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Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People

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We often think of burnout as an individual problem, solvable with simple-fix techniques like “learning to say no”, more yoga, better breathing, practicing resilience. Yet, evidence is mounting that personal, band-aid solutions are not enough to combat an epic and rapidly evolving workplace phenomeno…

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5 Key Trends Shaping the New World of Work

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5 Key Trends Shaping the New World of Work

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Five key trends that are shaping the new world of work

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The working world is experiencing a post-pandemic transformation. The keys to future success will be efficiency, employability and digital skills.

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Learning Principles - We dont need to supervise

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Learning Principles - We dont need to supervise

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We DON’T Need to Supervise Our Teachers | The International Educator (TIE Online)

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I don’t know about you, but I never did good work because someone was “supervising” me. We do good work for its own sake, or perhaps even more significantly, fo

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DEIJ Inclusion Activities for your teams

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DEIJ Inclusion Activities for your teams

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Modern organizations recognize that to be leaders in their industry, they need a workforce that represents the society in which it exists. But while many companies are putting their best efforts into recruiting a more diverse workforce, it's the experience created for employees that will ultimately drive their success. To keep employees from all backgrounds engaged, leveraging their skill sets, and sharing their ideas, there must be a sense of belonging for all.

There's no one-size-fits-all approach or quick checklist for building diverse, inclusive teams. Even the most progressive companies are still figuring out how to create better systems and processes. And this sheds light on a greater truth: there is no end point to fostering inclusion; there will always be more to do, and more to learn. So the most important thing that any manager can do is see workplace diversity and inclusion as long-term projects, ones that will need continuous nurturing and dedication.

Why is inclusion important for teams?

An inclusive and respectful team culture impacts employees in a number of ways, from their collaboration with their peers to feeling they have a voice in what work they do and their relationship with their manager. When we look at the data from our Employee Pulse Surveys, we see a strong correlation between whether employees feel that people are respected for who they are at their organization and:

Feeling that communications among peers are honest and transparent,

Feeling appropriately involved in decisions that affect their work,

Feeling that they can count on their peers when they need help,

Satisfaction with the level of autonomy they have at work, and

Feeling that their manager cares about their opinions.

Caring about employee engagement and performance and caring about inclusion are inextricably linked. Team success requires a safe environment where people feel valued for who they are, not fearful of being judged, invalidated, or discriminated against. So, how do employees feel about workplace inclusion? According to our data,

19% of employees do not feel that people's personal identities are respected by everyone in their organization.

That's nearly 1 in 5 employees who don't feel their work environment is inclusive for all. This is why it's essential that organizations be intentional in developing cultures that not only value but embrace diverse perspectives, backgrounds, ideas, and approaches.

Every employee gets an equal voice in Officevibe. Discover our anonymous feedback tool that connects managers with their teams-even on the toughest topics.

Who is responsible for inclusion?

Ultimately, every individual in a workforce is responsible for making the people around them feel safe and valued. This includes managers, teammates, colleagues in other departments, upper leadership- everyone. When values of equity and respect are firmly established, they become something that each employee feels personally responsible to uphold.

A mistake that's commonly made across all industries is that organizations leave it up to HR to foster inclusive environments. When CEOs delegate the "inclusion project" to their people team, they can inadvertently send the message that it isn't a personal priority for them as a business leader. An organization's staff look to leadership for guidance not just on the company's vision and mission, but also its values and ethics. Inclusion should be central to the operations and direction of any business that wants to invest in it.

While diversity training and equitable values, policies, and structures are essential, efforts need to be made at both an organizational and a team level to build an inclusive culture. Team dynamics and employees' sense of psychological safety play a big role in feeling respected and valued at work, and this is where management comes in. Managers have a direct impact in the way that employees interact with one another on a day-to-day basis, so they must make inclusion a priority in how they lead their teams.

Fostering inclusion on remote teams

As many organizations have been rapidly adapting to remote work, the impact that this shift has on employees' sense of inclusion is as much of a concern as anything else. Going virtual has the power to create more balance and wellbeing, but it can also reinforce barriers if we're not mindful. For example, people who live alone might benefit from their ability to focus and be productive, while people who aren't tech-savvy can end up spending more time navigating new tools than getting work done. The fact is that each team, and each organization, will be impacted differently based on their pre-existing culture and norms.

How managers can promote inclusion on remote teams:

Remember that employees are not just working from home, but trying to get work done at home during a time of crisis. Make space for people to speak out about how they're feeling and what they're thinking.

Be mindful that the breakdown between home life and work life is impacting everyone differently. Offer support, connect people with mental health resources they might need, and be as flexible as you can when it comes to everything from schedules and time off to deadlines and objectives.

Check in with all of your employees regularly, and encourage them to check in with each other, as well. Facilitate virtual team-building activities and social hours so everyone can stay connected on a human level.

As the leader of your team, you play an important role in keeping everyone connected and giving everyone an equal say. Inclusive managers listen empathetically to their employees, advocate for them, and break down barriers when needed. More on this in the next section.

Expert tips for leaders to build inclusive workplaces

Michelle Kim, the CEO of Awaken who is passionately changing the face of diversity and inclusion efforts within organizations, offers three essential tips for leaders to build inclusive workspaces.

1. See people, not just workers

There's a tendency to think that our identities in and out of the workplace are separate, but they're not. When leaders take the time to demonstrate that they see people, and not just workers, employees feel valued for who they are. Ask questions, show interest, and show support for people's personal identities and what's important to them.

Tip: Find out what religious and cultural days and holidays are significant to your employees from different backgrounds, and offer them the time off.

2. Lead through tension

Remember that your workplace does not exist separately from the world, and world events affect your employees. Whether it touches on race, gender, religion, sexuality, or other identity-based issues, it's key for managers and HR leaders to check in with their teams, make a formal company statement, and create a safe space to hold discussions or ask for support.

Tip: When major events targeting specific communities occur, gather your team and let them know that you recognize the impact. Ask if anyone needs some time off, and remind them you have an open door policy should they need to talk.

3. Use your power to level the playing field

People look to their leaders to set the norm, so managers must model inclusive behaviour for their teams. Here are some examples of how:

Interrupt harmful language or behavior in the moment. This includes noting your own, as we all have bias. Speak up!

Listen to and amplify underrepresented voices.

Give credit where credit is due; to the people who actually did the work.

Delegate work equitably and thoughtfully-give everyone the chance to shine.

Question and then challenge norms established by and for privileged groups.

5 diversity & inclusion activities for teams

Inclusion must exist from beginning to end in an employee lifecycle, from the moment someone sees your recruiter brand to the moment they leave your company. But as Michelle Kim states,

There are a lot of companies that put out fancy marketing slogans about diversity and inclusivity but when we peel back the layers and look at how managers lead their teams there is a gap.
Michelle Kim

Here are 5 Diversity and Inclusion Activities for managers to build stronger teams:

1. Learn what's shaped people

Create a safe space to learn about your employees' backgrounds and what has been vital in shaping their lives. Doing this as a group allows employees to learn new things about each other that otherwise might not come up, and the act of being open, honest and vulnerable is a great way to form bonds, increase empathy and improve relationships.

Ask everyone to think about the three most defining moments in their lives and write them down on separate post-its (remote teams can try a virtual whiteboard like miro).

Have each employee present these moments to the team, and share their story to whatever degree they feel comfortable.

Thank everyone for sharing and ask the team to share what their takeaways are from the exercise.

2. Find out how people feel

Employees' lives and experiences outside of the office inform the way they show up to work. Simply recognizing that and encouraging people to feel comfortable sharing builds inclusion because it makes it okay for everyone to be themselves. Try one of the following prompts to kick off a small group meeting or a one-on-one to set the tone for openness and vulnerability.

"If you really knew me, you'd know that..." This can be something as simple as "I missed the bus this morning so I feel a bit stressed," or something a bit more revealing such as "I have a family member who is not well and I'm having trouble focusing."

"The rose (best part) and thorn (worst part) of the last week were..." This gives everyone the opportunity to bring up both accomplishments and challenges, big or small, professional or personal.

3. Confront stereotypes head-on

This particular inclusion activity suggested by MIT is a great way to break down misconceptions and stereotypes by giving people a chance to self-identify, while also addressing the stereotypes that can accompany these identifying factors.

Here are the steps for "I Am, But I am Not"

Each participant folds a piece of paper in half to create two separate columns.

In the first column, they write "I Am".

In the second column, they write "I Am Not".

In between these two columns, write the word "But".

The final phrase will read "I am _____, but I am not _____."

Participants fill in the first blank with some kind of common identifier, such as their gender, race, religion, or age, and the second with a common stereotype about that group which is not true of them (whether the stereotype is positive or negative).

Make sure there are no questions and have everyone write at least 5 statements.

Allow participants to share their statements with the team and have an open and respectful discourse on stereotypes.

4. Walk in Someone else's shoes

Harvard Business Review recommends "perspective taking" as a great way to mentally walk in someone else's shoes. Lead your team through this activity with the following steps.

1. Have your team share what types of diverse backgrounds are represented on their team (education, sexual orientation, race, etc).

2. Pair each team member with a background that is different from their own.

3. Have everyone write a few lines on the distinct challenges that they believe the background group they've been paired with could face.

4. Share and discuss with the team or in small groups.

This reflection will produce more empathic teams, and according to the Harvard study, will help build positive attitudes and behaviors toward minorities. The study also reveals increased support and "engaging in less mistreatment toward marginalized minorities."

5. Bring bias to the forefront

We all have bias, whether we think we do or not. One way to confront bias and reduce the use of non-inclusive language is to call it out (whether it's from yourself or others) and encourage others to do the same. You can promote this on your team by starting a bias jar.

Have your team call out bias and non-inclusive language openly (for example, using gendered language when discussing a specific profession).

Whoever is called out must submit a dollar.

But don't stop there. Have a quick discussion about the type of bias with your team so that it resonates.

The practice will help everyone reduce their bias a bit more everyday by bringing it to the forefront. At the end of the year, use the money to do something fun together as a team.

How inclusive is your team?

The first step in improving any team's dynamic is understanding it better. Offering a safe, anonymous platform for employees to share feedback helps managers leverage team strengths and identify pain points before they turn into problems. Officevibe does just that-and our Diversity & Inclusion Poll gets you insights specifically on your employees' sense of team inclusivity. Questions include:

To retain and engage your employees, you need to create an environment they feel comfortable to be themselves in-one where they feel heard, included, and valued. And when leaders, managers, and employees are all on the same page and prioritize building a sense of belonging, teams and organizations thrive.

