When sports psychologist, culture coach and author Dr Pippa Grange was recently tasked with helping a tense team navigate a high-stress acquisition discussion, she intervened with a surprising activity.

“I took them trampolining. Everybody said it was ridiculous, but within 10 minutes they were all laughing. It broke the tension and helped them regain perspective,” says Grange, who is a keynote speaker at AHRI’s upcoming National Convention and Exhibition in Melbourne, and is also conducting a masterclass on identifying and leveraging deep wins at work.

“Fun is a form of release. It’s a neurological, chemical and hormonal reset, and an opportunity to rebalance from over-performance and stress.”

Grange has worked as a psychologist with high-level soccer, AFL, rugby league and Olympic teams, with extreme endurance athletes, and with businesses all over the globe. 

One of her career highlights was working with the England soccer team at the 2018 World Cup. 

“They got to the semis after a long period of underperforming and the nation celebrated with them,” says Grange.

No matter her client, she has one core aim: boosting performance while also fostering a healthy, supportive culture.

“HR and sports psychology complement each other. Both are about helping people find their best and perform well. In this way, leaders are like coaches, and vice versa – always seeking the balance between output and wellbeing,” she says.

She believes the key to high-performance cultures is building strong relationships through honest connection, storytelling and genuine feedback, whether on the sports field or in the office. 

“The quality and character of relationships that we have with each other will determine the level of performance that we’re able to output,” says Grange, who, after working in Australia for 20 years and Los Angeles for two, now lives in England’s Peak District.

She was originally attracted to sports psychology because she liked the idea of working with motivated people.

“I thought this would provide opportunities for both one-on-one and systems work. It felt like an opportunity to create real change.”

As she got into the field, she realised that motivated humans are complex. 

“Most of the work I’ve done is about the human being, not their performance. [I’ve helped] people understand who they are, how they operate best, what they want and how they can get there.”

It’s not about her coming in and being a performance “guru”, she adds.

“If you’re not focused on both the person themselves and the system they’re operating in, you won’t find high performance.”

Team bonding for improved performance

On the sports field and in the workplace, performance starts with teamwork, says Grange. But this can’t be imposed from the top; it needs to come from the ground up through mutual understanding and clear communication around goals.

“Start with understanding what actually motivates your teams. It might not be what you think. Motivation builders are communication, purpose and feedback. Discipline builders are clarity, feedback, clear methods and skill building.

“In sport, it’s not all about the end goal, it’s also about what we’re working on this week. And that’s a nice translation into some workplaces too. It’s about a group’s clarity of purpose over a block of time.”

Keeping a team on track requires regular debriefs, she says.

“The ‘hot debrief’ after weekly or daily performance and ‘emotional hangover work’ after big events both speak to strong, cyclical feedback cultures that normalise continuous conversations about performing and succeeding while being human.”

“We used to see resilience in terms of bouncebackability and grit. For me, it’s a lot more to do with adaptability and being allowed to be a whole human.” – Dr Pippa Grange, sports psychologist and author

Busting misconceptions about high-performing teams 

Over her career, Grange has sought to unpack, break down and replace some of the destructive narratives that shape our lives.

Part of that work has manifested in her book Fear Less: How to Win at Life Without Losing Yourself, which is about living with less fear and more freedom.

“Fear is amplified or lessened in cultures and environments as much as in individuals’ minds. There’s a lot you can do in systems and processes, and with symbols, language and power dynamics, to lessen it and build confidence,” she says.

Just as fear can hold us back, so too can a constant pursuit of productivity.

Grange maintains that high-performing teams shouldn’t come at the cost of wellbeing, and having good, caring cultures shouldn’t come at the cost of winning. High-performance and good culture aren’t mutually exclusive. 

“Workplaces are under so much pressure for profit or shareholder values, and this creates a downward flow where people can [feel like] never-ending productivity machines. The level of burnout we’re seeing is not random.”

To rejuvenate their minds and spirits, people need space to both rest and recover, which are two different things, says Grange. 

“Recovery is about finding the space to regenerate our creativity and curiosity, our humour and our energy.

“Creating ‘psychological space’ for people means they don’t have to perform constantly and can regenerate. Compromising on wellbeing is only a short-term gain for a person and an organisation.”

So how can companies help employees find psychological space to recover? It can be as simple as giving permission, setting good boundaries around working hours and allowing the sharing of stories and experiences, she says. 

“When companies start talking about what high-performance looks like, they need to recognise that it’s a triangle of work, rest and recovery. It’s not just a line between work and rest.”

What generates motivation, she says, is people’s ability to be authentic and share their stories with each other.

“Everybody who walks through the door of a workplace is asked to buy into a story, a vision and a purpose. Stories shouldn’t just come from the top, but also from the shop floor and the home offices. They should be an exchange. It’s making everyone feel like they genuinely belong and are part of something.

“You need practices that genuinely build on belonging, not just inclusion.”

Building more resilient teams

While some people may feel that ‘resilience’ has become somewhat of a buzzword that’s tightly linked to output, Grange says its meaning has evolved.

“We used to see resilience in terms of bouncebackability and grit. For me, it’s a lot more to do with adaptability and being allowed to be whole and human while performing, versus living in roles, categories and boxes. It’s about minimising drama [while] being real and honest, allowing emotions to arise, but still processing them.”

How do you help employees and teams foster resilience? 

“It’s principally about quality relationships that provide a social web for all challenges. Cultures that embrace courage, vulnerability, challenge, care and the will to change are resilient,” she says. 

Anticipatory guidance and foresight helps boost resilience, she adds. If something tough has happened, such as a round of redundancies, giving people space to ask questions, air concerns and share perspectives is important. 

“People find it much tougher to maintain resilience when they get ambushed by circumstances, or if they’re kept in the dark. Telling the truth about where things are at and allowing people to participate in being resilient makes a big difference.” 

Culture work is unlike other kind of organisational work, says Grange, and culture leaders often need different timescales, methods and measures to drive real change. 

“Culture, like ethics, should be a verb – a doing word. It’s daily work that lives in interactions and exchanges, as well as in big initiatives,” she says.

“It’s an ongoing effort to create an environment that supports psychological safety, trust and compassion, and it’s also building systems that actually reward and resist what you do and don’t want to see in the culture. Great culture is signified by an organisation that is present, observing, focused and active in considering ‘what ought we to do’ – and then actually doing it.”

A longer version of this article first appeared in the June/July 2024 edition of HRM Magazine.

Dr Pippa Grange will be speaking on  cultivating authenticity and vulnerability in the workplace at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition in August. Don’t miss the chance to hear from inspiring thought leaders and master practical strategies for now and the future. Secure your spot today.

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Businesses stand to gain a lot when they embed trust at their core. As well as being morally important, it’s an organisational enabler. 

Research conducted by Paul J. Zak, Founding Director of the Centre for Neuroeconomics, found that high-trust companies gain 76 per cent more engagement from their employees, 40 per cent less burnout and 50 per cent more productivity. Also, their employees take 13 per cent fewer sick days.

“Trust can bring a lot of additional discretionary efforts, increased creativity and innovation,” says Will Harvey, Professor of Leadership at Melbourne Business School. 

“Trust is also incredibly important in terms of retention. Once you’ve got people who feel a sense of belonging, and that they can be themselves, that’s the sort of organisation people are going to not only work harder for, but also want to stay with.”

On the flip side, a lack of trust can cause severe and long-term damage. On a macro level, economic instability, globalisation and industrial dislocation, combined with the rise of misinformation and disinformation, are all driving people from the establishments that have supported western societies since the Industrial Revolution. 

Businesses’ own internal practices are also introducing risk. There is no shortage of recent examples of high-profile businesses that have had their trustworthiness called into question. Whether they’re under the microscope for claims of price-gouging, widespread underpayments, the ‘moral blindness’ of certain leaders or unethical business practices, it’s safe to say trust in our institutions is eroding.

