No ‘I’ in ‘Team’

KPMG Calamity Continued. The dust surrounding Bill Michael’s departure from KPMG has begun to settle. Two female partners, Bina Mehta and Mary O’Connor (pictured), have been appointed to run the firm on a temporary basis and have vowed to overhaul the firm’s unpopular forced ranking appraisal system in an attempt to calm relations with staff.
 
COVID appraisal. Another relevant theme making the news is the impact COVID-19 is having on the way we’re assessed in the workplace. Discussed by Alessandro Di Fiore and Marcio Souza in their latest article in HBR and in further detail in their exclusive interview for this month’s edition of The Loop, peer to peer reviews offer an important avenue for future performance evaluation in the workplace.
 
What are they talking about? Alessandro and Marcio argue that the existing system of performance review is broken and has shifted to become a political and bureaucratic battlefield. Instead, they believe it’s time for organizations to develop new models, especially amid the rise of agile and self-managing teams. They argue the need to create a socially based feedback system is even more urgent during the COVID-19 crisis since many people are working remotely and without the same level of daily interactions with managers. Their ‘social feedback system’ provides the employee with a larger amount of feedback (often 50 or more instances over the course of a year) from peers and others. This reduces the emphasis on receiving feedback from the employee’s manager alone.
 
Feedback Frequency. As Alessandro and Marcio identify, a common driver to achieving the feedback revolution is the frequency at which it’s received. Writing for The Next Web, Tom Sagi, CEO of Hourly makes the case for fostering a feedback culture and sets out key ways to encourage teams to embrace it. Building feedback into your day-to-day operations is key, he says. It shouldn’t be reserved for annual reviews or critical situations. Instead, you need to make feedback a core part of your corporate culture — and build it into your day-to-day operations.
 
COVID-19 Feedback Bias. The quality and reliability of feedback has also been hampered during lockdown, argue Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, JoAnne Wehner, and Sofia Kennedy. Writing in Harvard Business Review, they believe that due to lockdown managers are facing a trifecta of conditions that make the task of delivering good quality feedback even harder because they’re likely to give rise to increased bias. They believe these factors have had a disproportionate effect on women’s careers and argue managers need to be given the tools to avoid crisis-specific biases. Following the three steps of “criteria monitoring” (below) can help remove ambiguity from the review process, get decision-makers on the same page, and help managers hold one another accountable for fairness.

1. Define effective criteria before making critical decisions about employees. 
2. Align all decision-makers. 
3. Engage others in being consistent and equitable.

Companies that put this into practice, the authors argue, can help prevent further damage to women’s careers while continuing to advance organizational goals.
 
Team and Team-to-Team Feedback. However, as the team at ViewsHub set out in theHRDirector in 2017, feedback remains too fixated on the individual. Instead, it’s teams that should serve as the base unit of company productivity and innovation.
 
Teams are critical. While individuals undertake actions in companies it’s teams that enact strategies. A marketing strategy, for example, is written, performed and executed by the marketing team – and not by an individual within the marketing division.
 
This new focus gives us a powerful and rich additional concept to recast and better understand our companies. We must stop monitoring the work of individual team members and instead take a step above the action to watch how people are working together, examining the interplay between individuals.
 
That will give us renewed perspective to spot interpersonal and inter-team friction, which may have been working against our overall objectives all the time. It will also give us a wider field of vision to spot where different groups have either been repeating the same tasks or even working against each other.
 
Secondly, it helps us understand why we have been getting things wrong in the first place. Our organisations have been forced to change direction because we’re constantly having to adjust, readjust, and readjust our strategy again, under the instruction of our CEO. Business is moving quicker, we can’t change that, so we need to anticipate and be nimbler with our strategies.
 
But, as we know, the base unit for delivering on strategies is the team. Shifting the direction of the company isn’t done by one team member alone; all the different team members have to pull together to achieve that objective.
 
The challenge therefore becomes finding an instrument with which to measure this team and inter-team performance, while also ensuring sufficient feedback frequency to ensure organisations can respond in time. This is our mission here at ViewsHub. Our workplace feedback platform allows teams to measure and improve cooperation among clients and co-workers to drive employee engagement and client service. The platform empowers teams to track their effectiveness using TeamScore, a dynamic, real time metric to measure performance effectiveness and improve it through stakeholder feedback.