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5 diversity and inclusion activities to build belonging on teams | Officevibe

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Modern organizations recognize that to be leaders in their industry, they need a workforce that represents the society in which it exists. But while many companies are putting their best efforts into recruiting a more diverse workforce, it's the experience created for employees that will ultimately drive their success.

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The State of Performance Management 2020

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The State of Performance Management 2020

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Microsoft: Using a Growth Mindset to Develop Leaders

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Microsoft: Using a Growth Mindset to Develop Leaders

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Research shows that managers see far more leadership potential in their employees when their companies adopt a growth mindset - the belief that talent should be developed in everyone, not viewed as a fixed, innate gift that some have and others don't. But what are those organizations doing to nurture their talent?

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How Microsoft Uses a Growth Mindset to Develop Leaders

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It's emphasizing learning and creativity.

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Guides successful change management for sustained business performance, including driving talent initiatives, enhancing culture, and leveraging inclusion for diverse outcomes

Partners with clients to develop change-ready organizations with a focus on culture and learning initiatives that drive belonging, inclusion, innovation, and performance

Supports organizations in developing talent as a competitive advantage, with specific focus on building more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplaces

The past two years have seen an unmatched level of organizational commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). Organizations stand to benefit tremendously by unlocking more inclusive workforce behaviors.

Our research found 51 percent of employees who recently quit their job cited a lack of belonging at work as a critical reason for leaving. Employees from underrepresented identities were even more likely to cite this reason. As organizations diversify their workforce, they must, in tandem, invest in a more inclusive culture to retain these employees and create better outcomes for all.

An inclusion capability-building program is a critical component to this change-when done effectively. Despite significant investment, many organizations run into the same pitfalls that limit their ability to drive and sustain inclusive behavioral change. Here's how to avoid the top three:

Pitfall #1: Focusing all efforts on raising awareness while neglecting broader objectives
Organizations often dive into DE&I trainings by scheduling a few sessions on assumed "introductory" topics (e.g., unconscious bias, allyship) or launching a longer series on deeper themes (e.g., anti-racism, privilege, identity). These programs start the conversation with awareness, but fail to give concrete direction on what must change, which can result in adverse effects.

Instead: Start by understanding what will be done differently once the learning journey is complete and how current behaviors impact experiences of inclusion. Survey employees through a comprehensive inclusion assessment, focus groups, or interviews to envision a more inclusive culture and understand current gaps. Our research shows a core set of practices create the experience of inclusion at individual and enterprise levels; determine the biggest priorities for employees and specific gaps in inclusivity, then marry that feedback with research-backed programming designed to teach behaviors that employees can practice to be more inclusive. Though programming should be specific to organization needs, we typically see successful programs include curriculum around mentorship/sponsorship, inclusive leadership, decision making, allyship, and addressing bias.

Pitfall #2: Requiring everyone attend mandatory, non-tailored trainings
Organizations often emphasize the importance of DE&I trainings by making them mandatory for all employees. Their intentions are virtuous: This is a strategic priority, and everyone needs to work with the same information. However, this can result in trainings becoming a "check the box" effort with attendance as the success metric. Multiple studies show mandates can backfire, with some individuals feeling that their agency is diminished, which may lead to more animosity following the program. Participants who feel forced to engage on DE&I topics may feel resentful and decrease psychological safety for other learners.

Instead: Some programs or roles might justify mandatory attendance, like harassment policy compliance and minimizing bias during interviews. Others may require more creativity to increase optional attendance, including leadership role modeling, a sustained communications plan reiterating a compelling value proposition, and an "opt-out" registration process. The goal should be to create a program where individuals are compelled to attend but invited to participate rather than pushed into it. Evaluate success based on post-session impact and measurable behavior change, not just number of attendees.

Pitfall #3: Using a business-as-usual approach, lacking focus on the human side of behavior change
Discussing equity and inclusion (or a lack thereof) can be complex, raising deeply entrenched mindsets around power, privilege, and the status quo, and the conversations required can often be uncomfortable. Organizations often design DE&I capability-building programs without taking this into consideration, leading to long sessions focused on statistics with little interaction, facilitators unequipped to discuss DE&I topics in depth, and limited time for reflection and practice. Employees are told they need to change, rather than invited into a conversation and asked to explore how change may benefit not just others but their own experience as well.

Instead: Meet employees where they are in their individual DE&I journeys with space to reflect, discuss, and practice in small groups. Design shorter, more frequent sessions to sustain momentum without overwhelming the audience. Require that facilitators are knowledgeable about DE&I, willing to authentically share their own experiences, and able to create a safe space for vulnerable reflections.

Inclusion capability building, especially at its best, may feel challenging and complex. However, when done well, these efforts can support and generate courageous workplace conversations that ultimately yield greater belonging and transform organizational cultures.

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Don't train your employees on DE&I. Build their capabilities.

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Addressing these common pitfalls can help organizations design and deliver organizational DE&I programs with greater impact.

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Imagine that you recently gave some feedback to a member of your team. You told him that his meeting agendas looked great, but he needed to improve his presentation skills.

You follow up a few weeks later to find out why he hasn't made any changes. You discover that he didn't understand what he could do to improve - your feedback simply prompted more questions. He was left thinking "What's good about my agendas that I can transfer to other documents?" and "What's wrong with my presentation skills?"

The Situation - Behavior - Impact™ (SBI™) feedback tool helps you to deliver more effective feedback. It focuses your comments on specific situations and behaviors, and then outlines the impact that these behaviors have on others.

About the Tool

Developed by The Center for Creative Leadership, the SBI™ feedback tool outlines a simple structure that you can use to give feedback:

When you structure feedback in this way, your people will understand precisely what you are commenting on and why. And when you outline the impact of their behavior on others, you're giving them the chance to reflect on their actions and think about what they need to change.

The tool also helps you to avoid making assumptions that could upset the other person and damage your relationship with him or her.

Applying the Tool

Let's look at each part of the SBI™ feedback tool and discuss how to use it to structure feedback.

1. Situation

When you're giving feedback, first define the where and when of the situation you're referring to. This puts the feedback into context and gives the other person a specific setting as a reference.

For example:

"During yesterday morning's team meeting, when you gave your presentation..."

2. Behavior

Your next step is to describe the specific behaviors that you want to address. This is the most challenging part of the process, because you must communicate only the behaviors that you observed directly.

You must not make assumptions or subjective judgments about those behaviors. These could be wrong, and this will undermine your feedback.

For example, if you observed that a colleague made mistakes in a presentation, you should not assume that he hadn't prepared thoroughly. You should simply comment that he made mistakes - and, ideally, note what the mistakes were.

Don't rely on hearsay, as this may contain others' subjective judgments. Again, this could undermine your feedback and jeopardize your relationship.

The examples below include a description of the specific behaviors you might want to address:

"During yesterday morning's team meeting, when you gave your presentation, you were uncertain about two of the slides and your sales calculations were incorrect."

Tip:

Aim to use measurable information in your description of the behavior. This helps to ensure that your comments are objective.

3. Impact

The last step is to use "I" statements to describe how the other person's action has affected you or others.

For example:

"During yesterday morning's team meeting, when you gave your presentation, you were uncertain about two of the slides and your sales calculations were incorrect. I felt embarrassed because the entire board was there. I'm worried that this has affected the reputation of our team."

Next Steps

Once you've delivered your feedback, encourage the other person to think about the situation and to understand the impact of her behavior. (The Perceptual Positions technique can help her to explore how other people may think.) Allow her time to absorb what you've said as well, and then go over specific actions that will help her to improve.

Also, where someone has done something well, help him to think about how he can build on this.
Key Points
The Center for Creative Leadership developed the SBI™ feedback tool to help managers to deliver clear, specific feedback. SBI stands for:

To use the tool, describe the "when" and "where" of the situation. Next, describe the other person's behavior, only mentioning actions that you have observed. Then, communicate the impact of his or her behavior on you and others.

Finally, discuss what your team member needs to do to change this behavior in the future, or, if his behavior had a positive impact, explore how he can build on this.

SBI and Situation-Behavior-Impact are trademarks of the Center for Creative Leadership. For more information on how to use and apply this tool in your organization, check out the Center for Creative Leadership's workshop kit: Feedback that Works.

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The Situation - Behavior - Impact Feedback Tool: Providing Clear, Specific Feedback

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Imagine that you recently gave some feedback to a member of your team. You told him that his meeting agendas looked great, but he needed to improve his presentation skills. You follow up a few weeks later to find out why he hasn't made any changes.

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Tough Conversations and How to Approach Them

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Tough Conversations and How to Approach Them

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As leaders move up in their careers, they are more likely to have tough conversations with people within and outside of their organization. Tough conversations are necessary in all roles in order to progress through difficult situations. While we have all put off tough conversations or avoided them altogether, great leaders must know how to approach these conversations and face them head on and make sure to consider the other party when they do so.
Why We Avoid Tough Conversations
People put off tough conversations because they worry about the outcome: what might happen during and after the conversation. We want to be able to control where the conversation goes.

There are three kinds of tough conversations: giving feedback, sharing a tough decision or trying to influence the other person to come to a decision in your favor. The last kind is particularly difficult because you have a vested interest in the outcome.

Every time you step into a difficult conversation, vulnerability plays a role. Vulnerability is uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. This is precisely what makes conversations difficult: the unknown outcomes, the feeling of emotional exposure, and not knowing how the other person will respond. This is what causes people to delay having those conversations and giving feedback.
Initiating A Tough Conversation
So, how must a leader approach a tough conversation? First, you must ensure that you are ready to engage in the conversation, feedback or otherwise. Brené Brown has an Engaged Feedback Checklist (download required), which lets you self-assess if you are ready to have this kind of talk.

The next and most important step is to ask for permission. This means that "no" must be an option for the other party as well. In the book Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate, Daniel Shapiro and Roger Fisher listed five "core concerns" for every negotiation or tough conversation:

* Appreciation

* Autonomy

* Affiliation

* Status

* Role

These five concerns ensure that the other party feels safe in a tough conversation. By asking for permission, the other person may feel that their core concerns are acknowledged. If a conversation must happen, give the other person the timeframe and ask them to come see you when they are ready.

Lastly, be clear on the type of conversation that you are about to have. Are you giving feedback or sharing a decision? Sometimes, we call it feedback when it's really not.

Also, is it an influencing conversation where you want a specific decision from the other person, and you might be disappointed if they don't agree? Sometimes you just don't come to an agreement, but you must find a solution and move the conversation forward in some way.

