Who is Our Speaker? 

Karen D. Weeks is a strategic partner, who found her purpose in helping organizations build amazing cultures while guiding individuals to find fulfillment in their careers. Her passion is around creating inclusive & supportive cultures, talent development, organizational effectiveness, change management, and helping individuals build fulfilling careers. 

Earlier this year she published her first book, “Setting the Stage: A Guide to Preparing for any Feedback Conversation” which is now available on Amazon.  

Recently, she was named one of the 2020 Notable Women in Talent by Crain’s New York Business. She is also the host of the podcast, “Getting off the Hamster Wheel” where she talks to people about their career journeys and finding their passion! 

Currently, Karen serves as the SVP of People at Ordergroove, where she is building the people strategy and focuses on maintaining a strong culture during the growth stage of the company, including winning Best Companies to Work in New York two years in a row! Additionally, she can be found teaching management and HR strategy courses at Baruch College and as a certified career coach with GoCoach. 

Podcast

A Glimpse of the Podcast 

01:08 – 04:03 – Why organizations should focus on employee performance management? 

04:04 – 04:43 – How important are these trainings? 

04:45 – 06:55 – Can continuous feedback help in reducing the recency error among managers? 

06:57 – 08:18 – Give us a few tips to build successful teams. 

08:19 – 08:55 – Does empathy play a role in building successful teams? 

08:56 – 11:26 – What are the best ways to improve employee adoption and have successful change management? 

 Organizations, where the strategic and dynamic HR practices on the go in this current scenario, employee performance management play a key role in building the overall organizational competency and effectiveness. Can you give us a few reasons why organizations should focus on employee performance management? And it would be great if you could add about your previous role at Yodle and the current role at Ordergroove regarding what difference did you see, what worked and what did not work and how do you manage your everyday work.  

It’s really interesting because I have heard a lot of people say you know how do we handle performance management during a pandemic, when we want to be thoughtful and recognize that people are going through a lot, and companies goals probably changed, so how do you manage against that. And I think it always goes back to the goal or performance management whether that is in your performance reviews or ongoing feedback is to help people be the best they can be.  

Let them know what’s going really well. Let them know where they’re struggling and have that conversation. Give them the tools to improve and so that’s the place where you’re coming from when you give performance feedback. Then, you can frame it in a way that’s not dismissive of the situation someone may be in. It recognizes that goals may have changed so let’s talk about how we perform against the new goals or let’s talk about how the goals have changed. So, I think don’t shy away from it even though there’s a lot happening around all of us right now. 

Just position it in a way that’s human to human, respectful, setting this person up for success, helping them through any struggles they have, and that helps set the right tone for the conversation.  

I think that depending on your size of your organization, so when I was at Yodle, when I got there, there were about 300 and we grew to about 1500 before we got acquired. It was an amazing journey. I’m so thankful for my time there. But obviously that is a very different way to manage performance than at Ordergroove where we were 75 people. It also is very different roles as well. Yodle had a huge call center as well as engineers and product managers while Ordergroove does not have that. And so, when I thought about performance management at Yodle, we really thought about what do we want every Yodler to go through.  

So, we want people to get feedback on how they live the values, there’s some competencies that are important at this company but then on the flip side, giving feedback to an inside sales Rep who’s dialing 100 calls a day is going to look different than how we design it for product manager, and so, that’s where we sort of built in different ways to think about it while the philosophy was the same for everybody, how we executed it was different depending on the team.  

So, I’m sure training would be a great part of it, right? For a manager especially when they are not used to remote management, right?  

Yes, yes, we’ve done a lot of training at Ordergroove about and actually we have a training tomorrow about how to have some of these conversations especially because at Ordergroove, we are very used to being together. We have some folks that were remote but most people were based in New York and so how do you see those social cues, how do you start the conversation in a more human way versus diving right into the agenda because those are things you miss when you’re not bumping into them in the kitchen or walking and chatting on your window eating, so, build that into your one on ones in your feedback conversations.  

The other thing which we are seeing is what we call the recency error. And it’s rather most common rating error observed among managers, who rate employees during the appraisal. Do you think continuous feedback can help reducing it? If so, are there any few ideas and steps, which you can bring to get the continuous feedback culture in an organization? 

