Evolving Your Performance Management Approach Using Internal Collaboration Tools

Follow these 3 tips

With the changes brought forward by the pandemic, workforces are now more distributed than ever before with many employees working from home for the first time in their career. This requires managers to increase their frequency in touchpoints to best monitor continued health of the workforce.
 

We’ve all witnessed as the physical (and rhetorical) walls have come down, with video conferencing providing a literal window into the lives of our colleagues, partners and customers. From the beloved household pet causing background ruckus to little ones peeking their way into frame, relationships across the board have become as untucked as our dress shirt and sweatpants coupling. A new level of casual has emerged, and with it a change in how we as a professional community communicate.

In our role as a strategic consultancy, we have a unique vantage point with windows in to businesses of varying scale, collaborating on both local and global levels, and one thing is clear – people are embracing the new informal ways of communicating, and valuing greater fluidity and frequency in communication cadence.

Lockstep with how inter-business communications have shifted, organizations need to take this opportunity to evolve legacy tools and the perceptions toward what performance management system looks like. Luckily, enterprise technology tools to enable remote and hybrid work environments were already undergoing rapid development prior to COVID-19 and there are a number of tools available to support. 

For the team at Intercept, we had already standardized on Microsoft Teams prior and were well positioned for a seamless transition when the WFH mandates came out in March this year. However, the past 5 months of navigating this ‘business as unusual’ has served to further accelerate our usage and forced us to explore and stress tested its features and functions to the max. Beyond the tablestakes of workplace chat, document collaboration, file sharing, security and data protection features, here are 3 ways that Teams can add value and integrate to your workflow: 

Transforming previous in-person meetings to the closest virtual compliment, hosting meetings through Teams with video on has been instrumental in keeping our team connected while physically apart. Beyond transitioning our usual day-to-day meetings, we’ve found success in using this feature for recruiting and onboarding new employees, and recreating social touchpoints with team lunches, BYOB happy hours, and team trivia challenges leveraging third-party platform integrations like Kahoot.

A morning huddle at the coffee machine or quick walk around the office floor could provide managers with a snapshot of where resources were focused. In absence of this, we’ve leveraged AgilePolly to introduce an automated daily standup across the org. In less than 5 minutes at the start of every workday, employees are able to thoughtfully communicate their top priorities for the day, available bandwidth to support additional tasks, and any blockers requiring additional support. Management receives a digest list of responses and is able to prioritize outreach to areas of the team requiring support.

Without the daily organic water cooler chatter, we saw a risk for losing that organic conversation - beyond the direct productivity related workflows - that truly embody our culture. We’ve leveraged an All Company membership Team, as well as a series of Chat groups with varying members, to keep up with daily dialogue. Employees are encouraged to share key wins, pull out a laugh with personalized GIFs, and use the embedded Praise feature to formalize kudos for help and news both big and small.

Shaheen Yazdani is the Co-Founder and Vice President at Intercept, a strategic consultancy specializing in the B2B landscape. Visit https://interceptgroup.com/  Connect Shaheen Yazdani  Follow @ShaheenMarie