Knowing the answers to these questions should help you get in the right frame of mind for this talk.
Key Aspects Of A Tough Conversation
Some people say that emotions have no part in business. However, in tough conversations, emotions will inevitably play a role. A great leader listens not just for content, but also for emotions.

Be ready to handle the emotions that arise. If tears come up, don't pretend that they are not there. Emotions inform us during conversations about what is and isn't OK. Sometimes, it shows us that it's OK to walk away from the conversation when we need to, to take some space so we can pick it up again later. You might need to have a series of conversations instead of trying to push for a result in a single discussion. Know when it's necessary to apologize.

Open up the discussion by choosing your words carefully and with empathy, seeking to understand the other person: "Help me understand ..." "Tell me more ..." "What's important about ..." You must also recognize when your own safety or the other party's safety is at risk. Remember the core concerns listed above.
Tips For Specific Conversations
As business leaders, you may face tough conversations regularly with specific groups of people.

If you need to have a tough conversation with a direct report, a colleague or an employee within your organization, consider what you want for them, not what you want the outcome to be for you. Be aware of who has the power, and recognize the environment you are in. If someone is not your direct report, the power may rely on their leader, not on you.

Tough conversations with a leader or a client are put off even more often. You might feel more at risk with them because they convey the power in the relationship. In this case, it is paramount to speak tentatively, keeping safety and respect top of mind. Rather than asserting truths or facts, opt for statements such as, "I was wondering why ..." "In my opinion ..." "I'm beginning to wonder if ..."

Lastly, here are some tips for any tough conversation:

* Speak from the heart and a place of vulnerability.

* Separate sharing facts from interpretations, assumptions or impacts.

* Use feeling words and "I" language to express yourself, and consider your tone of voice and body language.

* Be direct with empathy. Brené Brown says, "Clear is kind, unclear is unkind."

* When you make a mistake, own your part and reset the issue, or stop yourself and explain that it didn't come out as you would have liked and try again.

* Use the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) format for giving feedback. Show without shame or blame.

* Practice! We tend to build it up in our minds that we have to wait for something really big to have a conversation. Practice talking about small things before they become big things. Then, when something bigger or more uncomfortable comes up, you will have had plenty of practice and it will be easier, even if it is still uncomfortable.

* Consult references such as Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High , Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time and Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations.

Tough conversations aren't always easy, but I hope that the above tips inspire you to face them head on, with courage and vulnerability.

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Council Post: Tough Conversations And How Best To Approach Them

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As leaders move up in their careers, they are more likely to have tough conversations with people within and outside of their organization. Tough conversations are necessary in all roles in order to progress through difficult situations.

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A book excerpt from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead book — We need braver leaders and more courageous cultures.

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Performance Review Phrases for Development and Reflection

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Performance Review Phrases for Development and Reflection

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Figuring out how to phrase something can be tricky. Lean on these 28 performance review phrases to guide your more nuanced one-on-one conversations.

As the year begins to wind down (I know, I can't believe it's late October already!), a question I often get asked is: "Are there certain, handy performance review phrases that I can lean on, as I offer feedback to my direct report?"

Whether you do formal performance reviews in your company or not, you likely will have some sort of year-in-review, reflective conversation. Perhaps it's a one-on-one meeting, perhaps it's over dinner. Regardless, finding the right set up, the right lead-in, the right performance review phrases, to tee up what you're trying to say makes everything easier.

Through the thousands of conversations had in our online leadership community, The Watercooler, and working with 15,000+ people through Know Your Team, here are 28 different performance review phrases that you can put into practice at various points during your year-in-review meeting as a manager:

When you want to build trust with your direct report...

The best leaders know they're fallible - and they openly admit that to their team as a means of getting better, and building trust with their team. Use these performance review phrases when you need to do the same.

"Here's where I think I fell short"

"It was my fault when..."

"Here's what I intend to do differently..."

"I hate that I let you down when..."

"You were right when..."

"Thank you. I'm going to process and internalize that feedback as much as I can..."

When you want to encourage confidence in your direct report...

Try these performance review phrases when you want to positively reinforce your team member's behavior. These phrases are more specific and personal, than just a generic "Good job" or "Well done."

"Here's why you're a unique, valued contributor to the team..."

"I was most impressed when..."

"We hired you because..."

"The best work I think you produced this year was when..."

"I admire the way you..."

"I learn from you when..."

When you need to share critical feedback with your direct report...

We often dread performance reviews because we can't seem to figure out how to give honest feedback without coming across as demoralizing. These performance review phrases (paired with our framework on giving feedback) can help ensure the feedback you deliver is both honest and kind.

"I believe in your ability to improve in these things..."

"It's my job to support you in becoming better in these areas..."

"Can we riff together on ways we can better support each other?"

"May I offer some ideas for areas of growth?"

"Might I suggest a few challenges for you, as you look to accelerate your own growth and learning?"

"May I point out a few opportunities that might be useful, as you think about your career progression?"

When you're looking to create shared understanding between you and your direct report...

Sometimes, you're eager for a better sense of where your direct report stands. What do they think about the team? Are they engaged? Are they frustrated by anything? Use these performance review phrases - well, questions, in fact - to help reveal more understanding between the two of you.

"When have you felt most proud of what you were working on this past year?"

"When have you felt most motivated this past year?"

"When have you felt most disappointed in the team this past year?"

"What was the most energizing project for you to have worked on? Why?"

"What was the most frustrating project for you to have worked on? Why?"

"Is there anything I tend to do that you find - particularly helpful?"

"Is there anything I tend to do that you find particularly burdensome?"

"What are you most eager to improve on, for yourself, in the upcoming year?"

"What do you think is the greatest way, we as a team, can improve in the upcoming year?"

"If you had a wishlist for this team to be your ideal working environment, what would you put on it?"

The hardest part of having a conversation is oftentimes figuring out how to start them. Utilize these 28 performance review phrases during your end-of-the-year 1:1s to make it easier on yourself.

✨ Performance reviews are often given during one on one meetings. To help you structure these, you may want to take a peek at Know Your Team. Our software gives you the tools to run one-on-one meetings, get feedback, and build rapport with your team - along with a knowledge center based on data from 15,000+ people and a community of 1,000+ managers to learn from. Give Know Your Team a shot today.

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28 performance review phrases to consider using

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As the year begins to wind down (I know, I can't believe it's late October already!), a question I often get asked is: "Are there certain, handy performance review phrases that I can lean on, as I offer feedback to my direct report?"

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Template for Mid Year Performance Reivew

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Template for Mid Year Performance Reivew

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5 Warning Signs That Your Team is Not Agile

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5 Warning Signs That Your Team is Not Agile

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Is "Agile" a process, a methodology, a framework, or something else? Depending on who you talk to, you will likely get different answers. Some say that "Agile" is a mindset. What does all of this mean in practice?

Let's take a different approach to answering this question. Let's explore some signs or antipatterns that may help us identify none Agile teams . You may have experienced this yourself already on your projects.
Warning Sign #1 - "I need all the details before I can estimate how much work that is"
The way of planning work encourages us to work with what we know to avoid getting stuck analyzing every single detail of a problem before we start building the solution. This is the empirical approach which means we should learn from our experience. We should try to work in small increments and iteratively discover and refine the solution as we go.
Warning Sign #2 - "This is the way we have always done it"
Working in short iteration, by design, is a mechanism that helps our teams refine not just the products/solutions, but also the process that we are following to do the work. Working in an manner, we have natural checkpoints for reflection, so we should try to take advantage of those opportunities to improve how our Agile teams collaborate by investigating people, processes, and/or tools.
Warning Sign #3 - "The customer wants all of this so we need to give them everything!"
The Agile mindset encourage us to think about what is most important and valuable to the customers, and cut out anything that may not be meaningful. Even if the customer demands it, it's our responsibility to evaluate the benefit of the work we do.
Warning Sign #4 - "We can't change the schedule now; it's already been submitted to management"
The world is changing at a tremendous pace, and the needs of the customers are also evolving rapidly. Keeping up with this demand will be a huge challenge for most organizations and teams, but those that are able to do so effectively will most likely stand out from their peers. Finding ways to embrace change is a key principle in an Agile team. We should not fear change, but use it to our advantage.
Warning Sign #5 - "We will work every weekend if we have to in order to finish this project on-time!"
Many teams are under tremendous pressure to deliver, but pushing the workers to the limit is not a sustainable solution. You may get some short-term wins, but you could also impact morale and product quality. Working with an Agile mindset means we should try to strike a delicate balance between speed, quantity, and quality. We should look at the big picture and strive for long-term success.

In closing, the Agile Manifesto, which is generally considered the doctrine for Agilists, embodies the principles of Agile software development. It discusses many practices such as:

Reflect as a team regularly to find better ways of working

Focus on simplicity and consciously stop doing unnecessary work

Work towards a sustainable pace

It's not always easy to formally "adopt Agile", but it may make sense to find ways to in subtle ways leverage some of the principles to help improve the work that we do. You just might be surprised at the results!

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5 Warning Signs That Your Team is Not Agile | Cprime Blogs

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Is "Agile" a process, a methodology, a framework, or something else? Depending on who you talk to, you will likely get different answers. Some say that "Agile" is a mindset. What does all of this mean in practice? Let's take a different approach to answering this question.

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Communication is one of the organizational functions that helps a company to stay efficient and productive. One of the more important forms of organizational communication is inter-departmental communication, the Institute for Public Relations notes. The importance of communication between different departments in an organization becomes most evident when that communication breaks down. Implementing policies to strengthen inter-departmental communication help to underscore its importance and maintain an efficient flow of information.

Accurate and efficient communication between departments builds trust within the organization. When departments trust each other to deliver accurate information, this eliminates the extra fact-checking step that can slow down productivity. Departments should ensure that the information they are giving to other departments in the organization is reliable to help improve operational efficiency.

When inter-departmental communication is poor, customer service can suffer. For example, if a client continues to receive a bill for an invoice that was already paid because the accounts receivable department is not communicating properly with accounts payable, then there is the risk of losing repeat business. To retain clients and insure the flow of repeat business, you need to maintain a high level of customer service. When the departments in your company are efficiently sharing information, then clients can be properly attended to, and customer service improves.

If your sales department loses business because the manufacturing group was unaware of an increase in product demand, then your company suffers a loss of revenue. The accurate exchange of information between departments improves the ability to meet sales projections, to get product to distribution points and to have contracts and documents reviewed by the proper people.

