At Kin, we’re big on clarity and effectiveness when it comes to employee goals and objectives. We’ve created employee review tools to help you stay on track and written several blog posts about how to write clear and transparent objectives regardless of your role. While creating the right goals and objectives are important, ensuring they are something you’ll maintain your passion and motivation to achieve long after they’re set is critical to success.
We’ve rounded up some great Ted Talks to help you get into the right mindset, change any behaviors that may limit your success and maintain motivation when you fail.
Pop some popcorn, sit back, and watch these before you set your next big goal.
Setting employee goals that matter
The Real Goal Methodology, created by Samantha Kris, helped her earn five promotions in five years while also doubling her salary and starting her own business during that period. She also used it to write a book in under a year.
She argues that most goal setting methodologies don’t answer why you want to create the goal from a personal perspective in the first place. Instead, goals are based off of checklists that feel impersonal and become easy to dismiss.
Check out the pillars Samantha created to create goals that actually resonate and have a direct connection to your “why.”
Changing behaviors that limit you
It’s proven that people take in more from information that they want to hear, or good news, versus what they don’t want to hear, or bad news. Warnings don’t always work the way they were intended, either. Many people actually respond with dismissive behavior to warnings or bad news, hence why something like cigarette warning labels barely put a dent in cigarette purchases.
So, if we know that negative news and warnings won’t change our behavior, what will? Tali Sharot has found three triggers that can change the way you behave and allow you to establish habits that will get you to achieve your goals faster. Check out the three ingredients you need to make big changes in her Ted Talk below.
Maintaining motivation after failures
Achieving big goals will rarely happen without failures along the way. If you fail, can you survive it?
Big goals aren’t achieved easily. If you’re going to be brave enough to set a big goal, you also have to commit to it because you’ll be tested along the way. Catherine Reitman, writer and lead actor of Working Moms on Netflix, details her many failures that led to that big win and how she maintained motivation throughout it all.
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down with incredible speed. Nearly four months ago, offices globally were forced to shut down and work remotely. Some were prepared to do so, others faced hurriedly getting practices and procedures into place in order to make it through the short-term. As companies prepare for the long-term realities of remote work, many are having to find ways to create an effective virtual employee onboarding experience.
When you begin to grow and you’re faced within hiring help, how do you create an experience that is as great as the parallel to the in-person onboarding process you had in place? It takes good planning and an eye for creating “wow moments” to properly onboard a new employee and make them feel welcomed and settled in their new role – especially during times of uncertainty.
Kin has always been a huge proponent of a great onboarding experience. Studies show that employee onboarding is directly connected with how productive an employee will be during their tenure and how long they will stay. In fact, a recent study by Glassdoor reports that a great onboarding procedure can make a new hire retention rate improve by 82% and employee productivity rise by 70%.
Ready to reap the benefits of an excellent virtual employee onboarding experience? Let’s walk through a few things you can put into practice starting today.
Send paperwork ahead of time
“If you want new hires to “hit the ground running”, it’s important to reduce “first day” stress even before they start work to get new hires fully engaged with the company,” Dr. John Sullivan, an HR consultant in Silicon Valley, wrote in a LinkedIn article about creating “wow” moments throughout the first few weeks of a new employee’s tenure.
One thing that can cause that first day stress is paperwork. If you live in a state that allows it, get onboarding paperwork out of the way prior to the new employee’s first day. This lets you take care of the actual person and not the paperwork when they begin their journey with you.
You’ll want to not only include digital paperwork, but also a note from their manager walking them through what to expect on their first day.
Of course, spend the first few minutes of that first day with the new hire reviewing all paperwork to ensure they’re good to go. Then, quickly move onto the best part: transitioning them into a full-fledged team member!
Have their calendar ready to go as a blueprint
Typically when a person starts in an office, they’re shuffled from meeting to meeting to learn the ins and outs of their job.. Remotely, we don’t have the same exact luxury but we do have Google Calendars (or any calendar app of your choice) to guide the way.
Before the new employee begins, get with everyone who is responsible for a portion of their training. Together, create a schedule that guides the new employee through each training session and gives them room to breathe in between. When they open up their calendar on the first day, they’ll be able to see their agenda for the next week or so, reducing any stress around unclear expectations.
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Make sure they have the equipment they need to do their job
One way to make sure a remote employee is comfortable is to have everything they need to do their job well – including time to set up their work station.
Send out their computer and any other equipment necessary a week prior to their start date. This should have it arriving no later than 2-3 days before they begin, giving them plenty of time to set up in their workspace and take the computer for a quick spin.
Send a gift
During the interview process, you likely learned a few things about your candidates personally. Maybe your new hire loves dogs or can’t get enough of Thai food.
By sending a small personalized gift prior to the first day, you’ll make them feel heard and valued.
