0 The Struggle Between Efficiency and Effectiveness Posted by ReviewSNAP | at 1:01 PM

Business books, magazines and newsletters are full of recommendations about becoming more efficient. They talk at length about the importance of the bottom line and incremental gains from reengineering and total quality efforts. And they talk about how technology can provide a real boost in efficiency.

But with all this talk about efficiency, are we losing something in terms of being effective? To distinguish between effectiveness and efficiency, a brief definition should help. Effectiveness is doing the right thing. Efficiency is doing things right. These simple definitions point to a clear distinction that has major implications for businesses of all sizes. The implications arise from the difficulty in balancing both efficiency and effectiveness.

With the pressure to constantly be as efficient as possible, an organization can get caught up in focusing too much on reducing process time and/or the number of employees and not enough on what makes sense for the organization. For example, suppose a distribution company decides that it is taking too long to process orders because there is an additional review step in place to ensure that the order is accurate. But often times, orders get backed up slightly for shipping because the people doing the additional accuracy check on outgoing orders fall behind. So the decision is made to eliminate this additional step and at the same time save some money by eliminating two positions. This is done in the name of efficiency because orders will go out faster which has some real merit. But the result of eliminating this additional step is a significant increase in incorrect orders being shipped. The impact of this is additional time dealing with more customer complaints, additional picking and restocking time, additional costs of returned shipments and, above all, customer ill will.

This example illustrates how doing the right thing is often overshadowed by doing things right. What employees often view as being efficient can many times impact the company negatively. This is why it is important for management to create an environment where employees are encouraged to look for ways to become more efficient, but do so without degrading the level of customer service and quality.

Bringing a balance between efficiency and effectiveness is one of the critical jobs of any owner or manager. In the above example, the company might have been realizing a competitive advantage because it was shipping orders with a higher degree of accuracy than its competitors. When it decided to save some money by streamlining a process and eliminating some positions, it lost that competitive advantage. And in terms of saving money, any savings realized from the streamlining were in all likelihood given back several times over.

It is important for businesses to constantly look for ways to do things right....to become more efficient. But it is equally important that decisions along those lines be made by asking questions about the impact on quality, customer service and employee morale. Bad decisions relative to efficiency can very often have a negative effect on all three of these variables.

With regard to technology and efficiency, does the addition of new technology to any process have a positive impact on these variables? Business processes and what's good for the customer should drive the implementation of technology. Technology should not dictate how a process gets defined. Start with the customer and work backwards. Define the process based on the best way to serve the customer and the best way to accomplish tasks. Once the business process is defined, match the technology to the process. When technology is allowed to drive the business, things tend to get forced to fit and the customer, productivity and employee morale with often suffer.

We can safely say that balancing efficiency and effectiveness is not easy. But it is important for organizations to stay focused on the long-term impact of all decisions. Yes, short-term performance is important, but if it takes precedence over long-term viability it could lead to a decline in performance over time.

0 ReviewSNAP Price Increase - Lock In Now Posted by ReviewSNAP | at 9:18 AM

ReviewSNAP™ has recently launched several enhancements and modules to our Web-based performance management system. These include:

•eSignature to help you make your performance review process completely paperless.
•Comment suggestions to help managers/reviewers find just the right verbiage to support ratings.
•Employee import feature that allows you to import your existing employee information to the system.
•Logo upload that lets you personalize the system and review templates to your specific organization.

Also, we will soon be launching our compensation recommendation tool. This enhancement will allow you to create recommended percentage increases for employees’ compensation based on overall ratings. This feature can be turned on or off at your discretion.

As you may know, ReviewSNAP360™, a complete 360 degree feedback module will be bundled with the current performance review solution. It will afford your organization the opportunity to gather important feedback from superiors, peers, and subordinates on employee levels including managers, team leaders, group supervisors, and other staff levels of your choice.

Our goal is to offer the most powerful and flexible system possible at the most affordable prices. Due to the recent enhancements and the imminent release of ReviewSNAP360™, annual subscription rates will be going up.

Since you are currently or have been a free trial member we are offering you the opportunity to subscribe to ReviewSNAP at the current subscription rates until 11/15/2008. If you do subscribe to ReviewSNAP prior to the 15th and don't exceed your initial employee limit, you will be locked in at that price for annual renewals.

Although our prices will be changing they will still remain the most affordable on the market and you will have access to the most powerful version of ReviewSNAP yet.