Information exchange allows for a productive exchange between engineering and marketing about the release of a new product and gets information on prospective employment candidates to the human resources department. Improving communication between departments improves the efficiency of the overall operation of your organization.

A breakdown in communication at any point in the organization can result in conflict. If the shipping department does not get notification of an important shipment in time to make next day delivery, then that can cause a conflict among several departments in the organization. Finger-pointing and arguing accompany a breakdown in inter-departmental communication. When departments engage in conflict, the productivity of your entire organization is affected.

Effective communicators get noticed. Make it your mission to enhance communications within your organization, with a special focus on making sure your department is actively communicating to other company departments. A worker or manager who can contribute the advantages of good communication - efficiency, trust and service - and avoid the pitfalls of unnecessary conflicts and finger-pointing is an employee whose work will be noticed by department heads.

Good communication may not be a guarantee of quick advancement, but poor communication can most certainly hold you back.

Tip

Many organizations, for better or for worse, run on memos. Keep your memos concise, clear and professional. Make sure they are well-written, with attention to spelling, grammar and overall clarity. In general, it is better to send memos to too many recipients than it is to overlook an important recipient who may feel "out of the loop" if not copied on the latest inter-departmental message.

About the Author

George N. Root III began writing professionally in 1985. His publishing credits include a weekly column in the "Lockport Union Sun and Journal" along with the "Spectrum," the "Niagara Falls Gazette," "Tonawanda News," "Watertown Daily News" and the "Buffalo News." Root has a Bachelor of Arts in English from the State University of New York, Buffalo.

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The Importance of Communication Between Different Departments in an Organization

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The Importance of Communication Between Different Departments in an Organization. Communication is one of the organizational functions that helps a company to stay efficient and productive. One of the more important forms of organizational communication is inter-departmental communication, the Institute for Public ...

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It's safe to say your job can make a huge impact on your quality of life. For most of us, we spend around a third of our lifetimes at work.

Knowing how our workplace culture and environment impacts our job satisfaction, motivation, and sense of fulfillment is essential to designing the best employee experience.

If your employees are finding themselves frustrated, feeling unworthy, and sleep-deprived like a zombie, you'll need to focus on creating an environment that uplifts their morale, productivity, and relationships.

What's a human-centric workplace?

A human-centric workplace is one that revolves around its people and considers their specific needs.

Using human-centered design, we can apply the theory to crafting our workplaces, starting with intentionally hearing about the desires and pain points of employees. The end goal is to come up with custom-made solutions that address those specific needs.

Let's take this approach and see how human-centered design can be applied to the workplace. This concept consists of three unique elements:

Empathy. Meaning that there is genuine care for the people who will be using the workplace environment. It's essential to build empathy by immersing yourself in the community that will actually be involved with whatever you're designing, i.e. your employees.

Creativity. Especially in our changed working world, we'll need to find creative ways to solve new problems that have emerged, such as the problem of loneliness and lack of connection at work.
Business needs. We need to make our workplaces a core support for our employees' success, particularly when it comes to enabling collaboration and communication.

Creating an environment where employees can thrive starts with involving them in the design process. Here are several strategies that can help humanize your workplace.

Strategies to humanize your workplace

1. Offer flexibility

Flexible working is a major perk to employees. 64% of workers say that flexible scheduling they would like their employer to offer more flexible working arrangements. More schedule flexibility enables workers to balance their work and home life in a way that suits them, ensuring they're able to enjoy their free time and focus when they are at work.

Giving team members more ownership over their daily routine and productivity demonstrates trust in your team, helping them develop their time management skills. Providing tools such as time-tracking apps is a great way to help team members manage their focus autonomously.

However, flexible scheduling can add some potential challenges, such as getting people on different schedules into a meeting on time. Additional reminders can help employees stay on track here. For example, many companies use SMS appointment confirmations and personal reminders to ensure employees are fully prepared and on time for their meetings.

2. Recognize achievements

Recognition for accomplishments and hard work is an integral part of showing your employees that they're valued. While praise and appreciation are far from the only motivators in a happy and productive team, make sure that hard work is acknowledged because that's one more reason people perform at their best.

Recognizing achievement doesn't only mean rewarding employees for accomplishing set goals and targets. Giving a shout-out for great work in everyday tasks, such as noticing that a team member went above and beyond for a customer or proactively collaborated to solve a difficult problem is just as important. Paying attention to these details and awarding out-of-the-box thinking shows employees their impact and contributions.

3. Focus on employee wellness

Employees who feel overworked or stressed typically don't do their best jobs, affecting the entire team. Work burnout also leads to demotivation that can influence the mood of other colleagues. Furthermore, employees struggling to manage their workload are less likely to help other team members with their tasks or proactively think about future obstacles and solutions.

These factors highlight how leaders can provide support by initiating direct conversations that address a need for change. For example, regularly discussing ways a team member could streamline their tasks to reduce workload, leaders offering to alter their schedule, or providing advice on switching off after work. These conversations are critical in a remote or hybrid team, where you may not have as much face-to-face time to gauge how team members are feeling.

Taking care of employee wellbeing is essential for its own sake but brings very tangible benefits for your business. Satisfied employees are up to 20% more productive, and it's known that happy salespeople generate 37% more sales.

4. Create team goals

Rewarding individual accomplishments is one of the critical parts of making people feel valued, but working towards collective team goals is just as important.

Group targets encourage team members to collaborate, unify and share their knowledge with colleagues-which drives overall team performance and drive employee efficiency. Furthermore, this practice in working together gets employees more comfortable asking for or offering their skills to help a colleague.

Achieving a goal together strengthens the bonds between team members. Being part of a close team makes work more fulfilling; and achieving ambitious results can serve as a powerful motivator. When setting up a team-oriented project or team-building task, think about ways to involve remote workers.

5. Office layouts matter

The layout of your office affects how people work and interact in it. Shared workspaces make it easier to communicate and work together, but they have their drawbacks too. Separate work areas and offices enable employees to focus without interruption. They also provide the space for private one-on-one conversations, meetings, and group work. As a result, your office's mix of shared and private focus pods, meeting rooms, discussion spaces and social areas should reflect the needs of your human-centric workplace.

Teams with remote workers need to consider how they'll engage everyone in group work and meetings. If you're using video conferencing to connect remote workers to an in-office meeting, bear in mind that it's easy to unintentionally prioritize the input of in-office employees over those who are far away. For example, talking across one another is generally bad practice in a meeting, but this can make the conversation unintelligible over a video call. Referring to physical notes and charts can similarly cut remote workers out of the discussion. The bottom line is to grant a platform for everyone to share their ideas without neglecting those who are physically absent.

6. Provide learning and development opportunities

In today's competitive jobs marketplace, organizations have to promote from within and develop talent in order to sustainably scale. A popular reason why employees quit their jobs is because they feel like their growth is stagnant. Organizations that care about their employees will provide learning and training opportunities so that career advancement is a natural progression for all employees. By investing in your employees' careers, your teams and overall business will also grow.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, humans want to work at human-centric workplaces. Suppose you want employees to consider a long-term career at your business. In that case, there has to be a workplace environment that fulfills their needs for recognition, personal development, and rewarding teamwork. Companies need to understand their employees' needs to build the work environment that enables them to thrive in their role and as part of their team.

A human-centric workplace that rewards, supports, and develops its employee's benefits from motivated teams who are more than ready to meet the next challenge.

About Alexa

Alexa Lemzy is the blog editor and customer service maven at TextMagic. She's extremely enthusiastic about productivity advice, small business tools, and workplace innovations.

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6 strategies to create a human-centric workplace

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It's safe to say your job can make a huge impact on your quality of life. For most of us, we spend around a third of our lifetimes at work. Knowing how our workplace culture and environment impacts our job satisfaction, motivation, and sense of fulfillment is essential to designing the best employee experience.

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As technology develops at an accelerated pace, cognitive abilities and tasks that were once thought to be reserved for humans are increasingly being carried out by machines, causing growi...

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WEF: Resetting the Future of Work Agenda:Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World

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WEF: Resetting the Future of Work Agenda:Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World

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Accelerate! The Evolution of the 21st Century Organization

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Accelerate! The Evolution of the 21st Century Organization

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Accelerate! The Evolution of the 21st Century Organization

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Go Agile - 5 things agile organizations have in common

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Go Agile - 5 things agile organizations have in common

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We use cookies essential for this site to function well. Please click "Accept" to help us improve its usefulness with additional cookies. Learn about our use of cookies, and collaboration with select social media and trusted analytics partners here.

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Go agile: Five things agile organizations have in common

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We use cookies essential for this site to function well. Please click "Accept" to help us improve its usefulness with additional cookies. Learn about our use of cookies, and collaboration with select social media and trusted analytics partners here.

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Agility to Action - 4 Questions Leaders should ask

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Agility to Action - 4 Questions Leaders should ask

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Over the past few years, many companies have sought to be more agile by reconfiguring their organizations into small, cross-functional teams. In most cases, such exercises start with a pilot, in which employees from across the organization come together to work on a common mission. Such missions might include a bank building a product for its customers, a retailer tailoring an assortment for shoppers, or a fast-food chain implementing a plan to comply with changes in labor regulations in a specific country.

Moving beyond individual teams to implement an agile operating model requires that missions are loosely coupled but tightly aligned; teams should be able to execute their missions with minimum dependencies while ensuring the overall organization is geared toward generating value. Establishing such an operating model is intimately tied to the organization's strategy and how it creates value. The process involves a blueprinting phase, in which an organization's means of generating value for customers are mapped in a series of value streams, against which the operating model is then structured (Exhibit 1). While most organizations can design a logical blueprint, they struggle to understand and manage its implications.

A blueprint should segment teams based on how they create value-a step many companies overlook in their haste to launch pilot projects. Teams that are central to value generation and lie on the primary organizational axis stand as first among equals. These core teams lead the way for the rest of the organization by setting the priorities that can help accelerate value creation, with the other teams enabling it (Exhibit 2). The definition of these teams depends on the organization's industry, situation, and strategy. In a retailer that views supplier negotiations as a strategic differentiator, for example, these core teams might be aligned with merchandising. In another whose strategic differentiator is in-store experience, the teams might be focused on formats. This article explores four questions an agile organization must answer to develop an effective blueprint, put it into action, and create the most value.

1. Where should profit-and-loss ownership lie?

In a traditional organization, strategy determines which business units own the profit and loss (P&L). Agile operating models typically redesign business units into cross-functional teams around end-to-end value streams, so P&L ownership often needs to be revisited.