“There’s a polarisation effect in society that has always been there, but with social media and the algorithms behind it, reinforcing the content people are seeing, it has polarised us further,” says Harvey. “That creates a structural polarisation effect; more and more people are divided.”

Harvey points to geopolitical issues, climate change and the failed Voice referendum as examples of conflicts that could be spurring similar results in Australian workplaces. This can further impact work relationships, he says, which may already be under stress due to remote/hybrid work setups and tensions over return-to-office mandates. 

This means HR has an opportunity, once again, to use challenging global circumstances as its burning platform to encourage change. 

“In HR, there is the psychological contract between an organisation and its employees, and underpinning that is trust,” says Harvey. “If you build trust within an organisation, it enables individual employees [and] the wider stakeholders, as well as the leaders of an organisation, to be truly authentic in terms of who they are and what they stand for.”

Trust and psychological safety 

Trust supports collaboration and ideas sharing. It underpins a transparent, open culture and is critical to the pursuit of psychological safety at work.

Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School Amy Edmondson, one of the world’s leading thinkers on psychological safety, says trust is paramount due to the complexity of the contemporary business environment.

“Uncertainty is a given,” she says. “We lack a perfect line of sight on the future, so we are required to do things for which there is risk.”

She says trust and psychological safety are prerequisites for people to overcome the natural inclination to stay silent, and instead to speak up with a new idea, admit a mistake or provide potentially unpopular feedback.

“Performance in today’s environment of uncertainty and interdependence is very much dependent on psychological safety and trust.”

But this isn’t on employees to solve; organisations need to create the right environments. Take Icon Water, an Australian utility company, for example. In an attempt to break cycles of silence that often surround challenging topics impacting employees’ mental health, it developed the ‘building trust through storytelling’ initiative.

“Trust accounts for about 30 per cent of variation in performance. Dependability was a little over two times as important as benevolence-based trust.” – Rob Cross, Senior Vice President of Research for i4cp and Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts

This allowed its workforce the opportunity to hear stories about mental health from keynote speakers from all walks of life. This has included fellow colleagues, a former politician, CEOs of local charities such as Lifeline and Menslink, former Australian Defence Force soldiers and mental fitness educators. 

Hearing stories from a diverse and broad network highlights the myriad issues faced by different individuals and communities and “injects ownership and empowerment to the workforce”, according to Icon Water.

After the initiative was implemented, many employees found the courage to speak up and share their own stories without fear of retribution, and felt more able to support others.

While this was an effective way for Icon Water to mitigate against polarisation in its workforce, efforts to embed psychological safety will look different in every organisation, says Edmondson.

“Importantly, psychological safety is not an organisational-level phenomenon; it’s a group-level phenomenon. There can be as many differences in psychological safety across teams within a company as there are differences between companies.”

Mapping patterns of high performance

Once psychological safety and trust are embedded into an organisation’s fabric, one of the greatest benefits to be gained is improved performance levels.

High-performance researcher Rob Cross is an expert on the intersection of trust and positive outcomes. As the Senior Vice President of Research for i4cp, and Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Cross maps patterns of collaboration across organisations to analyse the effect of trust on high-performance teams.

His work draws links between who interacts with who to get work done, how they make decisions and who energises or blocks others.

“The team is the primary unit of value creation in organisations – but they’re not really managed,” he says. “Individuals are managed, they have feedback, and the units are managed. [There should be team] guidelines that people can follow on start-up practices and ways of establishing trust early.” 

However, findings from a recent i4cp study show that trust involves a fundamental trifecta of interdependent forms, says Cross. There is benevolence, or the feeling of psychological safety; competence, or knowing the person can do what they say they can do; and dependability, or integrity that comes with matching their words with actions. 

While all elements are necessary, he says, when it comes to performance outcomes, nothing beats trust in others’ competence.

“Dependability is the most important form of trust in predicting team effectiveness and market performance in the metrics we’ve looked at. Trust accounts for about 30 per cent of variation in performance. Dependability was a little over two times as important as benevolence-based trust.”

This recent finding – yet to be published – overturns some existing wisdom. Team cohesion and interpersonal relationships have long been considered the pinnacles of team effectiveness, he says. However, given changes to remote work and rapidly forming and changing teams, the priority has become trust in competence.

“We have all these teams being formed in an ad hoc way, very rapidly and with very little structure,” he says. “You build [trust] by putting structure into the work and holding people accountable for their deliverables.” 

This could involve guidelines for team communication and feedback, as well as processes for accountability that are followed consistently, he says.

It could also be a good idea to set up knowledge-sharing activities to further the positive effects of demonstrating competence.

This could involve show-and-tell-style presentations where employees present successful projects they’ve worked on, or setting up opportunities for colleagues to shadow each other for a short period of time.

How to respond when trust is broken

Organisational trust can be volatile. While there are myriad benefits to a business’s performance when trust levels are strong, it only takes one misstep to lose decades worth of trust deposits.

With strong leaders at the helm, trust can slowly be rebuilt. But with laissez-faire or absent leadership, employees can lose trust in the entire organisation.

A 2016 study of engineers who were deemed to have laissez-faire leaders, published in the Journal of Economics Finance and Accounting, found that, when a supervisor did not meet their subordinates’ expectations for presence and involvement, it significantly eroded the employees’ feelings of trust – not only in the boss, but also in their organisation.

“Performance in today’s environment of uncertainty and interdependence is very much dependent on psychological safety and trust.” – Amy Edmonsdon, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School

The authors said that, because a leader was the representative of the organisation, the supervisors’ lack of consideration seemed to be “regarded by employees as a reflection of the organisation’s indifferent approach to themselves”. 

Rebuilding trust requires a strong and unwavering commitment from leaders and their teams, who have to buy into its importance, says Gauri Maini FCPHR, Founder of The Culture Advantage.

“A checkpoint for me is, ‘How often do we review performance against revenue and profit targets?’ We need the same disciplined protocols to review trust and lead indicators such as advocacy, brand health, stakeholder experience and reputation.” 

Even if a company or team is hitting its revenue or performance targets, they may still be dysfunctional and distrusting, she says.

“It’s more important than ever to have a robust metric to gauge our progress on the societal and planetary impacts of any activity we have stewardship of.”

HR as enablers of high-performance teams

Processes and cultures that support both accountability and trust must be established quickly once teams are created. This is where HR’s coaching and leadership development work is worth its weight in gold.

Edmondson suggests coaching managers to learn the skills needed to create transparency and clarity about the nature of the work or any challenges, such as active listening, accountability and clear communication. 

“HR’s job is to ensure growth and development opportunities for everyone, especially managers,” she says. “If there have been events or situations that have led to a climate of distrust, you need to talk about the elephant in the room.

“Often you will need help from a facilitator in the organisation, or outside the organisation – someone to come in and lead a fresh start and help people have difficult conversations,” she says. “You can’t do it for them. You have to help people get the skills they need to do it themselves.”

Teams with poor levels of trust and engagement will often require interventions.

Maini recalls a former client where previous toxic leaders had left a vacuum of communication and trust deficits. Rebuilding trust began with a discovery process to determine executives’ strengths, values and aspirations.

“We were aiding the communication because uncertainty and ambiguity are the enemies of trust,” she says. 

“The previous leader was someone who didn’t really encourage people to have dialogue with each other. So the executive team had got into a pattern of having meetings after the meetings, or meetings before the meetings, but never speaking up in the meetings.

“So, whether it was mistrust or just habit, people didn’t feel safe enough to talk to each other about things that are important for the organisation to move forward and perform.”

She says deep-discovery meetings – held over the course of a year – revealed the team was aligned on their aspirations, but diverged in their methods. That realisation was a
game-changer.

“For them to understand each other’s aspirations and values, it was just mind-blowing. Their engagement scores improved in a year,” she says. 

Other techniques included creating a buddy system to build shared investment in another team member, and creating safe environments for people to raise issues.