0 Inventory Your Employees Regularly Posted by ReviewSNAP | at 10:11 AM

The title of this article sounds cold and impersonal. But it's not meant to be. You and your people are the number one key to the success, or failure, of your business or work unit. Taking inventory of your employees simply means taking stock of the quality of your people in order assess:
1) how well you have been hiring,
2) how well you have been training them,
3) how well they are being managed and
4) how healthy your company is likely to be.

We readily recognize that virtually all businesses of any size have some marginal performers. Our definition of a high performing employee is someone who consistently meets or exceeds reasonable, but demanding expectations. Think about your business or work unit in terms of the performance level of your employees. How many would qualify under this definition? Marginal and weak employees are defined as those who consistently fail to meet reasonable, but demanding expectations. Also, there are employees that seem to have potential to be high performers, but tend to fall just short of qualifying as high performers for whatever reason(s). They are the employees that meet or exceed expectations most of the time but slide back occasionally. Then there are those that seem to drift between high performance and marginal perfromance more often and, therefore, fall into the category of inconsistent performers.

Other categories in which to place employees are:
1) those who have been promoted beyond their ability and are struggling in their current job, but performed well in their previous position and
2) people who have been promoted and have not proven themselves in any capacity within the organization.
The latter category is especially perplexing, but does exist in many organizations because these employees have either played the right games or because management hasn't recognized or has ignored important deficiencies in performance.

So how should you go about inventorying employees? It will require either you or a group of people objectively evaluating your people based on the definitions offered above. Then we suggest doing an actual head count for each of the following categories:

High performers.
Potential high performers.
Inconsistent performers.
Marginal or weak performers who will never be high performers.
Employees that have been promoted beyond their ability and have virtually no chance of being high performers in their current position, but could be in another position with the company.
Employees that have been promoted beyond their ability and have not proven they can be high performers in any capacity within the company.
Ok, so you've done the head count. Now what? First of all, what does your inventory reveal about the quality of your work force? Does your company seem to be top heavy in marginal or inconsistent performers? What percentage of all employees are high performers or potential high performers? We like to use the 95/5 rule in terms of performance. Our philosophy is that businesses should strive to have 95 percent of their employees legitimately fall into the high performer or potential high performer categories. Without question, there are few organizations that can legitimately claim that they meet this target. It is our belief that to hit this target, businesses must do a lot of things very well in terms of hiring, training and managing employees.

Most businesses don't do all three of these things consistently well enough to reach the 95% target. And most businesses don't do a good enough job of "cleansing" themselves of employees that simply don't have a good chance of becoming high performers in the jobs they hold. In fact, we would argue that there are too many organizations where the ratio is reversed. In other words they have 5% of their employee base represented by high or potentially high performers with the others falling into the other categories. And there are many more companies that fall somewhere in between this level and the desired target. How does your company or work unit stack up?

0 The Major Drawback To Checking References Posted by ReviewSNAP | at 10:05 AM

Let's suppose you're hiring for a key mid-level management position. You've gone through an extensive search and interview process and you are ready to extend an offer to one of the candidates. Before extending the offer, three references are checked. One reference gives a glowing recommendation, the second gives a positive, but more subdued thumbs up and the third provides a somewhat useless report simply confirming hire and termination dates along with position held.

Based on these recommendations, what kind of opinion should you form? The answer is; it's hard to say. But why?

We all know that checking references can provide a mixed bag of results. This can often lead to confusion about the potential of the employee. Some hiring experts point to the fact that most employers are afraid to say anything negative about a former employee out of fear of litigation. This is certainly an issue that needs to be considered in evaluating reference checks. However, we think there is a bigger issue to address when evaluating reference results.

Every organization takes on a culture in terms of performance and accountability. A few have a high performance, high accountability culture. Some have a low performance, low accountability culure. And the rest fall somewhere in between. Given this fact, how can you effectively evaluate a candidate's past performance without knowing what kind of culture they operated within?

Let's go back and look at the first reference you called. They gave a glowing recommendation of the candidate. But we have to ask ourselves a very significant question. How does our culture compare with the culture of that organization? If ours is a high performance, high accountability culture, but they operate within a low performance, low accountability culture the candidate's glowing recommendation is based on "jumping over a lower bar" than he/she will have to jump over in our culture. Unfortunately this leaves us wondering in terms of whether that candidate can get over our "bar".

To compound matters further, it is not acceptable to ask questions of the person providing the reference about his/her company's culture. Even asking questions such as "When Mary was faced with high expectations, how well did she meet those expectations?" are clearly not going to yield reliable answers since the frame of reference is different than your frame of reference. In other words, what the other person considers to be high expectations is very likely going to be different than your organization's definition of high expectations.