In an agile organization, core teams own the P&L and provide funding to other teams. For example, in a large North American retailer, the teams that are responsible for running the stores in line with a format's value proposition have P&L ownership. Other teams that have missions to get products on store shelves and develop and deliver an exceptional digital experience do not own a P&L but contribute to the success of the core teams.

2. How does one create incentives for teams that do not own a P&L?

If a team doesn't own a P&L, what incentives does it have to support other teams that do? This is where objectives and key results (OKRs) come into play. An OKR is a means of tying strategy to the actions carried out by teams. It consists of an objective that originates from the organization's strategy (such as increase market share of a product) and one or more key results that measure performance against that objective (for example, sales growth of 10 percent).

In an agile operating model, an enabling team will have primary OKRs of which it is the owner, in addition to a set of inherited OKRs it must achieve to support other teams in accomplishing their missions. To ensure that the inherited OKRs carry enough weight, some organizations consider making them mandatory for a team. In essence, for an enabling team to achieve its mission, it must meet not only the targets set in its primary OKRs but also a minimum target in its inherited OKRs.

For example, an e-commerce player needed to optimize its expenditure in search, so a few core teams had a primary OKR to achieve a certain return on investment (ROI) on paid search. Those core team OKRs produce a large number of inherited OKRs for enabling teams to achieve to accomplish the goal. Specifically, digital merchandising teams had to create more compelling landing pages for keyword searches, other teams needed to develop financial reports to help determine ROI on a daily basis, and so forth.

3. What is the framework for coordinating among teams?

For an agile operating model to work appropriately, an organization must set up the right cadence to ensure coordination among teams. Several organizations handle this task through an annual strategy and planning process, which includes two primary elements:

An annual exercise to define the objectives for the coming year in light of an organization's strategy as well as strategic initiatives to achieve those objectives. A North American retailer analyzes major customer and market trends and defines its objectives based on those trends.

A quarterly cadence (often called a quarterly business review) to evaluate performance against strategic goals and reprioritize based on changes in customer and market trends. Often in these cadences, the core teams set their priorities, which then guide enabling teams. For example, in a large North American service provider, the quarterly cadence takes place in two steps: the core teams determine their goals for the coming quarter, and then these goals are socialized with enabling teams, which make trade-offs based on their other priorities.

4. How does culture need to adapt to make this work?

On a fundamental level, an agile transformation is a cultural transformation. The operationalization of such a model, where the interdependence among teams must be managed to deliver value to customers, requires multiple mindset shifts. Three are of critical importance: empowerment, end-to-end ownership, and a service mindset in enabling teams.

Empowerment is needed from the very beginning of an agile transformation. One of the biggest hurdles is when leaders have a lack of trust in their employees, which often arises when workers lack the required capabilities. For example, a medium-size US insurance carrier was in the aspiration-setting phase of its agile transformation. During conversations, leadership was clearly hesitant to empower employees to make decisions. Upon further examination, the underlying fear centered on the inability of teams to deliver on objectives. Consequently, the plans incorporated a robust capability-building agenda to ensure frontline employees had the required skills-an essential element in achieving the transformation's goals.

To weather a crisis, build a network of teams

End-to-end ownership requires teams to focus on customer-centric outcomes, some of which might require coordinating with teams that sit beyond their own. For example, a medium-size North American software provider was developing the next version of its flagship online and mobile banking suite. While the core team had developed a robust business case and product road map, it had not taken ownership of how the product would be taken to market. Upon inquiry, most team members said developing this strategy was the job of the marketing and deployment teams: these teams had handled product launches in the past, and they had incentives to do so through the right key performance indicators. However, such thinking not only wasted precious time in bringing those teams on board but also meant several activities that could have been completed in parallel (such as drafting legal contracts) threatened on-time delivery. Solving the challenge required the core team leader to take end-to-end ownership of the product and pull in colleagues to complete all necessary activities to take it to market.

Enabling teams in such organizations need to adopt a service mindset. The fact that certain priorities originate from a set of core teams does not mean that enabling teams are less important. However, helping them come to this realization can require significant change management. For example, in the case of the previously mentioned software provider, the cybersecurity group had historically set its own priorities. Now that the organization had been redesigned with a core team responsible for designing the flagship online and mobile banking suite, the cybersecurity group had to reprioritize its objectives based on the needs of the core team. This reprioritization required the cybersecurity group to shift its mindset, a process that happened gradually through a series of conversations between the group and the core team. The result was alignment on how critical the cybersecurity group's work was to the successful development of the flagship suite.

Designing a blueprint is only the first step in reconfiguring an organization to create value through agility. Putting the blueprint into action requires a major shift-categorizing teams as core or enabling. To make such a model work, the organization must reevaluate P&L ownership and incentives for enabling teams to support core teams, ensure the deployment of a robust strategy and planning cadence, and instill a culture that encourages empowerment, end-to-end accountability, and a service mindset among enabling teams.

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Agility to action: Operationalizing a value-driven agile blueprint

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Over the past few years, many companies have sought to be more agile by reconfiguring their organizations into small, cross-functional teams. In most cases, such exercises start with a pilot, in which employees from across the organization come together to work on a common mission.

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Most Leaders Don't Even Know the Game They're In

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Most Leaders Don't Even Know the Game They're In

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Most Leaders Don't Even Know the Game They're In | Simon Sinek

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After nearly a year and a half of decentralized collaboration, companies all over the world are redefining their vision of what it means to be "at work." While digital technologies like email and smartphones have always blurred the distinction between being at work and being out of the office, for many white-collar workers, the pandemic has eliminated any separation that might have remained.

To restore balance and sustain productivity, leaders need to reckon with exactly what has happened to their employees' work lives. Unlike with prior digital work technologies, which were typically adopted first by either the busiest executives (top-down), or by employees in field support, sales, or remote locations (outside-in), Covid-19 forced many office teams into working solely atop digital technologies all the time. For the average worker and frontline manager who were used to working in a standard physical location during "regular hours" - usually 9 AM-5 PM - the change has been abrupt and disorienting, necessitating new plans and expectations. And as hybrid and remote options become mainstream, companies need to incorporate positive and negative learnings from the pandemic year. The " new normal " in fact demands new norms for work itself.

One of the basic factors in determining these new work norms is the concept of "team overlap" i.e., the extent to which the work hours of different team members coincide. In the physical workplace, having regular work hours typically guarantees a high degree of overlap between one team member and the rest of the team. With remote and hybrid work, that level of overlap is not as common.

To understand the patterns and implications of team overlap during remote work, we studied the work behaviors of 187 individuals across six Fortune 500 companies that have transitioned to remote work in 2020. (These companies were all clients of Soroco, an enterprise software company focused on understanding the "work graph" of how teams interact digitally, where three of the authors work.) The workers in our sample were spread across 22 teams, with an average team size of about 10 members. All of these workers previously had well-defined office locations and office hours; virtually none of them do now.

We found a number of patterns in teams' work behavior, and saw in particular that overlap is important to consider when developing new norms for remote and hybrid work. Understanding these trends is essential to figuring how to lead teams as they navigate new modes of working. Managers can use these sorts of analyses in guiding a digital team charter, which can help preserve the flexibility of remote and hybrid work, while counteracting the psychological and practical downsides many workers experienced over the past year and a half.

Always on, but never all together.

Our findings confirm a now-familiar truth: the digital workday never really ends. On average, individual team members are available for work for 8+ hours in the day - using the conservative measurement of "being available for work" as being on a work computer for 30+ minutes in the hour. On average, teams are on their PCs for 45 minutes each hour, for 6.1 hours of effort over the course of each 24-hour workday (as outlined in the first graph, below).

The remote workday is divided into two distinct portions: an 8-hour window from 9-5 where team members generally work together and a 16-hour window where team members generally work apart. During the first window, team members on average overlap with 50-70% of their colleagues, and can generally be considered to be working together. During the longer "off hours" window, team members overlap with 10-50% of their colleagues, and can thus be considered to be working apart.

The graph of this data tells us a few important things.

In the 9 AM-5 PM window when there's the highest overlap, there are two peaks, one at 10 AM and another at 3 PM; outside of this range, there are low ebbs, but no time when everyone is completely off. This insight, in turn, contains four empirical observations that are the proverbial "elephants in the room" that managers must account for in remote and hybrid work: digital workers are working odd hours alone; the digital workday is truly endless; the digital team is usually not all together; and midday constraints matter much more during the digital workday.

First, the digital day implies working odd hours, alone. The "regular" work hours of 9-5 have survived the transition to remote work, but they only account for 60% of the work effort of the team. An average team member on an average team spends 40% of their work hours essentially working apart from their team members - and outside of regular working hours.

Second, the digital day is truly endless. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of emails arriving from team-members at all hours of the day - from team members who log on early or burn the midnight oil. What our data shows us is that this is not a scattered or one-off phenomenon. Even at the lowest point in the workday - 4 AM - on average 10+% of the team is available and putting in 30+ minutes of work in the hour. Given that the team size in the sample is 10.2 individuals, this means that one member of the team is typically online and working, no matter what time of day or night it is.

Third, digital teams are rarely all together. In our dataset, we saw a few teams that mimicked in-person hours, meaning that 90% of the team was online during traditional work hours. However, this is not the norm. The average overlap measured across all 22 teams in our dataset, maxes out at approximately 71% during 10-11 AM, and then again at 60% during 3-4 PM. This means, on average, that at least 29% of the team is not online - no matter what hour of the workday it is.

Fourth, midday constraints matter. Team overlap drops gradually after 10 AM, to a trough in the 12-1 PM slot, before recovering gradually again for the 3 PM afternoon peak. This slow drop and extended recovery is produced by different members of the team taking breaks at different points in the middle of the workday. There is no longer any social reason for people to take their lunch breaks together, so in the digital world, they lunch on their own time.

All these changes make the digital workday practically and psychologically different from traditional office work.

Does the work schedule actually matter?

What does all of this mean for productivity?

While our data set does not contain time tracking from before our teams transitioned to remote work, we observed (the second graph) that - on average - there was no correlation between the time of the day and hourly productivity. The 22 teams in our data set performed a total of 39 business processes, and each team member could choose when they performed each task. In effect, team members naturally scheduled their work so that their hourly productivity was constant.

Greater or lower team overlap was however an important factor for productivity; and by looking at how hourly productivity is related to team overlap, we saw that the business processes performed by our teams fall into three categories, according to whether having other team members online can help, hurt, or have no effect on completing certain tasks.