Overall, Maini says high-performing and high-trust environments deliver stronger outcomes because there is a culture of speaking up.

“It’s not that there are fewer mistakes… But people are calling them out and doing something differently,” she says. 

“For leaders who care about social impact and who want to contribute to the creation of an inclusive, equitable and just society, [organisational] trust is a critical enabler.”

A longer version of this article first appeared in the April/May 2024 edition of HRM Magazine.

Develop the necessary skills to build and sustain a high performing work team and tap into the full potential of team members with this short course from AHRI.

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If an employee is falling behind on their performance targets, policies and procedures tend to dictate familiar steps: craft a performance improvement plan, offer coaching and, if the situation doesn’t improve, issue warnings of potential termination.

But what if the issue isn’t with the employee’s capability, but instead with the performance targets themselves?

The implications of unreasonable performance targets

A recent legal case that HRM reported on underscored the importance of considering this question in dealing with lagging performers.

In this case, heard recently by the Fair Work Commission (FWC), an employee at a Sydney beauty clinic successfully contested her termination for failing to meet key performance indicators (KPIs). 

The employee in this case, who was a part-time worker, argued that her manager had imposed the same performance targets on her that were given to her full-time colleagues. Furthermore, she claimed that none of her fellow sales consultants, regardless of their working hours, had ever achieved the sales target of $150,000 per month. 

Her employer did not produce any evidence to the contrary, and the FWC found that the targets were therefore unreasonable. Also taking into account the manager’s inadequate warning and dismissal process, the FWC ultimately found in the employee’s favour and ordered the employer to compensate her.

Read HRM’s full article on the case and its implications here.

“[This case] is a lesson for employers to, firstly, ensure that their performance criteria are well-founded and will stand up to scrutiny,” says David Catanese, Partner at Hall & Wilcox. “That will ensure employers avoid issues when they’re applying performance criteria or taking action for underperformance or failures.”

Another key takeaway from the FWC’s decision is that employers need to take into account part-time and flexible work arrangements when setting performance criteria, he says.

“That’s especially the case if part-time work, flexible work arrangements or additional leave arise because of parental or carer responsibilities, a person’s disability or absences because of illness or injury. Without taking such factors into account, there is an increased risk of unlawful discrimination, particularly indirect discrimination.”

“If you’re asking too much of staff, they’re going to want something in return, or they may leave.” –  David Catanese, Partner at Hall & Wilcox.

3 tips to set clear and compliant KPIs

A common challenge that employers face is how to stretch and push employees without pushing them too far. As a risk mitigation step, it’s important to remind leaders that they should be setting realistic and achievable KPIs based on employees’ skill level, experience and available resources/support.

It’s also worth considering the following points: 

1. Plan for potential legal challenges

In the FWC case mentioned above, the employer’s inability to provide any evidence to justify their KPIs would have been one of their most significant failings in the eyes of the FWC, says Catanese. 

What employers can take from this is that they should not wait until they are in an unfair dismissal hearing to consider the justification they might need in a situation like this.

“The best way to justify [specific KPIs] is to consider whether the criteria would stand up to reasonable scrutiny,” he says.

“For example, if you’re setting a monthly sales target of $150,000, how have you arrived at that figure? [It might be], for example, ‘Our overheads are $140,000. And we need $150,000 to make a profit.’ You don’t need to gather the evidence at that stage, but knowing how you would answer the question is very important.”

2. Consult and involve your employees when setting targets

In determining whether KPIs are reasonable, it’s important not to overlook input from the employees who are striving to meet those targets.

“Lots of businesses do involve employees in the setting of KPIs,” says Catanese. “We see that often with feedback in annual performance reviews –  it’s a cooperative and joint process between management and staff as to how to set KPIs for the coming years.

“I think that that’s a really positive way to go about setting performance criteria. It makes it clear to employees what the criteria are, and [they’ll be] more likely to buy in that they’re reasonable.

“It might be that employees actually have a really good idea about how to structure work and KPIs such that they can achieve success and meet their criteria.”

On the flipside, co-creating KPIs also offers employees the chance to share information that might help identify potentially unfair KPIs. 

For example, perhaps a manager sets a new business acquisition target for a team, but forgets that one of the key team members will be on long-service leave for a portion of the year. That information then helps leaders to adjust the goalposts.

3. Account for non-standard work arrangements

Adjusting performance targets based on employees’ unique working arrangements is a significant challenge for employers, even more so now that flexible work arrangements have become commonplace.

“It can be really difficult… particularly where there aren’t clear measures of output or production,” says Catanese.

“In my experience, the best way to be able to set targets that are fair and achievable is to firstly look at the business model. There will be a bottom line and a point at which the overheads and direct employment costs of a person mean that a certain level of productive output needs to be generated to make it cost-effective.”

This may be easier for employers in a profit-driven environment where targets are more black-and-white, he says.

“If it’s not a profit-making enterprise, [think about] what they are funded for, what the maximum cost is and what sort of output they need for that cost. 

“Once that information is there, people can be more creative in thinking about KPIs. And, at that point, you engage the employees and have a meaningful discussion about what they are seeing.”

Ultimately, setting fair KPIs comes down to balancing what’s reasonable for the business as well as its people, he says. As well as the bottom line, this means considering the impact of difficult KPIs on employee morale.

“Businesses should remember that they do retain managerial prerogative – they can set performance standards, and they can set very high standards, but they need to weigh that against their ability to attract and retain staff,” he says.

“Obviously, if you’re asking too much of staff, they’re going to want something in return, or they may leave. And it’s difficult in some sectors to secure the best [talent]. So being reasonable, and having a high level of engagement about KPI setting is a good way to make sure that employees remain engaged.”

Need help crafting policies that set clear behavioural and performance expectations? AHRI’s short course will help you understand how to structure, write and implement effective policies and procedures.

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An employee of a Sydney-based beauty clinic recently filed a successful unfair dismissal claim with the Fair Work Commission (FWC) after she was sacked for failing to meet her key performance indicators (KPIs).

The FWC found that, while the employee had indeed failed to reach her sales targets, the targets set by the employer were arbitrary and unrealistic, and were not adjusted based on how many hours employees worked. 

Moreover, the FWC found fault with the employer’s dismissal process, particularly with regard to the warning letters it sent to the employee prior to her termination.

“[This case] is a lesson for employers to, firstly, ensure that their performance criteria are well-founded and will stand up to scrutiny,” says David Catanese, Partner at Hall & Wilcox.

“Another key lesson for employers is to ensure that when they’re issuing warnings, they have to be meaningful, they have to be understandable and they must give warnings that allow an employee to remedy their underperformance.”

Employee received unclear warning letters

The employee in this case commenced her role as a sales and beauty consultant at the company in January 2022. 

In November 2022, she received a warning letter informing her she had not met her sales target for the previous month. Her sales target was $150,000 per month, a target applied to all employees in the sales team whether they were full-time or part-time.

She sent a response to the warning arguing that it was unfair to impose this target on her, especially since she had taken approved leave in October and had only worked a total of nine days during the month. She requested that the employer revise or retract the warning before she sought assistance from the FWC. The employer did not respond.

A month later, the employee received an almost identical warning letter stating she had failed to meet her sales target in November for a second time. The letter instructed her to take immediate ‘corrective action’. During a phone call to discuss this second warning, her employer said she had not met the target because she had been 15-30 minutes late to work on several occasions and failed to make calls to existing clients. 

In response, the employee contested that her requests for clarification on the original warning letter had not yet been actioned. She rejected the letter as invalid on the grounds that it had been issued ‘arbitrarily’ and contained no details of the corrective actions she should take. She further argued that meeting the sales target and overall profitability was not part of her job as a consultant. 

However, the employer told her that meeting the sales targets was a requirement of her role, and urged her to ‘try [her] best’ to reach them. Six months later, in June of this year, she was sent a termination letter stating that her performance had been unsatisfactory and had not improved after two warnings.

