Ami Graves

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Amy to the Built by People podcast. Amy, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:45GuestSure. Love to. My name is Amy Graves. I'm the CHRO of ValtechLogix. We are a managed service provider located in Indianapolis, headquartered there with locations all over the globe. I'm really happy to be here. I've spent my career in human resources for the last 25 years. Very happy to be here and talk about a subject that I think probably grates on every HR practitioner's list of things that we would love to see through our departments around. So this is a great topic today.

▶1:14HostAmy, thanks for that great introduction. And I know part of our conversation today centers around performance management systems, and I'm curious what specific challenges or pain points with your traditional performance management system prompted you to completely overhaul it and move to rolling objectives.

▶1:31GuestYeah, I think that the system, when it was built many years ago, obviously had great intention behind it. But I think that some of the challenges that we've experienced, and not just where I'm at now, but over the course of my HR career, I've seen commonalities of these challenges are manager inconsistency, just buy-in for managers too. I can't tell you how many times I would have managers say, can I just copy and paste from what I wrote last year? Nothing's changed. Oh, those kinds of things are hard and frustrating. Just low engagement. I think there's a stat that Gallup put out that 14% of employees think that the performance management process as it exists today encourages them or incentivizes them to continue to do their best work. So that's a sad number. And I felt that too across the employee base wherever I've been. So just, I think, trying to get over the hump of what really does motivate employees and what makes a performance management practice give you a return on, return of value in your company. That was really the thing that indicated to me we needed to make some changes.

▶2:37HostCan you walk us through the implementation process of your new rolling objective system, including any resistance you faced and how you overcame it?

▶2:45GuestSure. I'll tell you how I did it, and then it's, I would recommend it be a little different. So I consider myself a little bit of an HR misfit. Not a lot of my peers were doing this. Of course, we always hear about Silicon Valley and what they're doing. I was noticing a tiny shift in some more progressive companies moving away from the annual performance incentive process or performance review process and moving to more what we're calling rolling objectives. So for us, we jumped right in. Just said, we're just going to do it across the company. Looking back, what I would recommend to those that have an interest in moving towards rolling objectives, I would say that process should include probably like a pilot or like a— pick a group or a team that's like, you know, really good performers, a lot of projects or a lot of agility within that function, and use them as kind of a pilot group, really, to make sure that it's going to work for your whole company before rolling it out. We didn't do that. Thankfully for us, it still worked. But as I look back, that's something I probably would have done a little differently. So pilot process. Certainly you'd better train and align your managers because a really important piece of this is that brief process, or do you just come together at the end and just kind of level set what is really good performance and what is mediocre performance and what's underperformance look like in your organization? So I think, again, so doing a pilot, having training your managers and your teams is really important, and just communicating the why. Those are pieces I would say are really important if you're going to implement a new process like that.

▶4:21HostAmy, what measurable improvements or outcomes have you seen since implementing rolling objectives, and how has that impacted both managers and employees?

▶4:30GuestIt's funny because managers and employees alike are really happy to move to this rolling objective, rolling objectives versus the annual cycle for a lot of reasons. One is I get feedback often, and rolling objectives can really be whatever works for you and your business or even your unit within a company. Those could even vary. So for some teams, it's, we're talking once every week or 2 weeks. For others, we're talking once a month. And not that you're not talking in other terms, but you're having very specific conversations around goals and objectives. Employees really enjoy that feedback that kind of tells them you're on the right path or, hey, we got to shift. Or what happens too if you're on a team that's just very agile and priorities shift so quickly, very hard to capture that in an annualized process. So doing that in a rolling objective setting is just way more beneficial. I think the employees appreciate having that constant feedback and connection to their manager. So the engagement helps as priorities shift. It's so much easier to capture that. I feel like we've had— we've definitely seen a trend down in attrition. And while I can't attribute this all of our lower attrition to this, I certainly think it's one of the components. And I think the other thing too is the very human element of this. So instead of saying, Amy, you did such a great job this year, you got a 3. And Amy's, oh my gosh, I thought I deserved a 4. And then I go home and stew about it all night long. I worry. And my self-evaluation was a 4. We tie our meaning and our value to this arbitrary number, which doesn't really do anything for our confidence. It certainly doesn't help our productivity. In fact, it might hurt it. And then it also doesn't really help our company achieve, I think, their overarching goals. So to me, moving to this process just made more sense, even from just the human perspective and how we treat each other and talk about our work and our successes.

▶6:25HostAmy, if an HR leader wanted to transform their performance management approach, what key steps would you recommend they take and what pitfalls should they avoid?

▶6:33GuestOh yeah, I guess I mentioned this a little earlier. Certainly training your managers and creating a toolkit that explains the why and the how that you're moving away from an annual, an annual performance process to rolling objectives or whatever you would call it at your company. I think starting with a pilot would be helpful. Again, I didn't do that. Looking back, probably would've been a good idea. I would suggest doing that. And then you might have to measure and tweak it. Really, you're, you are probably taking a risk that a lot of HR practitioners and companies are. I do believe that this will be the future of performance management, moving away from the annual cycle. So I think it just comes down to coming up with a plan, communicating the why behind it, and sharing that transparently with your employees and managers. It just helps us have a more fair process all the way around.

▶7:24HostAmy, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶7:28GuestYeah, the biggest advice I would give is, and not just for performance management, but it's just to take the risk. I think so many HR practitioners, we wear the compliance hat, and so often we are risk-averse. And of course, there's areas where you need to be ensuring that you're not taking risks. I believe there's a lot of areas in human resources that can take more risk. This is an area that you could say, how can we think outside of the box and do something different? That's not what the norm is and not what most companies are doing, but we believe is right for our employees and our company. I'd say kick the ribs.

▶8:08HostAmy, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

▶8:12GuestYou're welcome.