41% of business processes were positively correlated with team overlap: Having a colleague around to give you that input you needed or to help you clarify how to do your work is often productive. In 16 out of the 39 processes that we studied, we saw workers were nearly 25% more productive during 9-5 than time elsewhere. Examples of such work include finalizing rates for insurance quotes, creating and approving production plans, and managing changes to the inventory.

33% of business processes were neutrally correlated with team overlap: In 13 out of the 39 processes that we studied, productivity did not appear to depend on whether team members were working at the same time - and thus, it didn't seem to matter when in the workday these tasks were completed. Example of such work include creating purchase orders and monitoring supply-demand status of products and warehouse allocations.

26% of business processes were negatively correlated with team overlap. In 10 out of the 39 processes that we studied, team overlap was associated with low productivity - 28% lower during regular work hours, compared to times with lower team overlap. Perhaps worryingly, team members often conducted these processes between 9 AM-5 PM when there was high overlap. (That said, our data do not allow us to rule out the possibility that some of the negative correlation in this category was driven by team members shifting work on the most difficult parts of tasks to periods of high overlap.) Examples of such work include releasing purchase orders and updating employee details in a database.

Business processes in the first category benefit from team members working together at the same time; those in the second category are particularly good candidates for being conducted remotely in the long run; and those in the third category would benefit from explicit norms allowing team members to work on them remotely without distraction.

Lessons for Managers

Managers must consider how the digital workday might lead team members to push themselves harder or work odd hours. In some cases, team members may need to work for more hours in order to achieve the same outcomes. In other cases, the amount of work time may appear more burdensome when performed alone, at odd hours of the day or night, without much social cohesion and contact.

Teams can address these challenges through a digital team charter, which establishes norms on work hours and team overlap. Some specific areas of focus include:

Making time to be together: You should establish "together hours" where 50+% of the team is expected to be online and working together. In our data set, we saw that teams had on average 7+ hours in the workday during which more than half the team was consistently online. Those hours are also when you should schedule business processes that benefit from having greater team overlap - as well as making and communicating decisions that affect the entire group.

Not forcing overlap: You shouldn't be concerned if your team is not overlapping in a contiguous 7-hour block, or if the team is unable to achieve 50+% overlap all the time. (In our data set, we saw team overlap range from of 4-10 hours a day.) In every team there are processes that appear to be best performed individually, at times of low overlap.

Not micromanaging schedules: Allow your employees the flexibility to schedule their business processes as per their personal timing preferences. In our data, most team members appeared to naturally conduct their work at the times of the day when those business processes could be most efficiently performed.

Letting people log off: Establish norms for your team members to take the time and space to do focused work. These take two forms: "heads down" time, i.e., specific hours in the calendar where no team meetings are to be scheduled and team members are expected not to contact each other unless absolutely necessary, and "do not disturb" flags that individuals can use to signal when they need to focus.

The digital charter you create shouldn't be a static document - you should revisit it regularly (e.g., at the start of each quarter) as your team gains experience with digital collaboration.

Managers also need to focus on reducing the toil of digital work. This presents serious challenges in a remote/hybrid work context since managers can no longer walk the hallway and build managerial intuition on a sustained program of toil reduction. Reducing physical toil requires objective assessment of what the end-user is doing at work; how that work is organized into structured vs. unstructured processes; and how those processes can be improved through multiple levers such as process improvement, user training, automation, and upgrade of underlying IT applications.

Managers can rebuild their intuition either through periodic retrospectives (as part of their digital team charter), via the use of internal or external operations consulting teams, or via the use of new tools that apply computer science to understanding how teams work in a digital environment.
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Remote work is here to stay - and with it, new challenges for collaboration and productivity. Our research corroborates prior accounts of the remote workday as being "unending" - with productivity stretched across all hours, and periods of employee isolation. At the same time, we found that working alone can sometimes be productive - and in many cases, employees seem to be doing a good job of allocating tasks across different periods of the day.

Our analysis highlights the importance of establishing norms around team overlap, and suggests some simple strategies for combating the remote work's practical and psychological downsides. With this sort of research, we can use lessons from the pandemic period to improve business operations - and make them more sustainable for employees in the long run.

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After nearly a year and a half of decentralized collaboration, companies all over the world are redefining their vision of what it means to be "at work." While digital technologies like email and smartphones have always blurred the distinction between being at work and being out of the office, for many white-collar workers, the pandemic has eliminated any separation that might have remained.

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3 Secrets of Resilient People - Lucy Hone

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3 Secrets of Resilient People - Lucy Hone

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3 secrets of resilient people | Lucy Hone

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Transforming Beyond the Crisis - Head, Heart, and Hands

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Transforming Beyond the Crisis - Head, Heart, and Hands

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None of these ambitious changes can happen without a capable and energized workforce. That big digital leap, for example, is contingent on having the right talent and culture. Indeed, talent and culture must align with your context and business strategy. So companies need to be sure that a focus on people figures prominently in their transformation agenda. They must also be sure that the impact on people is considered across all the "big rocks"-the most urgent and most promising priorities-in your transformation agenda. To illustrate, in dealing with an organizational restructuring, you would normally address structure first, then roles and processes, and only later, during implementation, would you deal with talent. Today, it's important to emphasize skills and talent during early-stage blueprinting. Successfully addressing the unprecedented and unrelenting challenges depends on having the talent to innovate creative solutions and an engaged workforce to carry them out.

Envision the future workplace. This strategic consideration, which is integrally tied to the Heart and Hands, should be front and center. That's because, despite the tremendous disruptions COVID-19 has wreaked on markets, supply chains, and entire industries (like tourism), no disruption has been as pervasive-or is likely to be as sustained-as the disruption to the workplace. Once government restrictions are lifted (or guidelines relaxed), organizations should take this rare opportunity to rethink how we work.

Which business activities do we need to prioritize for an in-person restart? Which activities or processes that were temporarily managed remotely could be permanently handled that way? Are there others that show promise?

What type of working mode-from fully co-located to fully remote, with various hybrid options in between-would be ideal for employees working in each area of activity? For example, are there locations where a sitewide alternating onsite/offsite work model would be most conducive to cross-functional collaboration? Are there functions, teams, or locations where an ad-hoc once- or twice-a-month, in-person working mode would be sufficient to foster connection and affiliation?

What changes in organizational footprint, technology, tools, and daily processes will be required to realize these working-mode shifts? The seeds of many effective daily practices-collaboration tools, team routines, remote coaching-are likely already sprouting in your organization. Find the pockets of best practice and scale them. Others-including those related to cyber- and data security, and core people processes such as recruiting, onboarding, and performance management-will need to be redesigned.

Operationalizing the future of work through a thoughtfully planned return to the physical workplace will be crucial. Leaders need to consider how much flexibility to give employees in the timing and method of their onsite restart, recognizing that their ability to return will be affected by other factors, such as extended school closures and other family members' work-restart schedules. And leaders and teams will need to be especially mindful of not favoring certain groups of employees on the basis of their ability and willingness to be physically present, especially in the early days of a physical restart.

Make a truly human-centered case for change. Here, it's not just about determining the burning platform that will compel people to act out of anxiety or fear; those motivators are already in ample supply as individuals and organizations grapple with the ambiguity and insecurity sparked by the pandemic and its knock-on effects. Rather, it's important to appeal to people's deepest motivations in a positive way-to establish the aspiration for new possibilities that the organization can achieve, rooted in a broader purpose-and to galvanize people around that aspiration. This can be especially difficult, and is even more critical, in unsettled times, when employees hunger for a sense of clarity, meaning, and belonging. It is also one of the areas where the Head and the Heart need to be intimately intertwined.

The Heart: Build on Strengths Forged in Crisis

When we speak of the Heart of transformation, we're referring to four areas, or "chambers": demonstrating care for people whose lives have been disrupted; activating purpose to inspire employees and connect with customers and communities alike; creating an empowering culture where people can do their best work; and leading with Head, Heart, and Hands.

The pandemic has called for a focus on Heart to a degree greater than most organizations would commit to under ordinary circumstances. Companies now have an opportunity to embed Heart into their norms and practices. Doing so effectively requires leaders to look through three lenses:

Retrospective: assessing our actionsduring the initial stage of the crisis. Where were our Heart actions especially strong? Where have we missed the mark? Which crisis response practices might we want to retain?

Current: considering our recovery strategy and the actions we are taking to weather the storm. What kind of culture and leadership do we need to propel ourselves through uncertainty into postpandemic success? Are we clear on our purpose and our commitment to ensuring employees', customers', and stakeholders' engagement and well-being?

Prospective: examining our need to increase resilience. Which Heart actions will help us build individual and collective resilience and continue to learn from crises big and small?

Demonstrate care to alleviate disruption. Everyone's life has been disrupted in the past several months, but many lives have been devastated by the disease itself, by its economic impacts, or by both. This pattern of disruption and devastation will continue into the foreseeable future. We cannot assume that employees or, for that matter, consumers will simply "snap back" to normal.

In developing recovery strategies-which include accelerated digital transformation, new ways of working, and associated workforce adjustments-leaders should ask themselves which crisis-era care practices should be retained, or even strengthened. These could be more-generous benefits, upskilling support, efforts to bolster employees' mental as well as physical welfare, or flex work options. (See "Care Tactics.") The deliberate and ongoing focus on connection and relationships will help provide a foundation for well-being and resilience during what promises to be a difficult time.

Double down on activating purpose. The all-encompassing disruption triggered by COVID-19 has led many people to ponder the "big" questions. Beyond the need to secure a paycheck (a very real concern for many), people are yearning to find meaning in their work. They wonder: Why am I doing what I do? How am I-and the organization I work for-improving the world? Why does my work matter?

Many organizations have leaned into their purpose during the crisis, going above and beyond to lend their unique capabilities to help customers, communities, and other businesses in need. SAP (whose purpose statement is "helping the world run better and improving people's lives") provided software to hospitals to help them screen patients, support health care workers, and manage information flow. The company is also collaborating with Deutsche Telekom on a contact tracing app for the German government.

During the difficult time ahead, companies must continue practicing their purpose and offering meaningful experiences to all stakeholders. Leaders may need to step back and consider whether the company in fact has a well-articulated and resonant purpose-one that applies the organization's strengths to fulfill a distinct need in the world. If not, then now is the time to discover, articulate, and activate it.

"Hot forge" an empowering culture. Culture-the way work gets done in an organization-gets "hot forged" in a crisis. Every decision you make, every communication you issue, every action you take, good or bad, intentional or unintentional, sets your culture. It is critical to be attentive to shaping culture as you forge recovery plans in order to ensure that your organization is on the right cultural path. This is especially important because remote work, social distancing, and safety protocols limit the opportunities for bonding, which is so crucial to reinforcing culture.