There are numerous examples of employees who received strong recommendations from former employers only to fail with their new employer. There can be a multitude of reasons for failure, but the point here is that reference checking will only rarely provide good information. Unless the companies providing references are somewhat similar to yours as far as accountability and performance are concerned don't expect to have a strong base of information to work with.

Given this potential problem, how should you deal with it? First of all, during the interviewing process make sure that the candidate is asked to respond to questions that relate to job-oriented behavior. For example, suppose you are hiring for a managerial position and the candidate has a management background. You might ask the candidate to "briefly explain how you establish accountability among those who report to you". This will provide some insight into how well the candidate understands the notion of accountability, but perhaps more importantly will reveal something about the culture(s) he/she has operated in previously. If the candidate stumbles with the response and doesn't have a good handle on this concept, it could mean that he/she has come from environments where accountability and high performance were foreign terms. Or it could mean that the candidate doesn't understand the important concept of accountability. Either way, a red flag is being waved.

Or try this, "in your past positions, did you find it easy to meet the expectations established for you or did you feel you had to stretch to meet them?" Understand that the response "I found them easy to meet" could mean:
1) the candidate is bright and meets expectations as a result,
2) the expectations haven't been all that high and it wasn't difficult to meet them.
And a response of "I had to stretch to meet them" could mean:
1) the candidate is not all that bright and it isn't easy for him/her to meet expectations or
2) the expectations have been very demanding and it caused them to stretch to meet them.
Knowing that, now try something like this; "you indicated it was (easy/difficult) for you to meet expectations in the past. Can you explain that a little more for me?" By probing, the candidate could reveal some tidbit that you will find useful in evaluating what kind of environment he/she is accustomed to operating in. These are only examples and you should take the time to come up with your own line of questioning to get at this very important issue.

In terms of references, asking questions such as "when (candidate name) was faced with meeting demanding expectations, how well did he/she meet them?" or "of all of your employees past or present, how would you compare (candidate name) with them in terms of overall job performance? Would you say he/she would fall in the top third, middle third or bottom third?" This question often goes unanswered for a variety of reasons. But it is an excellent one since it gives a relative ranking even if the culture is somewhat weak as far as accountability and performance are concerned. Obviously if the respondent says anything other than "top third" another red flag is potentially waived. These are only examples and you should take the time to develop standardized questions for reference checking and interviewing.

If properly constructed and carried out, references can add some value to the hiring process. But evaluate the responses carefully. There are too many unknowns in the hiring process as it is. References are only as good as the questions asked, the person responding and the quality of the organization(s) represented by the respondents. Sometimes an outstanding candidate is given a poor reference when, in fact, they are an excellent choice for the job. This can be due to some sort of bias on the part of the respondent or an environment where the candidate couldn't show what he/she was capable of. Many times an organization impedes the ability of an employee to perform and the employee is perceived as the problem because they are trying to perform at levels higher than the culture will allow.

In short, be very cautious in carrying out and evaluating reference checks. Bear in mind that perspective and frame of reference are important. We suggest that you not weight references too heavily in the final decision. Take them into account and if there is some consistency in responses among the various former employers, you can feel somewhat more comfortable in your assessment of the results.

0 Are Your Performance Reviews Efficient? Posted by ReviewSNAP | at 9:51 AM

Does your current review process work efficiently? Is it too much of a hassle to even worry about? Let us know what you think about your current review process by clicking on the link below and filling out a quick two question survey.

Performance Review Process Survey

0 Make The Most of Your Assets Posted by ReviewSNAP | at 11:59 AM

Employee's are a company's biggest and most important asset typically consuming around 70% of a company's overall budget. This is exactly why you want to make the most of your assets (employee's). Companies can hire a world of potentially talented employees, but don't have the processes in place to get the most out of that world of talent.

ReviewSNAP™ will put a review process in place that will save time, save money, increase sales and profits, enhance employee productivity and morale, and achieve levels never before reached. Our consultants, in collaboration with other human resource professionals, have developed the ReviewSNAP™ Performance Review System to assist organizations in managing their performance review/appraisal process.

By taking advantage of our feedback, goal creation and development plans you will be able to have a more accountable, yet relaxed review process. As an employee this let's you know how you have performed throughout your review period and what needs to be done to perform well. So, no longer do you have to worry about walking into your boss' office and hear something completely unexpected.