The employee asked for further details on the terms of her termination, why her performance had been deemed unsatisfactory and why her queries about the warning letters had not been answered. When the employer failed to provide this, she filed a claim of unfair dismissal with the FWC.

“Don’t wait until you’re in an unfair dismissal hearing to think about what evidence you need to justify the performance criteria.” – David Catanese, Partner at Hall & Wilcox

To demonstrate that her dismissal was harsh, unjust or unreasonable, the employee argued that both warning letters she had been sent were invalid due to unreasonable demands and typographical errors and inaccuracies.

“For employers to give warnings that they can rely on, and demand compliance with, they need to be reasonable,” says Catanese. “They [also] need to be clear and understandable – otherwise, they’re effectively meaningless.

“In this case, the lack of rigour in the warnings that were issued meant that, from the point at which the first warning was issued, it was a bit of a train wreck waiting to happen. Once the first warning was infected with error, then so was the second one and anything else that relied on that.”

Application of KPIs was “not sound, defensible or well-founded”

As well as pointing out the inadequacy of the warning letters, the employee called into question her employer’s process for setting KPIs. 

She noted that, to her knowledge, no consultant had ever met the sales target of $150,000 per month. Several other consultants had been dismissed in the recent past for failing to hit this target, and she therefore surmised that the target was unrealistic and unachievable. 

She also stressed that she was a part-time employee, but was held to the same targets as her full-time colleagues.

In its ruling, the FWC said that the employer had not provided any evidence about how the sales targets were set, whether they were reasonable and whether other employees ever reached them. 

While it’s an employer’s prerogative to set high performance standards, Catanese advises employers to carefully consider how they might explain their targets in a legal setting like this one.

“Don’t wait until you’re in an unfair dismissal hearing to think about what evidence you need to justify the performance criteria,” he says. “At the point of setting the criteria, consider: is this going to stand up to scrutiny? And if I need to justify this performance criteria, what evidence would I rely on?

“For example, if you’re setting a monthly sales target of $150,000, how have you arrived at that figure? [It might be], for example, ‘Our overheads are $140,000. And we need $150,000 to make a profit.’ You don’t need to gather the evidence at that stage, but knowing how you would answer the question is very important.”

Ultimately, the employer conceded that it was unreasonable to expect the employee to reach the monthly sales target in just nine days, and therefore that the warning letters were unfair.

Calling the targets and their enforcement “not sound, defensible or well-founded”, the FWC found that there had been no valid reason for dismissal. The ruling also said the employer “quite clearly does not care about fairness in employment matters”.

The termination process was also called into question; the employee said she had not been spoken to in-person about her dismissal, nor given the opportunity to respond or have a support person present, and that the experience had caused her severe stress.

“Those types of conversations should, wherever possible, be conducted in-person and confirmed in writing,” says Catanese. “The legislation requires a person to be allowed to have a support person at these types of key meetings if they request one. But we go further and say that employers should invite employees to have a support person.”

Read HRM’s article about managing a support person in an HR meeting.

Satisfied that the dismissal was harsh (due to economic and health consequences), unjust (because she was not guilty of alleged poor performance) and unreasonable (because the employer did not support the conclusion that she was a poor performer), the FWC approved her unfair dismissal claim and ordered the employer to grant her $4,300 in compensation. 

Next week, keep an eye out for HRM’s comprehensive guide on setting and enforcing fair, achievable and legally compliant key performance indicators.

Need help brushing up on HR laws and compliance? AHRI’s short course will give you an understanding of the key elements of legislation, regulation and practices HR needs to be across.

The post When can you dismiss an employee for not meeting their KPIs? appeared first on HRM online.

Managing an employee who is underperforming can be an uncomfortable task. Having to deliver negative feedback, however necessary, can turn into a difficult conversation, and managers are often tasked with striking a balance between driving improvement and maintaining morale.

By comparison, managing star performers can feel like a dream. Their ability to get things done effectively allows for a low-touch managerial style, and the high quality of their work gives the impression that they are thriving in their roles. 

However, according to Charles Brass FAHRI, Senior HR Business Partner at Moonee Valley City Council and Chair of the Futures Foundation, this impression might not be reflective of the whole truth.

“By and large, we respond to the issues that our line managers raise, and, by and large, the issues they raise are of underperformance,” he says. “The tendency is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

“It’s true that overperformers don’t need the same attention that underperformers might need. But they do need [support] for a variety of other reasons – not the least of which is that, if they don’t feel their needs are being met, they’re going to get up and leave.”

Issues that can arise with an overperforming employee

Since managers are aware that an overperforming employee will “get the job done”, they can make the assumption that things will be easy for them. 

Managers also tend to pile more work onto their best performers without considering how the extra load is impacting them. What’s more, the high performer, who may also exhibit perfectionist behaviour, might be hesitant to flag if they’re not coping for fear of having their ‘star’ badge revoked.

“They are also dragged into things they don’t necessarily need to be dragged into,” says Brass.

“Often, when managers are facing performance issues with a team, they tend to call the entire team in to have the conversation. While that is sometimes a necessary thing to do – because we’ve got to be treating everybody equally – there’s also an [opportunity] to say to those people, ‘We recognise that your circumstances are different. And we want to acknowledge and respect that.’”

When an employee is consistently exceeding expectations, it could be a sign that they are ready to move up the ladder in their organisation. However, that should be a gradual process. Research shows that the pressure placed on newly promoted employees can cause them to quit, so don’t just pile more responsibilities and power on a high performer without coaching them on how to manage a new role.

Read HRM’s articles on supporting your future leaders effectively.

If there is no immediate opportunity for a promotion, communicate with the employee about a performance management process that works for them and will allow them to thrive in their existing role until a chance to progress arises. This might look like the chance to lead team meetings or work on a project where they have full autonomy.

With that said, if an employee is overperforming to an extreme extent, it becomes much harder for managers to give them the support they need, says Brass.

“It’s true that overperformers don’t need the same attention that underperformers might need. But they do need [support] for a variety of other reasons.” – Charles Brass FAHRI

“Ninety per cent of those serious overperformers are in the wrong job. There’s about 10 per cent I’ve met who are just delighted to be doing the job and doing it exceptionally well, and they don’t want to do anything else. But for most of those people, the fact that they are seriously overperforming is an indication that there is capacity there that the organisation needs to recognise, or it’ll lose them. 

“Anyone who is seriously overperforming is not sustained unless they are continually challenged. This is true in almost every field of life. We’ve seen this with sports stars [when they] go to a second class team – they don’t last long, because they’re not being challenged by the rest of their teammates. They end up leaving, even though there are huge amounts of money involved, and they go to an environment where they are being challenged.”

Tailoring performance management to your strongest players

Particularly in larger organisations, performance management can sometimes feel like a box-ticking exercise for both employees and their managers. 

This can be exacerbated in the case of overperformers, since many elements of a formulaic feedback process will not be applicable to them.

While it is difficult to manage an underperformer without following a formal process, managing your star players might be suited to a more informal management style. The key, says Brass, is to communicate with them about how the process could be tailored to their preferences.

“These conversations around performance tend to be forced upon people. [Instead], you should try to find more organic ways for the conversations managers have with their staff to fit into this picture of performance.

“Rather than having a separate conversation around managing performance, you should do what is good practice anyway, which is to check how things are going, then talk about what’s going on and then have a bit of feedback at the end,” he says. 

During these conversations, managers should consider personalised ways to support high-performing workers to ensure that they are not bored, unchallenged or saddled with stacks of work that they don’t enjoy. 

Read HRM’s article on the three different types of burnout.

“When having that conversation with an overperformer, [you could say], for example, ‘I can clearly see that what we expect of you is being done. So could we give you a day where you spend some time choosing what work you’d like to do?’ Or, ‘There’s this project coming up in the organisation some time in the future. It’s a little outside your normal sphere of activity at the moment, but do you want to get involved in it?’”

