High Performance Organization

As employees work harder and longer, some are facing a breaking point, even though many companies aren't paying attention.

Dan Markovitz’s recent Harvard Business Review post on The Folly of Stretch Goals brings to mind a development in my own management incentive plan design work over recent years, as my clients and I address heightened concerns about risk and unintended consequences.

TED-Ed’s new free platform allows anyone to "flip" any video on YouTube by adding custom content to play alongside it, making it possible to turn any piece of video content into a teachable moment.

How do you feel about performance reviews?
Personally, I think the annual performance review (as most commonly implemented) is broken. It’s too infrequent, too fraught with anxiety and fear (for the manager as well as the employee), and too ineffective at doing what it is supposed to do – deliver solid, actionable praise and feedback on employee performance for a year’s worth of work (not just the work completed within the last week or so).
What’s the solution? I recently shared two case studies from companies that kicked the annual review to the kerb quite successfully. But the answer really isn’t as simple as that.

In today’s digital age, it's hard to focus. But the Not-Right-Now list can help you get things done.
Most people operate with To-Do lists. If you're like me, it seems as though that To-Do list never ends and you never check everything off of it.

Follow these eight steps to better instill continuous improvement in individuals and teams.
 

The best methods and the best of intentions can easily fail unless we take into account how adults learn in our organizations. During World War II a process that has become known as Training Within Industry (TWI) and its component Job Instruction (JI) were developed and then adopted by Toyota as it developed its system of production.

I WAS the youngest of four children. My father was an electrician, and my mother was a school nurse who returned to school to get her degree when I started kindergarten. She would say you can be anything you want to be, and she set an example for me.
In high school, I enjoyed public speaking, art and music. Whenever the Grateful Dead were at Madison Square Garden, a friend and I would silk-screen T-shirts with Jerry Garcia’s image and sell them to concertgoers.

To succeed in today’s health care field, its leaders must develop better innovative learning strategies to communicate a compelling vision of high-quality, cost-effective care.

Five Ways High-Performing Organizations Manage People
How do high performing organizations manage this change? They have embraced the new definition of work (with new HR practices as well):

 
If companies want their superstars to give 120 percent and not leave for greener pastures, an ongoing focus on retention and employee engagement will serve them well.

 
Organizations invest billions annually on a success curriculum known as "leadership development," which ends up leaving so much on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs — absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit to assessment, fix a problem. Likewise, they leave too many people behind with an elite selection process that fast-tracks "hi-pos" and essentially discards the rest. And they leave most people cold with flavor of the month remedies, off sites, immersions, and excursions — which produce little more than a grim legacy of fat binders gathering dust on shelves.
What if, instead of stuffing people with curricula, models, and competencies, we focused on deepening their sense of purpose, expanding their capability to navigate difficulty and complexity, and enriching their emotional resilience?

Ok, so there might not much chance of raising salaries, says Jack Wiley. But there are other ways of keeping workers happy.
With pay deals across the UK at an all-time low, employees could be forgiven for lacking in motivation at the moment. But it’s not necessarily big money that they’re looking for. A 30-year research study has found that seven factors contribute to the engagement, commitment, retention and overall satisfaction of employees.