Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Connecting Everyday Work With Performance Goals

Every people manager will agree that connecting day to day work with performance and development goals is very important. Almost every customer that spoke to in the past few years told me that they want their employees to know why they are going what they are doing. Connecting day-to-day work with goals is a hard thing to do. Just think about how many times last year you went to your company's goals management system to see if your daily work aligns with what your goals are. Even if you go there it is probably useless because, in most cases, your goals become obsolete the moment they are written down.

We are attempting to address this in Career OnDemand. Any employee will be able to send email messages and calendar appointments to Career OnDemand and later attach them to his or her goal in Career OnDemand. An employee can forward an email or appointment from any email system, even from a smart phone or a tablet. An employee can do this without having to install a plug-in or downloading an app.

The moment an email or appointment is attached to a goal, the employee's manager becomes aware of the work and the context of the work. This leads to a meaningful conversation the next time they meet and probably will lead to a discussion about the next steps or course corrections. If the daily work is not aligned with the goals in the systems, the manager can point that out to the employee. If the employee is doing meaningful work that is not aligned with the goals in the system, perhaps it is time to have another look at the goals and modify them.

If you were at the HR Technology Conference last month, you may have seen David Ludlow present these concepts and talk about them at great length.

We are working hard to simplify things and make complex concepts work with current technologies that people already use. Almost of of these ideas and suggestions came from customers who co-innovated with us. If you are interested in co-innovating with the Career OnDemand team, please reach out to @esdediego. We would love to show a preview of Career OnDemand months before general availability and listen to your thoughts.



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