This is a subtle version of job crafting and can be a great way to keep an overperforming employee challenged without pushing them too far, as the plan is led by their preferences.

Ensuring equitable feedback and support

When employers adopt different management approaches to employees based on their performance, one concern is that they could open themselves up to accusations of unfair treatment. 

Overperforming employees might feel that they are receiving less attention and development than their colleagues, while underperforming employees might resent any extra flexibility or opportunities offered to high achievers. 

“Ninety per cent of those serious overperformers are in the wrong job.”  – Charles Brass FAHRI

To address these concerns, Brass recommends ensuring that the amount of attention given to each employee is consistent, even if the type of attention might be different.

“That’s the way to deal with the perception that you’re dealing with people differently. [We could say], ‘Yes, it’s true that the conversation I’m having with you, the underperformer is different from the conversation I’m having with them, the overperformer. But the fact that I’m meeting with both of you means I’m treating you the same.”

Reward and recognition may also look different for these two groups, he says – for managers, this requires a careful balance between giving employees the recognition they need to remain motivated without showing favouritism.

“We’ve moved a long way from thinking that reward and recognition is all about money,” he says. “But I think organisations, particularly large organisations, have a way to go in managing these reward and recognition programs for people who are clearly performing at or above a level that is required.”

By providing ample consultation, tailored support and opportunities for growth, leaders can ensure that their star players don’t become victims of their own success.

Develop the necessary skills to build and sustain a high performing work team and tap into the full potential of team members with this short course from AHRI.

The post How to manage an overperforming employee appeared first on HRM online.

When Jeremiah Arigu Emmanuel CPHR began working at the Department of Housing in Nigeria in 2006 as a Training Officer, he immediately knew something was amiss.

The Department of Housing is responsible for building and constructing housing and roads in Nigeria’s 36 states in collaboration with several stakeholders.

Good roads and affordable housing are integral to the growth of Nigeria’s economy and its expansion into non-oil sectors such as agriculture, solid minerals and tourism.

But Emmanuel witnessed a workforce whose morale had slumped, impacting performance and wellbeing, and manifesting in behavioural and cultural issues. 

Many employees didn’t bother turning up to work, and if they did, it would often be late in the day before they arrived. Customer service relationships suffered, with unethical practices becoming a regular occurrence.

“People were collecting kickbacks to do tasks they were supposed to do already without any strings attached,” says Emmanuel, who is know a Teaching Associate at Monash University.

Ethics wise, there was also a common issue of favouritism and bias. Employees were singled out for praise and training based on their connections within and outside the organisation.

The impact of these issues radiated outwards, with many projects suffering service delivery setback

“The organisation handles a lot of enormous projects and we had contractors and organisations working with us to carry out these projects.

“The turnaround times in processing documents and files was impacted, and contractors were often coming to the office to follow up.”

Reinvigorating the training process

As a training officer, Emmanuel worked closely with the Deputy Director of Learning and Development and the Director of HR, and was responsible for developing training plans and proposals and overseeing short courses.

He discovered that in an organisation made up of over 9000 employees, the training budget only took a quarter of this number into account.

“Training had stagnated over two to five years,” he says. “When there was training, there was no deliberate attempt to train people based on needs and merit.”

On a daily basis, both formally and informally, Emmanuel received complaints and queries from employees about the lack of training, which led him to link this back to the issue of low morale and the resulting behaviours.

“Based on that, I drew up argumentative evidence [to demonstrate that] something had to be done if we want to reinvigorate a workforce that could deliver the organisation’s expectations.”

The proposal, which was the focus of Emmanuel’s case study to achieve AHRI’s HR Certification via the Senior Leaders Pathway, was a two-pronged approach comprising a mass training exercise and specific department-centred training.

The project was designed to uplift the capabilities of mid-to-junior level staff, who made up a third (3026) of the organisation.

“These staff were critical resources who I would describe as foot soldiers,” says Emmanuel. “They carried out the nitty-gritty detailed work that required approval by top-level management.”

The first aspect consisted of a one-time holistic training course to bring back employees’ confidence and let them know that the organisation recognised their importance.

Next, he changed the focus of the training to a needs and merit basis.

“I came up with a training needs analysis (TNA) [tool], and formed a Ministerial Training Committee which comprised line managers across all the departments in the organisation, including finance, architecture, engineering, electrical and highways.”

This committee helped to facilitate their respective departments’ TNA to identify the gaps, those who needed to upskill and the training required. They were also tasked with sourcing reputable training organisations that worked in collaboration with the HR team to deliver the required training.

“Employees who came late to work were coming in early and there was an enthusiasm in the air that you could read in their faces.” Jeremiah Arigu Emmanuel CPHR

However, there were some issues agreeing on the format of a TNA survey, but Emmanuel came up with a template that captured data in the context of performance in the following areas: What are the skills required to perform these roles? Do the employees have those skills? If not, what skills do they need to perform at the level expected of them based on the job description?

To strengthen his business case, the TNA was carried out before Emmanuel submitted his proposal to the higher ups. But it still took him a whole financial year to get the plan across the line after some delay due to lack of funds as advised by the finance and accounts department.

Emmanuel persisted, however, and was able to get the department on board by convincing them that training was critical to driving the organisation forward.

Moving the needle on mindset and performance

Once the new approach was implemented, almost all (2384) junior-to-mid level employees received training in a single financial year. The shift in their morale was palpable.

“Employees who came late to work were coming in early and there was an enthusiasm in the air that you could read in their faces,” says Emmanuel.

The turnaround time for processing customer requests improved dramatically, with 90 per cent of files processed within 24 hours of receipt. Positive customer relationship behaviour displayed by front-desk staff also jumped from 30 per cent to 70 per cent.

“I personally received messages from consultants and contractors, saying, ‘The customer relationship has improved.’

Employees also showed their appreciation, telling Emmanuel that greater access to training enhanced their technical, managerial, and attitudinal skills, and improved their ability to perform tasks.

“You could see that employees were beginning to implement things they learned during training.

“It showed in their behaviour and the way they approached colleagues and customers outside the organisation, with a considerable decline in employees taking kickbacks or engaging in corruption.”

The perception of HR in the organisation also shifted after the success of the project. HR used to be locked out of high-level discussions and there was no strategic alignment of HR and business functions. But afterwards, there was an integrated, deliberate approach in discussing key people-related issues at the top level.

“HR became a strong strategic partner in that all the departments saw HR as helping them achieve business objectives.”

Advice for HR professionals

For HR professionals looking to take on a similar challenge, Emmanuel says collaboration, openness and transparency are the keys to success. 

“You need to collaborate with other stakeholders in the industry, whether regulatory bodies or others in the organisation, such as the finance department.

“Training is not a one department affair – it’s an organisational affair. Get the right team and then work together.”

Resilience was also essential for Emmanuel to achieve his goal in the face of resistance.

“Even though some felt this may be a futile effort, I was determined. Top executives might ask you, ‘Why do you want to train people? Everyone is delivering.’

“You need to be persuasive and convince them that in order to gain a competitive advantage in the workforce, you need to upskill, train and develop them.”

A version of this article first appeared in the October 2022 edition of HRM Magazine.

Want to take your career to the next level and be recognised as a Certified HR Practitioner? Achieve the industry standard for the HR profession with the AHRI Practising Certification Program (APC).

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When it comes to recognising the achievements of employees, the personal touch can go a long way.

Take the former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, Douglas Contant, who is said to have crafted 30,000 hand-written letters to his employees across the space of 10 years (that’s about 10 each day). The company reported a boost to productivity as a result of this consistent and personalised action. Contant was personally paid back for these efforts too. After seriously injuring himself in a car accident in 2009, he was inundated with cards from well-wishers, many of whom were his employees.

With half of Australian workers expecting a pay rise in the next year, and almost two thirds prepared to request one in the near future, it’s clear that people are seeking recognition for the hard work they’ve put in throughout the pandemic years. 