Perhaps for the dog lover, you could donate to a rescue local to them in their name and let them know, or if they love a certain restaurant, you could grab them a gift card for take-out.
Whatever you send, it’ll make your new employee feel cared for and welcomed. That’s an excellent way to feel walking into a new job during a time when life may feel a bit uneasy otherwise.
Have your team flood their new inbox with welcome emails
Nothing is colder than opening up your inbox to a half dozen automated emails from new software accounts.
Flip the script next time and flood their inboxes with messages from their future co-workers. Let your team know the goal is to make the new hire feel welcomed and get to know them before they meet one-on-one. Team members can include pictures of themselves, their pets or their families, or a favorite team memory and why that’s so important to them.
It’ll automatically make the new person feel like they know everyone a little bit, making them more comfortable from day one.
Create a virtual event to get the team together
A great way to make people feel welcomed is by taking them out to lunch on their first day. It gives you a break from the office and lets you get to know one another on a more personal basis. But, in the world of COVID-19, that’s likely not a practical option.
Instead, you could host a virtual coffee hour, cocktail hour or lunch in their honor where your team can get together, cameras on, and just chat about life. It’ll allow your new employee to let their guard down and just be themselves. And, it’ll give your team an excuse to get together and let off some steam.
If that’s not really your thing, consider trying out one of these 16 virtual team-building exercises by Time Doctor, including a virtual jigsaw puzzle, peeks into each others’ homes or building a story line together.
What are some ways that you make your new team members feel welcomed when you can’t be together physically?
By Alex Yohn
Jul 2, 2020
Managers play a key role when it comes to providing employee feedback. Their impact is so much more than just providing positive or negative words. The work managers do during feedback can ultimately make or break an entire company culture.
The employee feedback we provide and the conversations we use to deliver that feedback is crucial. While we read a lot of advice about what to do during employee feedback cycles, we don’t see as much about what to absolutely, positively avoid.
Here are a few traps to avoid if we want our feedback to build up our team’s strengths, confidence and engagement.
Thinking of feedback as a statement and not a conversation
Feedback is a tool used to better engage employees. However, it can be difficult to engage someone when you’re providing critical feedback. Our first instinct when we hear anything negative about ourselves is to become defensive, which often leads to shutting down. Managers, especially those who are highly empathetic, realize this and may sugar coat the feedback or provide a praise sandwich which hurts everyone involved and downgrades the possible impact of the conversation.
However, when we use feedback as a tool to not only engage employees, but to nurture our relationships with them, mindsets shift. According to a recent article by Harvard Business Review, feedback powered by partnership can frankly be downright delightful. This type of feedback helps foster authentic conversation, deeper bonds between the manager and employee and higher productivity post-feedback cycle.
Hirsch asks his audience to question themselves with every single feedback conversation, “What’s my goal? Is it to force a change or provoke an insight?”
Forcing change without buy-in is something that is likely not synonymous with great insight and deep involvement on the employee’s side. Provoking an insight can change a person’s viewpoint on a topic for life, and give them a deeper understanding of the “why” behind their changed behavior.
Your answer to the question Hirsch poses will drive different word choices and perhaps even completely reset your tone and perspective when providing feedback.
Like Hirsch said, “When you think employees need a lecture, perhaps they only need a lift.”
Deciding not to give feedback at all
A recent study showed that only 14.5% of managers believed they were capable of providing good feedback. That leaves an overwhelming majority of leaders lacking confidence in providing feedback that would generate productivity, engagement, and success.
With the odds this high that we are failing when it comes to feedback, it’s likely that we will try to avoid the situation at all costs. If you’re reading this, answer this question honestly: Have you ever not had a tough conversation with someone at work because you deemed it to be something that you could “let go “ or you believed would be easier left unsaid?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. There’s so many ways we can combat this lack of confidence when providing feedback so that the conversations become more productive and useful.
First, we need to remember that they are just that: conversations. We so quickly get wrapped up in the word feedback and see it as a performance by managers to say just the right thing at the right time. But when we lead with it being a conversation, it helps put our worries at ease because the pressure is no longer on just one person to perform well.
Conversations are easy to maneuver since the viewpoint of one person is no longer the main focus. When we engage an employee about a behavior or an outcome that was less than desirable, we can engage our curiosity to find out the root cause. By doing so, we’re giving the employee an opportunity to provide feedback on what might have ultimately caused the undesired effect and maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn a thing or two too to help our team perform better in the future.
Over-engineering the conversation
I’m about to type something that will make Type A personalities reading this cringe: It’s okay to approach employee feedback sessions without an agenda. In fact, studies have shown that frequent informal feedback sessions can increase the performance of an employee by nearly 40% in one year.
What do I mean by informal? A great example is something as simple as chatting with an employee after a major presentation. Perhaps their points weren’t as clear as you’d want them to be, but they did a nice job overall.