Yeah, I think it really can. I respect that some companies still really like doing annual performance reviews but if you can do continuous feedback as you go through the year then you got the story already there for the annual review.  

And I think that while platforms and tools are obviously extremely important especially as you scale it grow; however, you keep notes and that’s what it’s all about to help avoid recency. It’s a Word document, it’s the tool that you have as a company, it’s tags and email whatever works for you, but that way you can go back and look at the last six months, the last quarter, whatever the timeframe is. And then as you’re giving feedback along the way with continuous feedback, you can continue to build the story because you’ll quickly start to see probably not with everybody but most the time some themes.  

So, someone who struggles with attention to detail, you’re able to give them feedback as you go and its live examples of “Oh! that was a place that you did really well and way to step it up or that was an example of where I’ve seen you struggle,” and you’re able to capture it in the moment but you’re tying it back to a theme that you’ve talked about before. If you only do it once a year or once whatever the cadence is, you’re really missing out I’m giving people the opportunity to either adjust if something’s not going well or build upon something that’s going really well.  

Think about it if you’re trying to lose weight and you’re seeing the progress of that success, you’re going to keep at it because you’re like yeah! This is working. So, the feedback can be the same thing.  

About successful and powerful teams, they motivate employees to learn, they make them grow, and they become a part of the collective success of any business. What kind of tips can you share? What have you seen work in terms of building successful teams? 

One tool that I really like to use is some sort of behavioral profile whether that’s disc, Myers Briggs, Hayes group like they’re all for all the same, don’t tell anybody. It’s really whatever works best for your organization with the reason why like that because if you combine that with your organizational values you’re creating common language about how people work and so, if I know that you are extremely action-oriented and I’m very data-driven, when we have that conversation or we’re in a team meeting and we’re working on a project together, that helps us understand each other and know how best to work with each other and how I need to communicate with you and how you want to communicate with me.  

So, I think that’s one tool that can help create a common language but otherwise it’s really respecting what each other brings to the table, you’re a team for a reason. You may be really great at Excel. I may really be great at relationship building and together, we’re gonna have the best project management team ever. And so really respecting what each person brings to the table.  

I guess empathy plays a big part in it, right? So, I think I’m assuming most of successful teams have a lot of empathy in them in terms of you bring a certain value to your table and I’m bringing certain values. So, it’s kind of recognizing those.  

Yes, in assuming good intent, if for some reason you and I are disagreeing, it’s not because you’re a bad person or you’re up to get me or you’re not trying to get to the same place, I’m trying to get to, we just have a different way to get there and so active listening, asking a lot of questions, realizing that you’re trying to do your best and like I’m just trying to do my best, those are all empathetic ways that we can work together.  

And the final thing which I want to ask you is, more of resistance to organizational change. I think it’s probably the first behavior to become defensive and it’s like immediately with a lot of employees, “Hey, no, I can’t, I don’t think I can change,” but it also requires the employees to be open minded in terms of new ways of thinking of doing work. What are some of the best ways you think which can improve employee adoption and have successful change management?  

I think it’s twofold. Often, people resist change because they are fearful. They’re afraid they’re not going to be able to be performed in the new way or maybe their jobs are going to be impacted and so they tend to retreat and get defensive. So, helping them walk through what the change is, how it impacts them, and how you’re going to support them through it, whether that’s training a new skill or redefining their job in a good way or being honest with them about yeah, this is gonna be a change and this is going to be different, but we’ll figure it out together. I think those are some of the communication tools that will be really helpful.  

And then also recognizing, we’re going back to empathy earlier, recognizing that people have been through change before and they bring that baggage with them whether it’s change fatigue like especially in 2020. Everybody’s just exhausted, so just recognizing that fatigue, maybe there’s a little whiplash, I thought we were going this way, now we’re going this way, so just helping the recognizing that is also part of what people are going through in addition to I hope I could be successful with whatever this change is.  

Some of your biggest opportunities for growth and to develop your career happens through a change. So, if you can see that and your manager can help you identify those opportunities, that can make it a positive thing versus a scary thing.  

Stay tuned in to Synergita TalenCast for more insightful talks.