Rethinking Performance Management System for 2021

Who is Our Speaker? 

Sandeep comes with extensive experience in HR M&A, Transformation & Change Management, Business Partner & Leadership roles. Sandeep is a constant learner with Interests & Certifications in AI, Future of Work & Digital Transformation & is currently based in Singapore. 
 
He currently heads HR for Singapore headquartered IT / ITES company, Optimum Solutions. 
He in 2016-17 as “Head HR” was instrumental in the transition, setup & growth of the “Rakuten India Development Centre” (the largest Tech Dev Centre of Rakuten outside of Japan). Prior to that he was with Cognizant & IBM in varied Business HR roles. 
 
Sandeep is involved in building communities of learning & engagement. Most recently he has set up the Singapore chapter of Hacking HR which focuses on the integration of Tech & HR. 
He is also a Certified Mentor and supports the social cause through way of Mentoring. He has also proudly served in the Flying & Administrative branch of the Indian Air Force after having graduated from “National Defence Academy”, Khadakwasla, Pune, India. 

Podcast

A Glimpse of the Podcast 

01:29 – 08:40 – How HR space will be in 2021? 

08:49 – 15:45 – What kind of initiatives you have planned for 2021 in terms of performance management and engagement? 

16:27 – 25:30 – Give us some tips on how to perform performance management process remotely and effectively. 

25:38 – 30:28 – How to drive the diversity and inclusion in the workforce and also engage them? 

Insightful Talks between a CEO and HR Head 

2020 has been completely a different year for all of us with COVID and HR played a really very significant and critical role across all the organizations, from helping the employees shift from office to work from home, trying to bring in the business continuity, and all of those things. So, how do you see the 2021 coming up for HR?   

I think it is very pertinent question from a business standpoint. One is the whole workplace scenario has changed globally, this is not aligned to one single geography of one country but this has predominantly changed across the world.  

So, every organization is having to mandate changes, working remotely has become the norm, which previously at least could be seen as taboo in some companies, where you can’t work from home, you need to be in the office. There were banks, which mandated people to ensure that you do not even carry back your laptop, you just come empty-handed and go back. So, a lot of things have changed.  

I was just reading a funny question, which was put across, the question is,  

Who led digital transformation in 2020?  

Options 

  1. CEO 
  2. COO 
  3. IT Officer 
  4. COVID 

All the organizations have been a standard a response that, “Hey, because of COVID, we were able to get better digitally.” Because be it all your standard tools across today the kind of systems that we have, because of which HR as a function has seen a massive change now.  

The erstwhile HR of being on the floor, being with people, that has completely we’ve done away with. We do not sit with people anymore. You’re not physically there with people anymore. You’re not there to be able to listen to them, enable them, or directly have face-to-face interactions. So, HR had to undergo massive and rapid transformation to be successful.  

So, when companies started moving toward the whole work from home scenario, HR was the first function to set up these policies to be able to enable and enhance the whole experience of someone being able to get a laptop in their house, I know of companies which went a step ahead to set up a whole complete Home Office for employees. A lot of companies wanted to take those initiatives and enhance employee experience.  

What COVID has done in this particular year is while the whole business model and the whole HR transaction model has changed, it has forced us to think purely digital, while enabling and enhancing employee experience. Because this has given a focus toward hyper personalization.  

What is Hyper Personalization? 

When I am en employee, I stay over here in this kind of a place, I need this for myself versus you as an employee, you stay in a different kind of a place and you have different needs. But if you were in the same office environment, your needs were standardized. So, HR had to take that step saying that, “No, we’ll have to work according to a personal requirement of every employee.” So, that whole standardization approach went out of the box.  

Performance Management 

You would also realize that the whole idea of performance management wherein someone had to physically see you working, someone had to get a report from you that, “Hey, I have done this.” Your manager had to run a review that you did this like you spoke this way, and this is your communication skills. Your performance metrics were all defined by being productive on the job in a certain kind of environment. That process went for a toss.  