However, not all employers are able to immediately fork out money for pay rises, so it’s worth looking into some alternatives. Even those who can offer pay raises can benefit from coupling pay with non-financial methods of rewarding and motivating their staff. That’s where symbolic awards, or interventions, come in handy.

Symbolic rewards and recognition ideas

How effective are symbolic rewards in motivating employees? This was a question a group of researchers in the UK set out to answer when studying the wellbeing of public sector employees.

The Happier, Healthier Professionals project – conducted by Ashley Whillans, Assistant Professor at Harvard Business school; and Michael T. Saunders, Associate Professor, and Shibeal O’Flatherty PhD candidate at King’s College London – gauged the impact of three different interventions on workers, chief among them being personalised letters of appreciation that contained messages of positive feedback and were sent to their home addresses. The letters were signed by the direct managers of employees participating in the study.

Researchers found that after one month, those who received a letter “reported feeling significantly more valued, more recognised for their work, and more supported by their organisation than those who didn’t receive a letter”.

Other flow-on effects included a small increase in wellbeing and belonging, and even a reduction in the number of employees taking sick leave.

Symbolic recognition can prove a boon for individual performance and team morale, particularly for public sector employees who “tend to be more motivated to do work that has a positive impact on others [and are usually] be less motivated by salary than their private sector counterparts”, according to a Harvard Business Review article detailing the research findings.

Noting there is no one-size-fits-all approach, the researchers outlined five factors employers should consider when implementing symbolic awards.

Consider using these points as a guide the next time your company rethinks its reward and recognition program:

1. Consider the stakeholder

Words of recognition often mean more when they come from someone higher up in the organisation, so start by identifying the person who will provide recognition to employees.

“The line manager is best, but it depends on the competence of the manager and the quality of their relationship with the employee,” says Carol Gill FCPHR, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Melbourne Business School.

To ensure the recognition has the intended effect – and doesn’t simply get lost in the spiral of intra-team communication – she recommends instilling a culture of recognition at multiple levels, including from senior leaders.

“There is always an opportunity to recognise the whole organisation’s efforts, and that could come via the CEO,” says Gill. “A [personalised] note from the CEO can be immensely powerful to an individual who has stood out in some way.”

2. Do it at the right time

Recognition should be used by managers as closely as possible to the behaviour or action being recognised, says Gill.

“Managers need to get in the rhythm of acknowledging when somebody does something great, saying: ‘I noticed that you handled that customer really well. That was fantastic. Thank you.’ Make it part of the way you do business every day.”

By the same token, positive reinforcement, day in day out, could become repetitive and water down the intended effect of the feedback. Use praise strategically to ensure it feels authentic to the receiver.

And be careful to ensure positive feedback is distributed fairly and equally – disabled, queer and gender diverse workers, and those from ethnically diverse backgrounds, for instance, cannot be left by the wayside, says Gill.

“We know that Caucasian males often get noticed more,” she says.

3. Don’t do it behind closed doors

“Public recognition makes everyone aware of what the organisation values,” says Gill. “So do it in private and in public, but if doing it in public, get it right.”

How does HR get it right? By committing to something called procedural justice.

“There are two types of justice. One is distributed: ‘This is what everybody gets.’ The other is procedural, which is about whether the processes that led to that recognition and reward were fair.”

And there’s a catch: when publicly congratulating an employee, try to avoid disappointing those who don’t get recognised, which could leave them feeling unfairly treated and can demotivate them, says Gill.

In some instances, it could lead to even bigger issues. In the HBR article, the researchers cited another study where public recognition triggered an uptick in negative social comparison among non-awardees.

4. Add a personal touch 

Consider a message written by hand on quality card stock that you receive with a small, personalised gift. Contrast that with an email signed with the CEO’s name at the bottom, which was clearly written by someone else. Which would you prefer to receive?

“If possible, personalise,” says Gill. “Human beings are one of the few species that imbue objects with meaning. The idea means more than the object does.”

An engraved pen to mark a significant work anniversary, for instance, could mean even more to an employee than a $20 gift card, says Gill.

It’s the thought that counts

One of the clearest wins of symbolic rewards for employers – beyond the obvious boost to confidence, team morale and culture – is that they can be extremely cost-effective.

Praising a worker for hitting a major milestone on a particular project during the company’s weekly meeting takes just minutes and costs the business nothing. 

At the end of the day, the form of recognition itself isn’t strictly important.

“It’s the fact that someone gets noticed that helps them be rewarded for the behaviour they’ve displayed and continued to display,” says Gill.

Such interventions are not a substitute for fair and equal pay, but they can be a step towards prioritising the satisfaction of employees and signalling that your company is one where people are truly valued.

What are some other novel approaches to rewards and recognition you’ve encountered? Let us know in the comments below, or AHRI members can join the AHRI Members Lounge on LinkedIn to share their perspectives with HR peers.

The post It’s not all about the money: innovative approaches to employee rewards and recognition appeared first on HRM online.

In July 2020, Shannon Wilson CPHR had been working as HR Advisor at Shearwater Steiner School in Mullumbimby for eight months when James Goodlet, the new Head of School, arrived. Before long, Goodlet had devised a strategic focus aimed at boosting employee initiative and improving the school environment while still delivering high-quality education. 

An employee survey in late 2019 had revealed that employees, while hungry for change, felt unacknowledged, under-appreciated and overworked. They reported that their roles and responsibilities lacked definition, and that professional development lacked structure. By 2020, voluntary staff turnover had reached 20 per cent – up from 10 per cent in 2016.

Wilson recognised that if Goodlet’s strategic plan didn’t address these issues, it would struggle to get the support of staff. So she set about working on the cultural issues at play to ensure he had a strong foundation to build on.

A four-pillar approach

Even though the school recognised the need for change, leadership was wary of introducing a performance management system. 

“Teaching is a unique job,” says Wilson. “Efficiency and productivity can’t be determined simply by looking at students’ scores, so it’s difficult to devise an objective process for performance management.”

Also, the school’s leadership felt that a performance management system would be perceived as a function to address underperformance when it was so much more than that.

“So we had to change the language,” says Wilson.

She adopted a holistic, four-pillar approach she called the Staff Potential Program, which doubled as her capstone project to achieve AHRI’s HR certification. The program comprises a “whole person” review, a goal-setting framework for a staff potential plan, probationary reviews for new staff and procedures for under performers.

Creating a tailored framework

The whole person review precedes the goal-setting framework, and unlike traditional performance reviews, it’s personal, spiritual and professional in scope. It takes the form of an unstructured conversation between employees and their manager. 

Wilson drew on the research of American neuroeconomist Paul Zak when putting the plan together. (Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to explain human decision-making.)

“The personal aspect provides a safe space to open up and reduces stigma around sensitive issues such as mental health,” says Wilson. “This conversation also assists us in fulfilling our duty-of-care obligations under the Work Health and Safety Act.”

The spiritual aspect is two-fold.

“It provides staff an opportunity to reflect on how one’s professional practice is supported and influenced by the Steiner philosophy, and, beyond that, to explore one’s passions outside of work to support and nurture their personal wellbeing and identity.

“The professional aspect is concerned with how the staff member is going with their career and where they see themselves in the future, and this can be used to inform our succession and workforce plans.”

Following the review, each staff member creates goals utilising the SOAR analysis framework, which stands for strengths, opportunities, aspirations, results. (See template here). This means focusing on strengths and opportunities, in line with aspirations, to achieve specific results.  

“We tailored the framework for our staff. For example, we encourage them to look at opportunities which exist in the organisation and support the school’s strategic plan, such as undertaking strategies to better integrate school curriculum.

“The intent is to guide managers, so they feel empowered to act when it’s needed, with an understanding of both legal and ethical obligations.” – Shannon Wilson CPHR, HR Advisor, Shearwater Steiner School

“Additionally, staff are required to devise goals in line with their professional standards. Teachers, for example, would develop at least one goal which reflects the NSW teaching standards, such as devising a goal to support student participation in the classroom.”

