Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Personal Development

We all need a little personal development mixed in with our professional and career development. Read blogs in this category for stories and best practices for personal wellness and wellbeing, skills improvement, and  more.

  • A personal account of performance management that works… and doesn’t

    A personal account of performance management that works… and doesn’t

    My take on performance management is quite different than it was 10 years ago. I once worked for a company that basically rewarded all employees for their continued employment, and performance was not really taken into consideration when we all received a 5% raise. Regardless of how fabulous of a job I was doing or how not-so-fabulous my co-worker in the cubicle over was doing, we both received the same reward. This was not motivating me to be a better employee nor was it motivating for my mediocre colleague.

    Fast forward well over a decade. Not only has the world of work changed in many ways, so has my career and thoughts on performance management. As I reflect on this past year with Horizon Point Consulting, I think about what has been motivating. What have I enjoyed? What have I really not enjoyed? As I’m asked to reflect on these things in preparation for plans for another year with HPC, I’m so very thankful for an employer who seeks my input and is genuinely concerned about how I see my career moving and my ideas for furthering our mission.

    First, I will say, my personality is that of a planner and one that needs plenty of notice concerning a change. When I think about what has been most stressful this year, I would have to say it was my very first week on the job. I was given a project that involved computer codes and website administration. I thought, what have I gotten myself into? I was stressed to the max to say the least, but I completed the project and am thankful for the learning opportunity it provided. I’m also thankful for an employer who asked me how I liked working on this and other work concerning marketing and website management. When I shared how stressful it was for me and that it just wasn’t what I felt was the best use of my time where my strengths are concerned, my employer listened and began thinking of better ways to get those projects done.

    I’ve learned so much this past year. The ability to select what professional development I wanted to do was wonderful. I’ve received three credentials and am working on completing a course to be an instructor for one of the courses we offer. All of this was so rewarding.

    I’ve also been motivated by the type of work I get to do. I especially love the program development and one-on-one coaching I do. And, of course the commissions that come along with some of the projects are always motivating.

    In the end, what matters most is that I have career that I love and have the flexibility to get the work done when it best fits my schedule. That’s huge for a mom of two and allows me to do my best to live out my mission statement:

    I will strive daily to present the best version of myself to clients, family, friends and others. I will work to empower others and help them in their journey to lead better lives.

     

    What are your thoughts on performance management? Are they in line with how your current employer sees performance management?

  • Basic Feedback/Feedforward Stuff

    Basic Feedback/Feedforward Stuff

    One of the best ways to improve and sustain great performance at work is to ask for feedback and to give it, freely, continuously and in the spirit of driving better performance. Here are some posts to help you out with this quest:

    6 Steps for Maximizing Feedback Through Feedforward

    Drop Lots of FYIs to Communicate Effectively

    Goal Setting – Feedback

    3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

  • 3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

    3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization

    Remember the wind chime, the umbrella, the party, snacks and bonus check in our last post?

    Well during the corporate foray of employee rewards and recognition efforts, everyone in the department, regardless of their level of involvement in the project, got the wind chime and the umbrella and the party and the snacks and, yes, the bonus check.

    In addition to the one size fits all approach whether earned or not, although an umbrella at some point is going to come in handy, and the wind chimes do actually still hang in my backyard almost ten years later, no one asked me, or anyone else if we particularly wanted any of it or we might have preferred say a rain jacket or maybe a decorative flag.

    You see, one of the main tricks of employers who do the employee engagement game well know that perks and benefits should be personalized, fitting with each individual’s motivational preferences based on their personalities, interests and place in life.

    As The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Todaystates,

    “Rather than a standard package of health, wealth, and paid time off, companies can provide employees with a budget and a widely diverse set of options. These can range from sponsoring paid community service time overseas to allowing for credits to buy a hybrid car or even financially supporting an increased personal skill, such as learning a new language. The options are endless.”

    So if you want to focus on making it personal, here are three steps:

    1. Ask.  Ask and ask often what employees want.   You need to do this in aggregate and individually.  We suggest you design a survey to ask employees what they want and value in order to design overall benefit package options and structure. However, each person should be asked individually by their manager what things actually motivate them and what situations they are experiencing in their life and in work that cause one thing to be more motivational over another. For a list of motivational factors we use, email us and we’ll send you a copy.