There’s nobody sitting. The manager is not able to see someone working. I think what I saw during this time was, this period gave rise to uncalled managers without titles. A lot of leaders came across in this kind of scenario, whom we didn’t realize that they had such fantastic leadership qualities. You could get work done from them sitting anywhere so the person tells me, 

Employee: Hey, I’m sitting in Starbucks but i’ll do it.  

Sandeep: Yeah, you have that liberty to. I don’t care where you are but delivery is.  

Delivery became an end point rather than an expectation that you’re here at 9:00am and at 6:00pm, you’re logging off. That concept completely went out.  

2020 saw a lot of these changes. On the positive side, I really say that we saw a lot of leaders coming up. People who didn’t undergo that standard managerial metrics that we had at the back of our mind that you need to showcase these qualities to become a people manager. There were none of these qualities that we could see in people from a digital standpoint. So, how did we get leaders across all? So, we had new people we never realized with these kinds of qualities existed. We had HR transforming the whole scope of the way of hyper personalization that every individual has an individual need rather than looking at it as a standardized function.  

Work from home became a norm today. The whole performance management process, the whole template of performance management changed. Remote engagement became a way of life, and it’s become a norm. Today, you don’t take it as a taboo anymore that I’m working from home. About a year back, if you worked from home, people look at you and say, “Oh! really nice. Your company gives you this option. Wow, good.” So, it was a comparative analysis that we give you work from home. 

Today, working from office is like “Oh, you are really working from office. That’s good.”

So, you see the whole paradigm shift in the way of thinking. It just took six months for this whole concept to change, i.e., from the month of March or April onwards. Then, we are at the end of the year and “I think it is the fastest ever.”  

So, what kind of initiatives or plans you have for 2021, especially towards performance management and engagement? Any advice for HR folks? 

There are a few sets of skills that have come up for HR in the last few months. I would like to term them as power skills like empathy, communication, proactiveness. These are power skills that we as a HR have to develop. We are always in a reactive mode. If something happens or you define a process policy for something that is happening continuously or if a problem occurs, then you define a solution for that.  

Now, it’s completely opposite. The most successful HR members of my team are the ones who are proactive and who understand the mindset of employees and treat every employee individually rather than a standardized approach. I tell my team that empathy, proactiveness, communication, you have to be on top of it. Otherwise, it’s going to cause chaos and confusion because you’re treating employees individually now, and there’s no concept of a global town hall where the CEO would come and define the whole policy.  

Instead, you use different ways like WhatsApp group, Skype, Teams, and multiple forums to communicate with people. Honestly, sometimes it becomes a digital information overload as well.  

The next year, we really need to look into mental health issues, which some companies are already doing now, and looking at detoxifying from the digital standpoint because there is overload of digital now. It is purely digital life. These days, people don’t log off, you’re on a laptop then on social media and then you go to sleep. Next day, when you get up, first thing you check with your mobile phone and then shift to laptop.  

It’s so digitized. The points HR should think about are as follows. 

  1. How do you make life better for employees? This is something that we as a HR should start thinking about for 2021. The digital life is going to impact the mental health of people and it causes stress. So, it is something that we need to think of very seriously.  
  2. The processes will continue to evolve because every company is looking at how can we make our performance management process better. There is nothing called bucket anymore, which is used to be one kind of a big concept that buckets to be made. Now, there are no buckets anymore. It is ‘perform and get paid, and pay as you perform’.  
  3. Every individual is treated individually rather than having a standardized approach. So, the processes are getting evolved and the systems are getting better. Next year, I propagate this big time that People, process, and systems, these three have to merge together. So, the people have to align to the process, the process, and the process and people have to align to a system and lead to the digital transformation we needed. 
      

With the analytics, the skills that HR are coming up with, they need to look at the data to be able to define outcomes and how good are our team members with data to define it. If you keep getting a lot of queries and a lot of issues, so you start putting them into buckets or towers to be able to define on how well you are doing on certain parameters, what is the month-on-month improvements, etc. You start looking at the numbers. You start looking at these sales numbers to determine, am I improving my sales or in typical sales language, are you improving sales. Similarly, with numbers you can know, am I improving employee experience.  

What Happens to HR in 2025? What HR Should Do Next? 