Wilson’s program includes probationary reviews to ensure that realising staff potential is a priority from the beginning. They take place when staff members are three and six months into their positions and begin by mirroring the whole-person review process. 

“The probationary review begins as a discussion about how the new staff member has found their time in the school so far. It provides an opportunity for us to find out what support is needed from their perspective in terms of development or resources while providing their managers with the opportunity to address any issues early on.”

Meanwhile, the risk of underperformance is addressed through policy and guidelines, which explain what is expected of employees and how leadership will manage underperformance. 

Wilson emphasises that this is a flexible approach. 

“The intent is to guide managers, so they feel empowered to act when it’s needed, with an understanding of both legal and ethical obligations. For example, when to take notes and how to draw up an improvement plan while identifying appropriate reporting lines.”

Feeling supported

The Staff Potential Program was launched in late 2020 and had achieved some pleasing results by April 2021. There was a 10.8 per cent increase in the number of staff who felt the school vision was clearly articulated; a 24 per cent increase in the number who felt supported by their supervisors; and a 23 per cent increase in the number who said they now received more regular feedback. 

“I was particularly happy that so many staff felt better-supported,” says Wilson. “In formalising the need for conversations between staff members and managers, we’ve created a space which is really positive.”

She acknowledges there’s still work to do. Not least because the pandemic and vaccination mandate for NSW teachers have negatively impacted job satisfaction and increased turnover rates.

“Designing and implementing an HR program for a whole organisation can be overwhelming and intimidating, but completing it as part of AHRI certification really helped. 

“In bringing together research and evidence-based strategies, I had more confidence in my recommendations and in the design of the program. It also helped me build clout with the leadership team.”

Join a growing cohort of HR professionals who are taking the next step in their careers by undergoing HR certification with AHRI.

This article first appeared in the March 2022 edition of HRM magazine.

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Most people reading this would have likely experienced productivity guilt at some point in their careers. Who hasn’t felt anxious about not starting a project sooner or watching unopened emails pile up in their inbox? Perhaps you’ve even found yourself engaging in panic working.

Procrastination and an inability to focus seem to be part and parcel of our hyperactive working lives. And while this certainly existed before the pandemic, it has ramped up in recent years. HR professionals in particular have been forced to add more to their plates, meaning productivity guilt has likely become a common experience in their working weeks.

It’s common to feel as if the days are getting shorter, and it’s rare to feel 100 per cent on top of everything. But when that guilt starts to impact your performance, mental health or team cohesion, it’s likely time to figure out a better way forward.

Productivity guilt can feel like a curse – so what can we do about it?

A little guilt goes a long way

The irony isn’t lost on me that when putting together this piece, I felt a lot of pressure to knuckle down and meet a deadline. I was tempted to put the writing off for a few minutes, then a few hours, then until the following day. I felt guilty that I wasn’t being more productive and that my chances of producing a quality piece of work were slimming by the minute.

But was that pressure I felt to perform such a bad thing? Will Felps, Associate Professor at UNSW Business School, says the feeling could have its benefits, in the right scenarios.

“Productivity guilt often provides a useful motivational ‘kick in the pants’,” he says. “While feeling guilty about productivity doesn’t feel good, it [sometimes] helps us motivate ourselves to get things done for colleagues we care about.”

Felps stresses the importance of distinguishing between productivity guilt and productivity shame, as HRM previously explored.

“Productivity shame is typically not healthy,” says Felps. “It is demotivating and typically leads to greater procrastination. Productivity shame makes us want to hide under the covers.”

Ringing any bells?

“You have to prioritise what really matters, and then let the rest go without feeling bad about it. You have to be the one to say, ‘That’s enough for today’.” – Associate Professor Will Felps, University of New South Wales

So productivity guilt can sometimes act as a reminder of what we should be doing, while productivity shame goes one step further, making us feel bad for not being more productive or doing more to support our colleagues.

It is key, therefore, to recognise the difference between the two and which one you’re experiencing.

Madeleine Dore, author of I Didn’t Do The Thing Today, a book about productivity guilt, says the issue is less the individual’s responsibility to solve and more so a systemic problem.

“Productivity guilt becomes a negative feedback loop,” she says. “Instead of recognising we’re in a system full of false promises that sets us up to fail, we place the blame wholly on ourselves.

“We try and fail and try again to live up to the pressures and demands placed on our days, and when we inevitably don’t meet society’s expectations – or our own – we can feel a sense of guilt, shame and anxiety.”

The adrenaline starts to wear off

Think back to pre-pandemic days, if that’s even possible. Were employees at your organisation feeling overwhelmed by their workloads or guilty due to their lack of productivity? If so, imagine how those feelings could have skyrocketed in recent years.

The pandemic has exposed the extent to which employees and and employers buy into the ‘always on’ culture – a phenomenon known as availability creep – and much has been said about the pandemic’s impact on cognitive function and burnout.

Now, as disruptions to the way we work are beginning to settle down, and more Australians return to the workplace, it’s likely that many employees are struggling to maintain the fast-paced workload they were forced to adopt at the start of the pandemic. They’ve been running on adrenaline for years now, and when you’re used to working at 120 per cent, working at 100 per cent can feel like failure.

“The fact that you could virtually always be working leads some people to feel like they should always be working,” says Felps.

“When you work from home … there’s much more flexibility about when you accomplish work tasks. But this flexibility is a double-edged sword. There’s nothing stopping you and your colleagues from working late until the night.”

Not only are our usual boundaries being tested, we’re realising our ambitious goals might not have been achievable even prior to the pandemic.

“The pandemic shook up our days in varying ways, but one thing it taught many of us is that we are more adrift than we think,” says Dore.

“When we don’t meet the high standard of productivity we set for ourselves, we feel bad – overlooking the fact that the benchmark was out of reach to begin with.”

Find a happy medium

So what’s the solution?

It’s clear that there’s no easy fix to productivity guilt, but there may not be any requirement to ‘fix’ it in the first place.

Instead, we could try shifting the emphasis we place on productivity, says Dore.

“We can untether [ourselves] from the idea that productivity is the sole measure of our worth,” she says. “We can forgive and accept the stumbles, and look at taking productivity off its pedestal and broaden the measure of a day.”

For example, perhaps we measure a successful day by how many people we had good connections with, how well we prepared ourselves to be productive in the future (e.g. diving into some research, setting up meetings or building a strategy to better manage our time), or simply how much we enjoyed, rather than judged, ourselves.

The overload of performance anxiety placed upon employees needs to change too.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law holds that, to a certain point, as the pressure placed on an individual to perform increases, their performance grows at a commensurate rate – but after a point, their productivity drops significantly due to overload of anxiety.

“Managers want their followers to feel some productivity guilt, but not so much that it is overwhelming,” says Felps. “This relates to the concept of the ‘zone of productive stress’, also called the Yerkes-Dodson Law.”

Another way to think about it is stretching employees to improve without pushing them beyond their limits. Setting ‘stretch goals’ is a fantastic way to facilitate growth. Sometimes you need to let employees feel a little stressed so they learn how to problem solve and come up with creative solutions to the challenges they face, a concept HRM discussed with Harvard’s Amy Edmondson last year.

Felps is especially practical about what’s required to stay on the Yerkes-Dodson scale’s upper incline.

“Realise that you’ll never get it all done,” he says. “You have to prioritise what really matters, and then let the rest go without feeling bad about it. You have to be the one to say, ‘That’s enough for today.’

“Strategise about what you’re going to stop doing, to make time for what you think is really important.”

Dore’s approach goes even further: to deal with productivity guilt, she recommends recognising the “a slow process of untethering” from the system rather than depend on fast and easy fixes.