You might stop them in the hallway and say, “Great job getting the vision out. Next time, please stop by my office before the meeting to go over the finer details together so we can really knock it out of the park and keep this project moving forward.”
Something as simple as this can open the door for you to help an employee get more out of their work while still feeling good about what they’ve contributed so far.
The more we begin to define the conversation above as feedback as well as the annual review process, the more we’ll be able to help guide our employees to success.
While we’ve outlined three traps to avoid, there are dozens more. What are a few things you’ve made sure to not do at your workplace to help the employee feedback cycle be more productive?
By Alex Yohn
Jun 30, 2020
Working remotely is becoming the norm. Companies that once relied on offices are now forced to have a team working from home in order to keep people safe during the global pandemic. While it was at first a necessity in order to safeguard our employees’ health, we’re now seeing the many benefits working remotely can bring. With new working environments comes new ways to engage your team. What worked in the office isn’t necessarily going to work in our individual homes. This is especially true when it comes to communication and employee feedback, including how we delivery employee performance reviews while working remotely.
At Kin, we’ve been working remotely for the better half of a decade. We’ve had our fair share of ups and downs when it comes to engaging our team genuinely without being face-to-face. Creating our employee performance review processes was no different.
Here are a few things we’ve learned over the years that have helped us develop a deeper level of understanding and trust with our employees while improving our ability to review their performance accurately, too.
Establish frequent communication
When you think of employee performance reviews, you often think of a one-time-big-deal communication. It’s this event where managers and employees are able to share their feedback about a certain period of time.
The way we work is different. Performance reviews are most definitely not the only time we share feedback. Managers are highly encouraged to have one-on-one conversations with their team members every single week to every two weeks minimum. It helps us get ahead of the curve if there’s a problem brewing, or lets us give positive feedback in the moment of great work.
Establishing this cadence of communication is so important in a remote workplace. We often talk about how we have to over-communicate since we don’t see each other in person often. No one can tell when someone feels lonely, or confused, or happy, or sad by the look on their face in a remote workplace. It comes from curiosity. And typically, the best leaders are curious. They’re curious about how their team is doing and they’re asking the right questions to find out.
Curiosity can’t just be planned to happen every quarter or annually. It has to happen naturally and often.
At the end of the day, frequency in communication between managers and their employees matters. HighGround recently did a study about performance conversations and their impact on the workplace. One of the most interesting findings was the correlation between a managers frequency of conversation with their teammates, and their feelings about an employee’s progress. Of the managers who have weekly performance-related conversations with their employees, 73% strongly feel these meetings help them better track their employees’ progress, compared to 67% who hold them monthly and 52% who only have them once or twice a year.
The more often we connect, the better we can keep track of progress. Simple enough, right?
Create solid objectives with metrics for success
You can’t hold someone to a standard that they don’t know exists. Objectives create clear pathways for employees so that they understand what is expected of them. When you have objectives that have metrics tied to them, it is much easier for the employee to successfully make progress towards goals that help the company succeed.
Wondering how to create great objectives? Check out the blog post we wrote on how to create effective employee objectives. It is always one of our most popular blog topics!
Encourage self-evaluations
We all know there are two sides to every story. The same goes for employee performance.
Typically, we prepare our employee performance reviews with our thoughts and feedback on the employee’s work during a set period of time. Of course, we take the time to ask employees what they think about our feedback or where they believe that they have done well, improved upon, etc.
However, one practice that could strengthen your business is to encourage employees to do consistent self-evaluations, both in and out of review periods. These evaluations can be post-mortem documents after major projects, or perhaps just every month.
You can watch the evolution of an employee through these documents, and they’ll better inform not only your performance reviews with them, but also your weekly check-ins.
Last but not least, these self-evaluations may very well be the perfect tool to develop better relationships with your team members. Perhaps there’s something that they lack confidence in, but you see it as one of their strongest traits. Or, it may be vice versa. Interesting conversations are sure to be had.
Either way, self-evaluations allow you to have more in-depth conversations with the employee leading to higher engagement, more trust between the manager and the team member and better progress throughout the organization.
1. The quality and quantity of the work that they’ve accomplished 2. The progress of their objectives during the evolution period 3. Goals for performance enhancement 4. Next steps they want to take personally or professional
Just as frequent conversations with managers help to keep us aligned with each other, frequent check-ins help us stay true to ourselves at work, too.
By Alex Yohn
Jun 26, 2020
One of our most popular blog posts of all time presented four great employee objective examples focused on how to integrate employee objectives and employee feedback into larger organizational objectives.
As a recap, Green sees objectives falling into one (or more) of the following four categories:
Essence of the Job Goals
Define tasks that will be required to complete the job, should be very personalized to the individual position and employee.
