I spent sleepless nights throughout my HR career thinking about how to improve performance reviews. A 1 to 5 scale to measure a KPI/ OKRs just wasn’t doing it for me. The numbers felt arbitrary and both managers and employees had no tangible examples of what the difference between a 3 and a 4 really meant.
That left them often picking a number which wasn’t an accurate reflection of their performance, didn’t give any constructive feedback and couldn’t easily translate into actionable goals.
The more time I spent explaining what the scale of 1 to 5 meant, the more confused people felt. I dreaded having to explain what getting a 3 out of 5 meant as opposed to getting a 5 out of 5, and I asked myself how I could make performance reviews more objective, as
I didn’t trust the methodology.
It was when I read a Harvard Business Review article titled The death of HR in 2019 that I decided to go back to the drawing board. I needed to completely reinvent the system, to find a way to make managers and employees get real value out of these sessions and to draw actionable insights from the data.
I started toying around with the idea of collecting data daily, to start ‘pulsing’ employees on a daily basis. The word pulsing was quite new back then – I had employees thinking I was going to measure their heart rate with my new system! It took a while until I started seeing the full benefits of this tool, but it was evident from the early days that there was something phenomenal about it. Getting information from employees firsthand was a new experience. Each employee telling HR what they were busy with as opposed to measuring them against their job description felt groundbreaking.
I was completely sold on the idea. But the hard work was still ahead of us, as we turned pulsing into a system HR could get real value from. So many questions still remained unanswered, such as:
- How often should we be doing this?
- How many questions should be included?
- What should those questions be?
- Should we get rid of the all-confusing rating scale?
Frequency
Daily pulsing felt like plain micro-managing. You would be better off completing a timesheet for that purpose. For this exercise you need inspiration, and it sucks the soul out of you to tell HR on a daily basis what you are busy with.
On the other hand, when we pulsed employees on a monthly basis, it was clear that lots of important milestones and achievements were missed. Employees would often only recall what they did the past few days and forget about the previous weeks.
So it became evident that weekly pulses were the way to go. People were able to recall the main achievements for the week and had the perspective needed to write about what mattered most.
Questions
When I designed my first pulse I did not think much of the questions to be asked on a weekly basis. I just wrote the first thing that came to mind, which was something like: What did you do last week?
This then turned into: What task were you busy with during this week?
Which then turned into: Looking back at your week, what achievement are you most proud of?
And I finally settled on: What was your highlight from the past week?
That question works like a charm. The magic word was highlights! Employees are inspired by this question and give meaningful answers that provide valuable insights for HR.
You might have noticed the time component in the evolution of the question. When you pulse employees, you need to ask questions in retrospect, as that is where the inspirational factor comes into play.
We also asked employees for any last thoughts or general comments. This was an optional question and I didn’t have high hopes for it. Well, much to my surprise, this became an incredibly insightful part of the exercise. This question helped us understand exactly what employees were going through and captured the sentiment on the ground. This provided HR with the insight needed to be a proactive department.
From the answers that stemmed from this question, we have created work from home and flexi-time policies, activated the Employee Assistance Programme for trauma counselling, and heard of employees’ financial struggles which led to CTC reviews. When used correctly, this channel allows HR to be strategic and contribute to employee wellness.
Sentiment tagging
I mentioned my dislike for ratings at the beginning of this article, and the various ways to interpret them. I developed the concept of sentiment tagging (a term which we coined) to capture the employees’ feeling about a fact.
For example, below is the log of a highlight of an employee:
“The podcast we started in January 2022 has over 13 000 listens overall. During this week we received over 1 000 listens in a day for the first time.”
The manager would then ‘sentiment tag’ the highlight as follows:
- This highlight wasn’t executed as expected.
- Some development is needed.
- This highlight was well executed.
- It exceeded expectations.
- It created a new standard.
The manager could say it wasn’t a well executed highlight, because we paid an advertising fee to spread the word of our podcast during the past week, and we were forecasting about 2 000 listens for the week (flop!). Or the manager could say the employee exceeded expectations because we hit an all time target by having 1 000 people listening to the podcast with organic advertising.
With this practical example, you can see the depth of the conversation HR, managers and employees can have, replacing the stale method where we rate a KPI like: “Continually create, test, analyse and optimise compelling content to drive high levels of engagement on all distribution channels” and the employee gets rated a 3 for that. Can you see the difference?
Bottom-up
And the last and probably most significant benefit of the pulsing concept is the bottom-up approach as opposed to top down. Employees are encouraged to bring their highlights to the managers’ attention, and managers get to discuss and sentiment tag those highlights. This is a big difference and it changes the way the conversation flows, creating a narrative of true empowerment in your company culture as employees get to be the ones crafting their careers one week at a time.
And as the weeks go by, this tool can be used for the purpose of journaling. Employees open-up and disclose thoughts that keep their minds busy in a constructive way.
I strongly believe that pulsing is the most successful tool I have ever used to unpack individual performance, due to its power to start meaningful conversations.
