables and shouldn’t be on accomplishments, however, the employee gets them accomplished. So you, as the supervisor, need to be thinking about that. So what that involves this transition to a supervision style of performance, every evaluation suitable for the future of work means many frequent evaluations that are much smaller than the annual or semi annual review. So instead of that large annual review, do brief evaluations, ideally, weekly, or bi weekly, or at the most, you want to do them no less than once a month. And that’s for the most independent so when I suffer with my clients when I’m working with clients, I’ve done that for researchers who spend their time researching and because that’s a very independent project that may be okay to do once a month or kind of creative r&d folks. So researchers have but if you’re going to do it for regular employees, want for organ, lots of various types of employees from software programmers to administrative staff, once a week is great, bi weekly, if that depends on the amount of autonomy, and how much independence and the length of their project tasks, but generally weekly is what I recommend. And then occasional 360 degree evaluations meaning giving the employee feedback from other employees on their team. But basically, the main main way that you’ll be evaluating them is once a week, briefly evaluate brief evaluations. And that actually reduces the amount of time that supervisors spend on supervision because those meetings with the employee take care of a lot of random conversations that you would have with the employee anyway. So it’s a much more effective way of collaborating with employees, supervising them and having the supervisors spend their time more effectively with each employee. So that is what you want to be thinking about. What that means is that you conduct a brief brief check in meetings of 15 to 30 minutes, with each supervisor once a week, so 15 minutes to 30 minutes. That’s actually every other week, if you want to do that, or once a month for the rare cases. And usually, once a week, it’s going to be a little on the shorter side. I’ve seen that the shortest 10 minutes to 15 to 20 minutes is going to be the regular length. For hybrid workers, you’ll definitely want to do this in person to discuss maybe some challenging things if they come up. And of course, remote workers do it remotely. What happens, the supervisee submits a report 48 hours before each meeting. So before the meeting scheduled on Wednesday, on Monday, the supervisor would send in a report for eight hours before it. And what that involves is a self evaluation report, including things like the top, the key thing is the top three to five accomplishments that they set out to do for the week. So in the previous report in the previous meeting, you would have decided on what their top two three to five accomplishments should be. And then this week, they’ll discuss what their top three to five accomplishments actually work. Most of the time, they should align with what they should have been, if things came up, of course for emergencies came up, then that should shift. So comparing the accomplishment set to what actually happened. And again, sometimes it will, those will shift and that’ll be fine. Sometimes they should have shifted there, but the employee wouldn’t have realized that. And then you want to be thinking about that. Well, how’s the employee making her decisions about what to do and what not to do, and sometimes the employee will be doing too many urgent and not important things. Whereas you really want them to work on some important, not urgent things. So you want to be thinking about those. Then their plan for next week. What do they want to do? What are their top three to five accomplishments for next week, and then the supervisor responds briefly to the civil self evaluation report and the self evaluation report, it’s gonna be brief, it’s going to be a page, then just a brief email by the supervisor. So sentence response report, again, it’s going to be under a page, usually several sentences, at least 24 hours before the meeting, all points in the supervisor’s reports. But again, a brief response, because then you’ll get into it in the meeting itself. Now, the report also should contain what challenges the supervisor faced in achieving the goals, and what measures they took to address these challenges and what they plan to do to address the problems in the future. Also, the professional development, what are they doing in their professional development, based on what they set out to do so they should have some activities that they are doing for the professional development. And then you want to see how actually they did on these activities, then a self evaluation rating, so evaluating themselves how they did zero greatly below expectations, one summer below expectations to meeting expectations, three, somewhat exceeding expectations, and four greatly exceeding expectations, or whatever system you have, but that’s kind of a standard system. Okay, going on for the check and meeting. And that’s going to be the weekly check in meeting 15 to 20 minutes, closer to 10. If everything is going fine. So you clarify all the points listed in the report. The supervisor, you’re the supervisor, provides coaching to the supervisor on helping resolve problems addressing all those challenges. How do they improve how productive they are, enhancing their relationships with others as needed. So that depends on their cross functional team projects for those teams, their internal team projects. So those activities are collaborative activities, and then discuss their civil fibrillation and what they plan to do for the next week. So the supervisor accepts or devises the self evaluation given by the employee and the plans for the week explains the reasoning to the team member and then gives the team member a chance to describe their thoughts on it before making a final decision. Now, that’s the weekly reports. That all gets fed into a quarterly performance report report. So that includes the final evaluations from each weekly meeting that gets fed into that report. And then those things include that 60 to 80% of the weekly value of the report. So the 60 to 80% of the quarterly performance report comes from that those weeks that make up the quarter so about what was the like 1314 weeks that make up the quarter then 20% comes from evaluations, the 360 feedback evaluations by fellow team members, if that’s applicable, if you’re working as part of a collaborative team, then that’s going to be 20% or 360 degree evaluations. And then in general 20% score by the supervisor for the supervisor for the quarter based on their progress over the quarter in the sense of that person’s development over time. So that’s what you’re going to be doing now? What are the benefits of why you should spend your time? Well, obviously, it’s going to save you time, I already mentioned that. So if this technique saves time, it really helps address a number of problems, prevent a number of fires and challenges that would come up, and also helps get addressed those everyday small interactions, and meetings that you would have with your supervisor annually. So it helps to supervise a lot. So besides those, it helps supervisors a lot, it helps them know where they stand, which is incredibly important and valuable, especially in a hybrid and remote team environment, where they have less connections with their supervisor. So they also know where to improve. So they don’t only know where they stand right now, but they also know where and how to improve going forward, as it reduces their career worries. So it’s harder to know where you’re standing and your career situation. And addressing that is very helpful for hybrid and remote team members. Because they don’t see their supervisors much they don’t know what’s going on. So they know where they stand. It addresses career concerns. And especially for those people who tend to have more proximity to supervisors, there’s more connected concern by people who have less proximity. So let’s say your hybrid team member, you come in once a week, and there are other people who come in four days a week, and you’re kind of concerned about your career growth, this helps address that concern for supervisors, it helps mitigate problems or to dimension that that’s a really critical area, it helps improve the relationship. So improve your relationship to that person. And that of course, helps that person be connected to their organizational culture, that is very helpful. But the main thing, the main indicator of whether somebody is retained, so that retention, engagement, morale, is there a connection relationship to that supervisor. So that’s going to be really important for you. So that’s retention, and morale. So those are the critical things you want to be thinking about for that performance evaluation. So this is the key. This revised performance evaluation that’s going to be a fit for the future of work is how you want to manage hybrid remote teams. All right, everyone, I hope you’ve valued and benefited from this episode of the wise decision maker show. Please subscribe to the show on whatever channel you heard it. Whether it’s YouTube, you heard a tote via video cast or on a podcast on iTunes or Amazon or wherever you heard it. Please subscribe and please share your comments, leave your thoughts, click like if you liked it and share it with your friends and family. That’s the best thing that you can do. Please make sure to leave a review again on whatever channel you heard it that’s super helpful. Let other people know about the show and what’s your like about it and send me your thoughts about the show and any questions you might have to Gleb GL EB at disaster avoidance experts.com Alright everyone, I hope you found this valuable and beneficial. And I look forward to seeing you on the next show. In the meantime, the wisest and most profitable decisions to you, my friends. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai 

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on January 4, 2022.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is a world-renowned thought leader in future-proofing, decision making, and cognitive bias risk management in the future of work. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage (Intentional Insights, 2021). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, French, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules at https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe/.