“What’s more realistic … is to recognise that work and life is a balancing act,” says Dore. “Instead of striving for stability, we can embrace what I call the ‘wobble’ – rather than striving for a life of perfect order, we can wobble between those tasks and commitments that are most meaningful, pressing or simply desirable in each moment.”

Many of us are unable to tear ourselves away from our ever-expanding to-do lists entirely, but taking small steps to improve employees’ wellbeing, and your own, can only have a positive impact on an organisation more broadly.

“We can swap being self-critical for being self-reflective,” says Dore. “Instead of lamenting that we didn’t get through our to-do list … [identify] whether perhaps we put too much on the to-do list in the first place, or whether we really need to do the thing after all.”

A healthy dollop of self-forgiveness, it seems, goes a long way to boosting an individual’s motivation and performance, which, in a workplace context, makes everyone happier.

It’s more important than ever to optimise your team’s productivity. AHRI’s Performance Management short course outlines the process required to effectively manage the performance of employees. Register here.

The post Is it time to change how we think about productivity guilt? appeared first on HRM online.

When you ask HR professionals about performance improvement plans (PIP), you’ll probably get mixed responses. Most will appreciate the value of a PIP as a tool to avoid an unfair dismissal claim, but the jury is still out regarding their effectiveness in helping poor performers to improve.

Perhaps it’s time that we gave PIPs a refresh and focussed on the ways in which they help? But first, it’s worth understanding how to use them effectively. HRM asked two HR experts to weigh in.

When performance improvement plans are useful

Performance improvement plans formalise the process of dealing with an underperforming worker, says Cecilia Jones FCPHR, HR consultant and coach. 

“[They’re often used] when managers have tried repeatedly to help an employee improve,” she says.

And while HR’s views on PIPs are a little up in the air, employees’ sentiments on them are pretty clear – if they’re put on a formal PIP, they probably feel like they’re being managed out of the business.

Perhaps that’s why PIPs sometimes fail. The employee in question might not believe their employer truly wants them to improve, so they don’t try to. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. More on that in a moment.

PIPs shouldn’t be used as the first step on the road to termination, says Jones. When used correctly, they’re a powerful performance development tool.

“The aim of a PIP should be an opportunity to set an employee up for success,” she says. “They must have clear [and realistic] objectives and timeframes, and the manager should be meeting with the employee frequently to provide the right environment for the PIP to succeed.”

This could include mentorship, further training or consistent and constructive feedback.

“It very quickly became apparent to me that his underperformance was a symptom of a personal issue and a PIP wasn’t going to fix that. People don’t suddenly decide to be a poor performer. There’s always a reason.”  – Cecilia Jones FCPHR, HR consultant and coach

Importantly, an employee’s first indication that they’re underperforming shouldn’t be when they’re placed on a PIP. There should be plenty of genuine attempts to help them improve prior to this, which could be done via formalising performance goals and making expectations crystal clear, so the employee understands exactly what success looks like.

“Some organisations will have a policy that says after three or six months of trying to improve performance is when [they’ll] formalise the process with a PIP,” says Jones.

The length of a PIP will be dependent on the goals you set within the plan, she adds. It can be a good idea to have a combination of short and long-term objectives to give the employee some quick wins. 

Don’t forget to encourage regular catch ups between the employee and their manager. This helps keep employees on track. 

“Regular meetings should be part of your PIP framework. PIPs cannot succeed in isolation. They need buy-in from both parties,” says Jones.

Time for a rebrand?

If a PIP is conducted properly, it gives employees a second chance. So perhaps the real issue with them is the way in which they’re perceived.

To employees, a PIP can signal that the writing is on the wall; they’re on their way to a dismissal, says Desleigh White CPHR, HR consultant at People Matter Mediation and HR Solutions.

So maybe we need to rebrand them?

 “I prefer to use ‘development plans,” says White. “This demonstrates to the employee that you are invested in their improvement.”

Development plans can be implemented slightly earlier and should identify the root problem, says White. This could be inadequate management, a lack of appropriate training or perhaps they need some adjustments made to suit their personal situation – for example, they might be neurodiverse or having issues in their personal lives.

Jones agrees that PIPs sometimes fail to focus on the employee’s development.

“I once had an employee transfer to my department and his PIP came with him,” says Jones. 

“It very quickly became apparent to me that his underperformance was a symptom of a personal issue and a PIP wasn’t going to fix that. People don’t suddenly decide to be a poor performer, there’s always a reason.”

To find out what’s really going on, Jones suggests being curious with the employee and posing questions by saying things like ‘I’ve noticed’, so employees don’t feel like they’re being interrogated.

“Questions such as, ‘I’ve noticed that your performance is going off track. This is unusual for you. What’s going on?’ or ‘I’ve noticed you’re not meeting the agreed KPIs. Can we discuss what’s going on?’ are worth asking,” says Jones.

“If the conversation with the employee is framed differently the manager can avoid going down the wrong rabbit hole. After all, the goal is to set employees up for success.”

Getting to the root of the problem might mean having a difficult conversation with the manager to ensure the employee was set up for success in the first place, says White.

“Too often, I find the employee wasn’t onboarded properly or didn’t receive adequate training on what is expected of them,” she says.  “That’s when we go back and look at the onboarding checklist or try to fill the gaps in the employee’s training.”

Identifying and filling those gaps should be part of the development plan. The plan should also include clear objectives, achievable timeframes and regular check-ins so the success of the plan can be measured. 

If this sounds remarkably like a PIP, that’s because it is.

“I actually use the [FWC’s] performance improvement plan template and change the name to development plan,” says White. 

“The whole situation [with PIPs] is really uncomfortable for most people, so I think we should do what we can to make it easier.” 

“Any plan needs to have carrots attached to it, rather than the stick.” – Desleigh White CPHR, HR consultant, People Matter Mediation and HR Solutions

Development plans are a good starting point, but they don’t always work. In this case, White might move to a performance improvement plan.

“I would suggest moving to a PIP to up the ante, possibly with a shorter time frame. The development plan can be used to counter the ‘but I’ve never been told about this’ response,” says White.

“Showing that you’ve done everything you can to help the person succeed is important for them.”

Play the long game 

Renaming PIPs makes a lot of sense if your employees only see them as a punitive measure.  

Development plans or performance re-engagement plans, as HRM has previously written about, often serve as a legal safety blanket for employers. If an employee makes an unfair dismissal claim, PIPs are an important part of the record-keeping process; they demonstrate that the employer attempted to help the employee. (Although, they can sometimes backfire, as HRM reported in 2019).

However, this means some employers will put an underperforming staff member on a PIP having already decided to dismiss them. 

Even if that’s not the case in your organisation, if an employee thinks that’s what’s happening, they’re much less likely to actively engage with the process.

“Any plan needs to have carrots attached to it, rather than the stick,” says White. “Rewarding or recognising the behaviour along the way is more likely to make the plan successful in the long run.”

While the possibility that they might get fired could inspire employees to pick up their performance for the short term, it’s unlikely to have a lasting impact. However, recognising their improvement might. 

In White’s opinion, positive reinforcement is a much stronger force to encourage good performance than anxiety-inducing approaches, such as the threat of termination, and formal warnings. However,  recognition must be specific to avoid coming across as insincere. Take the time to spell out what they did well.

“For instance, say something like, ‘Great job on the XYZ project. You were a key member of the team, collaborated well, received positive stakeholder feedback and the project was delivered on time,’” she suggests.

By getting to the root of the issue and implementing a performance improvement effectively, you can help employees to move through what are often only rough patches or small knowledge gaps. 

HR professionals can help to remove the stigma of a PIP by creating a culture that focuses on continual improvement for all – underperformers, middle-of-the-road employees and your star players. After all, there’s always room to improve. 

Telling an employee they’re underperforming or that you’re putting them on a performance improvement plan can be uncomfortable discussions. Learn the art of having difficult conversations at work with this short course from AHRI. Sign up for the next session on 16 February.

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