The big boys have done it. Juniper, Adobe, Deloitte, Accenture and Cigna have all done it. And even General Electric (GE) - the one that popularised Performance Ratings - have all thrown Performance Ratings out the window. So why are all these large organisations ditching performance ratings? The more important question you should be asking [...]
In almost every investment brochure, you will see a disclaimer that says: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results". However most investors (or so they call themselves) completely ignore this disclaimer. Similarly in the world of hiring and recruiting, most hiring managers ignore the fact that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Performance-based [...]
It’s that time of the year again when performance appraisals are done, budgets are set and strategies are put in place. This is the time of the year when you identify the weakest links in your team and identify the individuals who have not performed up-to-mark and decide what to do with them. However, not all [...]
Research has found that people have a natural aversion to idleness: we’ll go out of our way to stay busy, even if we have to invent things to do. But being too busy can be counterproductive. Studies have also shown that we have a bias toward action: when faced with a problem, we prefer to act, [...]
The measure of friendship on employee engagement has been touted by Gallup for the longest time. In their employee engagement surveys, one of the questions employees have to answer is: “Do you have a best friend at work?" The question is: Does the measure of friendship determine the level of employee engagement? The answer I believe [...]
NOTE: This article first appeared on LinkedIn in June 2014. There has been so much focus on Employee Happiness recently. There is even a National Workplace Happiness Survey Information Session coming up soon right here in Singapore to talk about – you guessed it – Workplace Happiness! Not too long ago, I came across a blog [...]
I recently came across a very interesting article in the Harvard Business Review. In this article, the author reveals that when companies hire lower-wage workers, the productivity of both its current employees who are paid higher wages and the new workers who are paid lower wages, are negatively impacted. This leads to an overall decrease in [...]
It was 1986. It was a cold January morning at Cape Canaveral. Engineers had been frantically preparing for the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. On board the space shuttle were 7 crew members. Just as in all previous launches, safety checks had to be done prior to the launch of the mission to ensure the [...]
Why do most teams and organisations under-perform? Even if you hired all the right people into your team, your team might still under-perform because of one reason. When I say “under-perform??? I mean the teams or organisations fail to perform their best beyond what they are already doing today. So what is the primary reason that [...]
It does not matter if you are a team manager leading a team of 5 or a Division Manager leading an organization of 500, the challenges with team and people management are fundamentally the same. It does not get any easier with a smaller team. All you require is a couple of difficult employees or staff [...]