Most leaders we have spoken to over the past months have remarked that during the peak of the outbreak they moved with unprecedented speed, collaboration, empowerment, partnership, focus, caring-and a "just do it" attitude. For them, the question now is, How do we bottle what worked so well to get us through the crisis? They cannot afford to go back to the old ways. For example, to further empower people, companies might build test-and-learn experimentation into standard processes or formalize highly distributed decision making. To foster individual and organizational resilience, they might emphasize accomplishment, achievement, and strong social connections.

Or take the example of crowdsourcing ideas for improving remote work. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, who took the helm midcrisis, developed a "work from home" pledge based on grassroots discussions among colleagues about the challenges they faced. Inspired by their ideas, Krishna crafted a pledge rather than imposing a policy, a move he believed would be more "from the heart" and more action-oriented. The pledge (which he posted on LinkedIn) includes commitments to being family-sensitive, allowing flexibility for people's personal needs, supporting "not-camera-ready" times, being kind, setting boundaries (and preventing videoconferencing fatigue), taking care of oneself, checking in frequently on others, and staying connected.

Lead with Head, Heart, and Hands. Perhaps the most critical question, given the impact of leadership on any organization, is, How will leaders guide the organization beyond the crisis into recovery?

The crisis has been a true test of leadership. Many leaders have risen to the occasion, bringing much-needed clarity (Head) and mobilizing resources against critical actions (Hands). The leaders who stand out have done this while leading and communicating with great care, empathy, and humility (Heart). In the vast majority of cases, leaders now face enormous short-term pressure to improve business results, drive transformation-or both. During recovery, employees, customers, and society will hold them accountable. Under these circumstances, everything that causes the Heart to be neglected in normal times will increase by an order of magnitude. The challenge for leaders now is to sustain, if not intensify, the focus on all three elements.

IBM CEO Krishna's pledge is as much an example of leading with Head, Heart, and Hands as it is of fostering the right culture. Another important move is holding weekly town halls in which leaders address the Head, Heart, and Hands. There are also a number of ways they can articulate, activate, and embed the commitment to each element.

For example, to focus the leadership team on the big rocks (the Head), CEOs and senior leaders can hold a virtual offsite to set the vision, following up with weekly sessions to ensure they're on track and remain aligned. To embed Heart, leaders might reduce or eliminate the number of steering committees so that it's easier to get work done. Senior leaders can solicit a dissenting opinion in every discussion and encourage team members to provide their viewpoint and explain how they will test it before leaders offer theirs. Senior leaders can also seek face time with one or two up-and-coming leaders every day to show support and see how they are doing. And to bolster the Hands, leaders can invest in building their own digital and remote-work muscle; for example, by using the platforms their employees are using, such as Slack and Trello.

The Hands: Shape the New Reality of Work

When it comes to operationalizing the business's recovery and transformation, engaging the Hands-the organization's ability to execute and innovate with agility-will not be as simple as flipping a switch. The COVID crisis has disrupted daily operations and ways of working in nearly every organization, which is at best confusing for people in their individual and team roles. To enable people to drive transformation in this new reality, leaders need to focus especially on three aspects of the Hands: reinventing ways of working, upskilling to address the digital skills chasm, and leveraging creative talent acquisition models.

Reinvent ways of working. Practically overnight, the COVID crisis forced most organizations to fundamentally shift the way day-to-day work gets done. This has not been easy, but most organizations have landed on at least some practices that work. They should use these as a foundation for rethinking how teams and employees can work in a more agile and digitally enabled way. For example, how can you:

Focus on managing toward objectives and key results (and output), rather than by defining activities?

Expand the agile practices that are serving remote teams well-such as stand-up meetings, backlog planning, and iterative working-across your organization?

Further encourage the use of digital communication and collaboration tools to foster and facilitate remote and asynchronous work?

Enable teams to set work arrangements (times and location) to maximize flexibility, collaboration, and productivity while accommodating the needs of the team and of individual members who require asynchronous collaborative mechanisms to deal with child care or other home responsibilities?

It's important to pay special attention to teams working in "hybrid mode." For example, if most members of a team are working in the office, the few working from home could be perceived as uncommitted. Conversely, when offices tight on space demand that some employees work part- or full-time from home, those workers can feel marginalized or excluded. It's critical to identify and stick to norms that level the playing field; for example, holding online-only meetings and agreeing that all team members-even those in the office-join individually from their respective computers so that everyone is sharing a virtual experience.

During our own 12-plus years of internal efforts in work flexibility and productivity, BCG has discovered tremendous benefits in allowing teams to set their own work rhythms and arrangements; the role of leaders and managers is to establish guardrails and encourage teams to choose their own norms, to which members hold one another accountable. By giving teams agency in shaping ways of working that suit everyone, employee engagement and productivity can flourish. In our own case, we have seen a 35% increase in effective teamwork, collaboration, and value delivered to clients, and a 75% increase in the number of employees who want to stay with the firm over the long term.

Upskill to address the digital skills chasm. The pandemic has dramatically shifted customers' preferences and demands. It has also put pressure on organizations to automate. As a result, companies will need to focus even more intensively on upskilling to enable their people to work with (and innovate) digital tools and offerings. Some digital skills will likely be in high demand over the coming months, so for most organizations, relying purely on recruitment is impractical. Building such capabilities requires more than a few virtual training sessions. That means the time to start upskilling employees is now.

Organizations can get going by:

Identifying areas ripe for further digitization.In some pockets of the organization, such as customer-facing functions, it will be harder to defer digitization during the rebound. Investing in in-depth upskilling in such core areas as advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and human-centered design will be important.

Holding upskilling boot camps. Invest in intensive training for all those working remotely, covering topics as wide-ranging as working effectively from home, agile practices, and digital fluency, including analytics and digital marketing.

Starting with executives.Put all executives and senior leaders through a digital upskilling regimen so they can lead, engage, and communicate on the digital big rocks of the recovery strategy.

Grooming the stars of your crisis response. Who among your leaders and employees was particularly effective and impressive in the crisis response? Many companies were surprised by the talent that stood out positively; it was often not the usual high-potentials. These new stars would be perfect candidates for helping to drive the organization's transformative recovery. Invest in focusing them on this purpose.

Tapping your best to upskill the rest. Talented employees at every level can help advance your upskilling efforts. Enlisting their help has many advantages: They know how things get done, as well as how to get things done. They understand the culture. And inviting them to contribute is a powerful motivator.

Leverage creative talent acquisition models. Upskilling can take time, so you might need to augment your efforts with such tactics as engaging gig employees or using talent sharing. Talent sharing emerged as a creative "fix" in many places during the early days of the crisis; London's Nightingale Hospital and Freshippo supermarkets, for instance, faced extreme staff shortages and got a helping hand from Virgin Atlantic (UK) and Yunhaiyao restaurants (China), which found themselves with spare capacity. Consider internal talent sharing, too: redeploying employees with relevant skills to areas of greater need within the organization. Talent sharing can be a powerful lever as companies cope with the potentially uneven nature of recovery across industries, locations, and functions.

Embedding Head, Heart, and Hands in Recovery-Linked Transformation

Bringing a deliberate, balanced, integrated, and disciplined people focus to all aspects of Head, Heart, and Hands will help turbocharge and sustain your organization's transformative recovery. Deliberate, to ensure that each element is part of the plan. Balanced, to give appropriate weight to each element. Disciplined, because shedding old habits and building new ones takes time as well as regular practice. And integrated, so that rather than compartmentalizing people-focused initiatives you conceive of them holistically, recognizing their interrelationships and mutual reinforcement. (See the exhibit.)

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Transforming Beyond the Crisis with Head, Heart, and Hands

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None of these ambitious changes can happen without a capable and energized workforce. That big digital leap, for example, is contingent on having the right talent and culture. Indeed, talent and culture must align with your context and business strategy. So companies need to be sure that a focus on people figures prominently in their transformation agenda.

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When people working with me face a perplexing problem, they often ask for guidance. I can't help but feel a little flattered. They are obviously stumped, and they expect I will have the answer. My first instinct is to sit back, stroke my chin, recount an impressive story or two, and then tell them what to do.

Though incredibly satisfying, this approach rarely works.

First, I might not even be solving the right problem. I don't have the insight of those on the front line, so I end up relying on my own history, what I think are similar events. Second, though the team was relieved by my answer, they are probably not fully committed to making it work. It isn't their idea, after all, and if it doesn't pan out it's easy to blame the boss by saying, "We knew it wasn't going to work all along."

When it does fail, finger pointing begins. My advice was good, I continue to convince myself, so the problem must have been their execution. The next time I will be even more specific to ensure they don't mess up again. Soon we are in a doom loop of increasing micromanagement. I want them to succeed, but I suspect they are not capable of doing that by themselves. Like a helicopter parent, I step in to play roles they should play for themselves, undermining the team's self-confidence and removing their opportunity to develop skills they will need as future leaders.

This approach has a long history. Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the first management consultants and someone whose ideas were widely influential, taught executives to tightly supervise employees, warning that, in his estimation, workers deliberately try to do no more than one-third to one-half of a proper day's work, while pretending to appear as busy as possible. Managers must do the thinking and tell others what to do, he asserted, because workers aren't smart enough to manage themselves. In his 1911 monograph " The Principles of Scientific Management," Taylor wrote that a worker performing routine tasks "shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type."

Today, such ideas seem entirely wrong-headed. Nearly 33% of the U.S. population 25 years and older has at least a bachelor's degree. Younger generations are increasingly data savvy and tech literate. And 30% of the U.S. workforce is part of the creative class, the fastest growing group in developed economies, and one that research has found to be less inspired by money and more by intrinsic motivators such as the ability to make choices.

It's no surprise that Taylor's approach has been giving way in recent years to a different understanding of leadership. In his first interview after becoming CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella told The New York Times: "Perhaps the No. 1 thing that leaders have to do [is] to bolster the confidence of the people you're leading." Three years later, in his book Hit Refresh, he asserted this even more forcefully: "I have come to understand that my primary job is to curate our culture so that one hundred thousand inspired minds - Microsoft's employees - can better shape our future."

As I've studied and learned more about agile ways of working, I've concluded that instead of giving answers to teammates with a challenge, everyone is better served if I ask three questions.