From the next year’s standpoint, these are the skills that HR should have. The reason is that a lot of studies and a report by ministry of manpower says that the HR roles are going to get obsolete by 2025. That is something that is coming up pretty strongly, and the kind of function that HR is going to get obsolete.  

A very operational HR process is completely going to go off the hook because systems are taking over. You have readymade apps, you have chatbots, all these functions, which are able to take on a function of an HR. So, you go and plug in something, upload data, you also upload your reports, you’re going to upload your documents, and somebody reviews it. In fact, the whole medical industry has changed. You don’t need to go to a doctor anymore if you’re sick. You just go online and show a doctor. A lot of countries are moving toward that. So, look at if you don’t need a doctor physically to check you, how does a role of a HR evangelize during this whole thought process. 

So, HR as a function need to go up, you need to look at systems, you need to look at analytics while having as your core source of input and output towards enhancing employee experience. We as in the HR function need to trend towards enhancing employee experience and less on processes and policies because policies and processes are made just to standardize. So, we need to look at hyper personalization looking at enhancing experience and that would happen through data. 

HR needs to understand business models in terms of how this data or how this employee experience or how a good onboarding is, how an exit is impacting my topline revenue or my bottom-line revenue, and where is HR leading those numbers. So, if you are able to look at all these data, employee experience, revenue, I think these are the three pillars I would want HR to look at very strongly for the next few years. If you are going to get stuck in the whole operations part of it doing query management, defining processes and policies, then digital transformation will eat you up faster than ever. 

 
You talked about the performance management, so in 2020, a lot of organizations have actually either skipped their performance reviews, skipped performance appraisals in the form of salary revisions. I think a lot of organizations really on the business front and survival. So, there was not much companies that did the performance and salary revisions. So, how do you see 2021 shaping up and then, what are all some of the tips especially for doing the remote performance management for managers? 

As you said in 2020, a lot of companies skipped performance management, not because they didn’t know how to do it or they were not aware but the business dynamics and business scenarios forced a lot of companies to hibernate and go into zero performance file because at one side people are losing jobs, and there is a huge impact of the virus, which has completely hit the whole world pretty much.  

The retail sector, the manufacturing sector, lot of job losses. The tech sector was somewhat at least comparatively to be safer in terms of job losses but there were many problems. A lot of companies shut down. So, performance management not happening this year was more attributable to the business dynamics, and employees in every organization understood this piece, it’s better to have a job rather than looking for a hike. The option was a zero percent hike or a job. So, the reason I say zero percent hike is you want to stay or not stay. That has been the whole idea. 

  1. Firstly, this year has been a bit difficult for all of us and getting a job or looking at alternate options in the jobs, it wasn’t easy. I think 2021 will not be very high on this whole performance management scene because a lot of companies will still look at stabilizing. Companies will take advantage of the fact that 2020 was a bad year, and we can continue being bad for sometimes till we get even. I don’t see a fully positive trend yet going back normal.  
  2. The managers not being able to do performance management, that concept of managers, I don’t see the value added in terms of managers doing this anymore. The kind of generation that we are in especially about gen z, the current and youngest generation, they don’t believe in performance management anymore. If we have about four generations in the workforce right now, it’s only the gen y’s who believe in this whole performance management that I need to be rated and then I need to be paid for my rating. What we’re seeing is a huge trend in Gen Z is that they don’t care about the rating anymore. If I’m doing good, you tell me now and you pay me now. You don’t have to wait for six months or a year to do that. 

A lot of companies are bending towards pay now for performance or moving to quarterly or half-yearly cycles. So, I think I see the cycles compressed. I see a lot of companies looking at retaining talent by utilizing long term incentive plans. They are binding people towards the longer term because you know that market is still uneven, you don’t know how well it’s going to survive. So, the best option is that look at long term incentive plans, wherein there is a fix element which is keeping employee engaged.  

It is going to be difficult for all the managers to do this from a remote stand point. There will be a lot of stake holder management which into play. If one person has got multiple stakeholders, systems are going to play a very strong role here again because it is going to be easy to seek feedback from multiple sources to be able to define a number-centric output versus one person, your manager defining your career.  