    2. Create.  Create a package of program options based on survey results of what people want inline with what is fitting with your organization’s budget.   The above quote goes on to say, “How to fund this? In one survey, Millennials indicated that they are willing to make trade-offs in terms of base salary in order to have a job that fits with their values.”

    In addition, some of the benefits/perks you see people want may cost little to nothing such as flexible work schedules and the ability to work remotely.  These options in many cases have been shown to increase the bottom-line through productivity instead of decrease it.

    3. Evaluate.   Evaluate if your program is working to drive employee engagement.  We recommend usingGallup’s 12 engagement questions for this.  Regardless of the mechanism you use to measure employee engagement, these results should be positively correlated with desirable overall business results such as increased profits that every organization tracks.   More on these business results that should be seen in next week’s post…

    Are your rewards and benefits personalized?  If so, what positive results have you seen?

    If you like this post, you may also like:

    The Best Way to Thank Employees is to Make it Personal

    Want to keep great employees? Know how to compensate them.

  • 3 Tips for Knowing What to Wear in the Workplace

    3 Tips for Knowing What to Wear in the Workplace

    Whether you’re headed out the door for an interview, starting your first day of work or wanting to move up in your career, what you wear (and what you don’t) can be an important factor in success. Although the workplace has become more casual than it once was, it’s important to know the different cues in order to dress for success. Here are three tips to identify what to wear:

    1. Look around you. What the majority of people are wearing around you is probably what is the unspoken norm of acceptable. I walked into my first interview for a job coming out of college, and it was obvious everyone there was dressed like they were going to an interview too. Suit. If you had a skirt on, put hose on, do not show your arms. It was obvious what was required, and I ended up shelling out almost all of my first paycheck on a new wardrobe of business attire. And sweating all summer long… But if I hadn’t worn this, I would not have been seen as acceptable in the environment I was working in and I would not have been respected as a new person coming in.

    2. Simply Ask. If you are unsure of what the dress code is for an organization or what is most appropriate after looking at the people around you, simply ask. Many employers don’t have formal dress codes anymore (but they might- and you should read it if there is one), but there is usually an unspoken standard. Ask about what that is. I remember coming from previously mentioned corporate job, to accepting a position at a much smaller organization. I wasn’t sure what the protocol for dress was at this new place because I had seen people that worked there in a variety of attire. So I asked. The response I got was “just don’t wear anything you would wear to the river on the weekends,” which was code for, “Business casual is the norm, unless there is an important meeting or something going on.”

    3. Think about where you want to be. This is the most important point to consider. Dress at a workplace is an unspoken pulse on company culture. Once you’ve identified what the dress is for an organization or a job within an organization, you need to consider whether or not that is a fit for you along with other organizational fit factors. This is also an important point to consider if you want to move up. A good piece of advice I think we have all probably heard is, “Dress for the position you want, not the position you have.”

     

    Have you ever dressed inappropriately in the workplace and been “punished” for doing so?

  • 5 Questions to End the Slow Painful Death of Death by Meetings

    5 Questions to End the Slow Painful Death of Death by Meetings

    In a leadership training class on communication in the workplace, I had one participant tell the group that meetings at his company were the biggest waste of time. When probed as to why, the basic gist of it came down to two reasons:

    1. No one knows why the heck a meeting has been called and/or why they need to be there

    2. Nothing results from the meetings

    Because of this dialogue as well as other feedback we had received, we started incorporating a segment on effective meetings into our standard Communication Outline lineup.

    Whether you are dealing with these two major meeting issues or just want to sharpen the saw on facilitating effective meetings, here is a checklist of questions to ask yourself:

    1. Do you even need to have a meeting? Is there a more effective way to communicate and/or make decisions?

    2. If a meeting is needed, what is the meeting’s objective? Clearly outline an agenda that meets this objective and send it out to all participants ahead of time. While in the meeting, stick only to topics related to the objective. If a topic comes up outside the scope of the meetings objective, politely redirect the conversation back to the objective and remind people you are doing so out of respect for everyone’s time.

    3. Who really needs to be there? We often include people because we don’t want to hurt feelings and/or we simply don’t take the time to think through who needs to be at the table. Only include those who are truly needed. In the case where decisions need to be made in a meeting, the smaller the group the better.

    4. Did the meeting result in decisions, action items and timelines centered-round the meeting’s objective?

    5. Did you put in place a mechanism to follow-up on the action items and timelines set forth in the meeting?