1. What do you recommend?

Asking this may rock your associates back on their heels for a moment, but once the surprise has worn off, they learn to come to any discussion prepared with a hypothesis. If they don't have a recommendation ready, we may brainstorm for a while, but eventually I will adjourn and ask them to come back when they have one. I won't let them go before I say: "I trust you. You are closer to this than I am, and you will know how to adapt as the situation evolves."

I'd guess that 75% of the most practical and effective ideas for innovation come from the frontline workers closest to customers and operations. This group understands customer frustrations, operating realities, technology opportunities, and other issues much better than people in ivory towers do.

2. How can we test that?

A fascinating recommendation has been made. We've got something that could be exciting - now, how do we take it for a test drive? A test-first approach allows a leader to let the team's idea play out at relatively low cost and risk. Even if I am skeptical of an approach, rather than launch a fight or engage in theoretical arguments, I push the team to create a prototype and see if it will work. Sometimes I am surprised.

Behavioral scientists such as Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely have taught me to use creative, real-world experiments to discover what customers really do rather than relying on rational calculations of what they should do. Business systems aren't complicated like a watch you can take apart, fix, and put back together. They're complex. Ideas that sound right don't always play out as expected in the real world. Testing offers helpful surprises, and, with deliberate practice, we get better at it.

3. What do you need from me?

Think about what obstacles you will face, I advise each team, and then tell me what I can do to help you address them. Do you need resources? Money? A testing environment? Access to teammates with certain skills? This puts the right part of the burden on me and makes sure I am working to facilitate and accelerate their work rather than inspecting and impeding it.

When people who have good ideas aren't allowed to contribute, they grow disengaged. Surveys show that globally only 15% of employees feel engaged in their work. Professor Amar Bhidé of The Fletcher School at Tufts University has found that more than 70% of successful startups are launched by people who had their idea while at a previous employer. Instead of finding a way to harness those good ideas, the companies end up paying millions to buy the startup later. Research done by my firm, Bain & Company, has found that companies that unleash the time, talent, and energy of people develop employees who are more engaged and 40% more productive.

But how managers treat their employees matters in ways that stretch beyond productivity and profits. Troubling statistics suggest that today many people regard purposeful work as an oxymoron. The majority ( 56%) of adults worldwide believe that capitalism is doing more harm than good. More than 60% of American employees describe themselves as burned out, and they are beginning to vote with their feet. In a movement some economists are calling the Great Resignation, more than half of U.S. workers are considering a job change. For them, the Covid-19 pandemic has been a wakeup call to act on their suspicion that life is too short to waste on bad jobs.

By creating a workplace in which employees are encouraged to innovate and exercise their creative passions, leaders can both improve their company's near-term results and contribute to a necessary re-thinking of the contract between employer and employee. They can help make bad jobs good, and it starts with three simple questions.

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3 Questions to Help Your Team Solve Problems

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When people working with me face a perplexing problem, they often ask for guidance. I can't help but feel a little flattered. They are obviously stumped, and they expect I will have the answer. My first instinct is to sit back, stroke my chin, recount an impressive story or two, and then tell them what to do.

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The Art of Giving Clear, Intentional Feedback

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The Art of Giving Clear, Intentional Feedback

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If you've ever walked away from a performance review confused about where you stand, you're not alone. The art of giving clear, intentional, and valuable feedback is tricky to master, which is why so many employees have experienced underwhelming performance reviews.

At Culture Amp, our mission is to build a better world of work. Useful feedback, an effective performance management system, and the overall employee experience are inextricably intertwined. That's why we put together this list of performance review phrases to guide you in the right direction and sharpen your ability to provide useful feedback - whether it's about yourself, your direct reports, or your team members.

Performance review phrases to use during a self-evaluation

Self-evaluations can be awkward. You don't want to pat yourself on the back too much, but it can also feel uncomfortable to openly share your areas of weakness with others. One way to combat this mental block is to utilize phrases that are more objective in nature. Chris Zeller, an Executive Recruiter at Adecco, explains, "It's always helpful to keep feedback rooted in observable behavior, which has nothing to do with intent or inherent traits."

This recommendation is aligned with the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) feedback model, which aims to focus on facts and less on subjective assessments. To use this model, you structure your feedback around the following components:

Situation: Describe the situation. Be specific about when and where it occurred.

Behavior: Describe the observable behavior.

Impact: Explain how the action has affected others.

Based on this advice, here are phrases you can use during the self-evaluation portion of your performance review.

To recognize positive performance

I demonstrated [behavior] when I [example].

This phrase is effective when talking positively about your performance because it identifies a strength while also providing a concrete example. This phrase is useful and makes it less awkward to talk about yourself since you're not subjectively assessing your personality.
Examples:
I successfully completed [project or milestone] ﻿and, as a result, achieved [results].﻿

This performance review phrase is less focused on your behaviors and more focused on the results of specific milestones you reached or projects you completed. This is a great phrase to use if you have strong data points to share.
Examples:
To acknowledge areas of improvement

I recognize that I could improve in [area of improvement]. I plan to do so by [action].﻿

While it's tough to talk about the areas you need improvement in, this performance review phrase is helpful because it immediately offers a solution to the "problem." This shows your manager that you're proactive, self-aware, and driven because you're taking ownership of your weaknesses. Kate Snowise, an executive coach and manager, explains, "There is one skill that can massively impact the way existing and emerging leaders are perceived by their peers and superiors: demonstrating initiative through being consistently solution-focused."
Examples:
I'm going to stop doing [action] because I know it results in [consequence].﻿

This performance phrase is more direct. It pinpoints a specific action that you know has negative results or consequences, while demonstrating your commitment to avoiding it in the future.
Examples:
Performance review phrases to use when you're a manager

As a manager, you serve as the gatekeeper for your direct reports' feedback, so there's a lot of pressure to deliver it in an impactful way. The balancing act of delivering positive feedback while also providing constructive comments can be challenging. Sara Kaplan, Social Media, Content, and PR Manager at Weploy, suggests a specific framework to make the process a bit easier.

She elaborates, "At my company, I'm asked to give feedback in the following format: Stop/Start/Keep Doing - it helps frame things constructively."

This Stop/Start/Keep Doing framework is also beneficial for making it clear to employees how they can influence and take action on their personal and professional development. While development should be owned by the employees, managers can use these phrases to help track progress and keep them accountable.

Keeping this constructive approach in mind, below are phrases you can use to effectively provide feedback to your direct reports.

To recognize positive performance

You excel at [action], and I would love to continue seeing that from you.

With this phrase, you're calling out behavior that you want to encourage an employee to keep doing. This makes clear to the individual what they're doing well and what's you expect them to continue doing in the future. The more specific you can be with this feedback, the more impactful it will be for the employee.
Examples:
I encourage you to keep doing [action]. I've received positive feedback that this has really helped the team [result].

This phrase is a little different because it gives you the opportunity to incorporate feedback from a third party (e.g., a peer or somebody on another team). Whether or not it's anonymous depends on what your team is comfortable with. This way, your employee knows their performance or actions is appreciated by people beyond just you.
Examples:
To identify areas of improvement

My feedback is for you to stop ﻿[action] because it results in [consequence].

This is a way to let your employees know that a specific and observable action they've taken is undesirable. Moreover, it gives you a chance to explain the negative outcomes, which is something your direct report may not have been aware of in the first place. It's important to make sure this action is one either you or a team member has witnessed multiple times - otherwise, it's difficult to justify why your employee is receiving this feedback.
Examples:
I encourage you to start [action] because it will help you [intended result].

If you're not comfortable asking an employee to stop doing something, you can flip it and ask them to start doing something instead. For instance, instead of asking them to stopbeing late to meetings, you can encourage them to start planning ahead for meetings so they get there early - pick whichever phrase better suits your management style.
Examples:
Performance review phrases to use when evaluating peers

Many companies incorporate 360° feedback. This type of feedback involves collecting responses from peers who work with the individual being reviewed. Sharing feedback about someone you work with every day, who you may be friends with, is tricky - especially when the feedback is constructive.

Christine Tao, Co-Founder and CEO of SoundingBoard, offers her perspective on how to approach this challenge. She explains, "Being specific and timely helps - the more you can catch or note the behavior close to when it occurred, the better. And when you share it, describe the impact that it had on you or others. You can also take this further by asking questions on what other actions they might take or change if the feedback is constructive."

Another important thing to keep in mind: Anonymous feedback doesn't give you the liberty to be unfairly harsh in your review of a peer. It's never easy to be the recipient of negative feedback, so try to practice empathy - especially when sharing constructive feedback with a fellow colleague.

Lauren Linzenberg, Founder & HR Consultant at MENSC{HR}, recommends doing a gut check. She goes on, "Make sure you're comfortable saying what you wrote in the review to the person's face. If you provide feedback that you wouldn't feel comfortable confronting in person, you may run into resistance."

To recognize positive performance

When you did [action], it really helped me [result].

This phrase identifies a specific instance when you really appreciated your colleague's contribution. When giving this feedback during a performance review, focus on something recent as you will likely recall their accomplishment more accurately. This phrase also follows the SBI feedback model and will help your peers understand what actions or behaviors positively impacted you, and why.
Examples:
I really appreciate it when you [behavior], such as when you [example]. ﻿

This phrase shifts the focus from a specific action to general behavior. However, that doesn't make this phrase less valid or more difficult to understand because it's still rooted in tangible examples.

When it comes to behavioral feedback, it's important to be aware of gender biases. Research has shown that managers and peers - regardless of gender - tend to give women more personality-oriented feedback and men more work-oriented feedback. Unfortunately, the former is less actionable and can contribute to the gender gap, so it's critical to be mindful of this when utilizing this phrase.
Examples:
To point out areas of improvement

I think you could improve on [action] because [reason].

You'll notice the language of this phrase is less managerial in tone. It's more of a suggestion based on behavior or results you've witnessed, rather than an ask to "stop" a certain behavior since this is feedback between two peers.
Examples:
I would love to see you do more [action] because [reason].

Again, if asking someone to improve on something isn't comfortable for you, a more positive way to frame feedback is to say "I would love to see you do more..."
Examples:
Take your performance review to the next level

Hopefully, these phrases helped you better envision the type of feedback to incorporate in your next performance review. Remember that these are just starting points - you should feel empowered to mix up the phrases, tweak them to fit your management style, or come up with your own if you didn't see any that resonated with you.

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60 useful performance review phrases | Culture Amp

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If you've ever walked away from a performance review confused about where you stand, you're not alone. The art of giving clear, intentional, and valuable feedback is tricky to master, which is why so many employees have experienced underwhelming performance reviews. At Culture Amp, our mission is to build a better world of work.