The technology firms very rarely have a single manager concept. So, you have many stakeholders, you are dealing with right from the product teams, sales team, technology backend and frontend. So, there are multiple stakeholders and the feedback, that’s why power skills even from an employee standpoint, these power skills need to come into play because you’re looking at customer simplicity out there, enhancing customer experience that is cx, you are able to do that only if you understand the whole product cycle completely well. Managers will play a role but I’m not really sure as to maybe they’re just going to be there for consolidation and communication. First, we need to have a sort of good communication skills that you go and inform employees that this work and this didn’t work.  

Another thing happening is that there is a de-linkage between performance and pay. So, the mindset with a lot of employees is that my performance and pay go together. If I get a certain rating, that means I get this much hike. That concept is getting over. Here, your performance is this, it’s done. There’s another conversation that this is the whole budget and this is how you’ll be getting paid. So, it’s an individual-centric effort. So, we are trending towards that. It’s going to rely more on systems because individually, it will be tough to maintain each and every individual’s detail, or moving towards that individualized cycle but I think systems are going to be doing a lot of jobs that the managers are able to do today.  

The development-oriented review, where you have a complete training plan defined, you have a mentoring plan defined, rather than the employee is like, “fine thank you for the feedback form, which is my pay.” So, we are moving away from the concept. We are just talking about development area, where you need training, mentoring, you did this right, you are doing this wrong, what you need to do next and the conversation closes. There is no conversation or communication about monetary element out here. A lot of companies are moving towards this concept. 

In digital HR, how are you driving the inclusivity and then the diversity within the workforce? How do you engage them? Can you throw some light on that? 

Diversity is incorporated above all the unique elements of every individual. They could be different gender, race, social categories, age as well. There is a lot of focus on this aspect, wherein our company stopped looking at age as a factor. You don’t really look at age or you don’t ask for these kinds of conversations, you’re not looking at gender background, so we made a very conscious effort.  

There is a huge initiative by the Ministry of Manpower, Singapore, as well and there’s a mandate guideline where you’re not supposed to be asking some certain elements like you cannot ask age, racial and gender background, and you can’t ask social categories, you just look at the CV as a mask, you don’t know who is that employee or candidate. While we look at diversity and inclusivity, how are we looking at a long-term stay, a long-term retention standpoint, a long-term plan for growth and development, this is what we need to start looking at very seriously as well.  

Companies are taking up a lot a of initiatives on gender, LGBT, or different kinds of diversity in age, racial, ethnic groups. Inclusivity is basically having everyone across on the same platform within the same inclusive organization. Basically, it all comes down to the culture of the organization, CEO downwards, it is what you percolate, top-down how you are being equal in all parameters, irrespective of what we are and how diverse we are but making an effort to look at all these aspects, define them with data, look at how we are improving on each data metric and end of the day, it’s all a business deliverable. It all needs to lead to a dollar value.  

So, if it’s leading to a dollar value and it is shown in the past that “yes, it does lead to the dollar value,” we are doing lot of programs returning mothers, looking at people who are staying who have been retrenched and we are giving them an opportunity without looking at retrenched because we know a lot of people got retrenched this year, so you don’t look at it in a negative way today anymore. But just think about a year back if someone told you that I was retrenched so you would look at the person with a negative view, “Oh, you have been retrenched there could be something wrong, we will not hire you.” 

Today, company are openly stating that, “I was retrenched” and companies are hiring them first and taking initiative to take them on board. That is positive and an outcome of the whole COVID scenario. That is also a part of inclusivity. So, looking at the people with skills, lots of people with technical skills, employees who are physically handicapped that don’t hamper them or derail an output or a deliverable. So, I don’t have that number but if we are able proceed on this line with data and start showcasing our leadership and communicate with employees that we are open, we are culturally-free, and we are a flat organization, these will continue to develop. 

This is possible with a culturally-driven background from an organization’s standpoint, which obviously HR needs to take on strongly.  

There are a lot of actionable insights in this podcast. Stay tuned in to Synergita TalentCast for more such insightful talks. 

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