Project Goals
Activities that the employee should pursue with a clearly defined beginning and end.
Professional Development Goals
What the employee will learn in the next six months and a year that will help their professional growth.
Performance Goals
Very basic, but what time the employee should show up, what they should wear, etc.
In addition to these categories, we also introduced the idea of creating S.M.A.R.T. objectives, which help team members stay on track and have something to measure progress against. S.M.A.R.T. stands for the following:
Specific (simple, sensible, significant)
Measurable (meaningful, motivating)
Achievable (agreed, attainable)
Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based)
Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive)
With these categories and measurements in place, we took it one step further and created a quick four step approach to develop effective employee objectives moving forward.
Review your company’s goals and understand how your position aligns to achieve them:
1.) When creating employee objectives, understand our company’s goals and how our work as employees can have a positive impact on those goals.
A recent study from 2017 by McKinsey & Company showed an uptick in businesses choosing to link organizational goals to team-performance goals. The companies that did had employees who were more engaged and accountable since they grasped the direct impact of their performance.
When you begin to create your own objectives, remember that your main goal is to drive the company forward within your own position. That means that your objective should ladder back up to one or more company goals.
If you cannot find a direct link between the objective that you want to achieve and one of your company’s goals, speak with your manager and let them know that you feel as if there is a disconnect. Oftentimes transparent communication like this can help uncover miscommunication or ambiguity within the organization’s messaging. Creating clarity here will not only help you, it’ll likely help others on your team as well.
2.) Understand how your employee objective relates to both your growth and the growth of the company.
Looking back at Marnie’s categories, they seem quite simplistic. That’s for a reason.
Employee objectives need to be clearly defined and easily understood by anyone who can read them. You want to be able to tell people what you plan to achieve and why without much opportunity for misinterpretation.
When you look at Marnie’s four categories, you can see how they would directly relate to company growth. Professional development goals, for example, may be something that would be unique to the employee and at first glance, centered around their own personal and career growth. However, beyond that, you can draw a clear line between how personal development and company achievement are connected.
An employee who wants to achieve a higher sales goal this quarter may take a professional development class on confidence in the workplace. This will not only boost the employee’s abilities at their job when they are delivering that big pitch to a mega-client, it will also help the company grow when they confidently land it.
3) Think realistically about an objective and the first few steps necessary to achieve it.
All too often, we get swept up in big ideas. This is especially true when you think about an employee objective and the amount of time it likely takes to achieve them. An employee objective could take a quarter, six months or even an entire year to complete. A timeline this long makes pie-in-the-sky thinking a quick go-to. Usually big visions at work are a good thing. But for objectives, we need to scope our perspectives a bit.
For example, as great as thinking big is, it can also create a lot of ambiguity. Objectives don’t have any room for that. Your objective should be something that you realistically can achieve in the timeline that you have set. You should also be able to easily envision at least the first two to three steps to get to that objective.
A great way to test this is to explain your objective to a colleague who isn’t in your division and has little insight into your job, then explain the first few steps you’ll take to achieve the objective. If they seem completely puzzled or unsure of why your objective matters, it may be time to go back to the drawing board.
4.) Anticipate potential roadblocks.
Since objectives take time to accomplish, there are many unknowns that could pop up and derail progress. It’s important to not only anticipate that this could happen, but have a game plan ready to get back on track.
Work directly with your manager to first establish check-ins throughout the objective’s timeline to ensure small problems are recognized and addressed quickly. For bigger problems, make sure you have ways to discuss getting where you need to go.
What have you done already to overcome the roadblock? What have you not done?
What can you realistically control or change?
Do you need to adjust your goal?
What additional resources or support will you need?
If you are unable to make the progress you anticipated, what are the consequences and how do you know these consequences will actually happen?
What have you decided to do next and when will you do it?
While you may never have to answer these questions, it’s important that you continue to make progress against an objective you set regardless of what life throws at you.
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By Alex Yohn
Jun 23, 2020
One of the most important tools in your business is employee feedback. We don’t often think of it as a tool, but it’s a critical one. Businesses that have the correct processes and tactics in place to effectively give and receive feedback typically see higher profits, more engaged employees, and a more successful business overall.
So what do you need to know to get there?
First, remember this: employee feedback is a two-way street. More often than not, it’s not something that is rigidly planned. You may use annual employee reviews and shared employee objectives as part of your formal process, but sometimes informal and timely acknowledgement can be even more powerful. If you catch an employee doing a great job, it’s time for feedback right then and there. If you find an employee struggling with something, that’s also a great time for feedback.
Now, let’s talk about the ways to make those conversations count.
Tailor your approach
Did you know that only one third of people believe the feedback they receive is helpful? Receiving feedback without context that helps turn words into action can actually do more harm than good. It can confuse our employees, break down our relationships with them, and put us in a worse spot than we were before the conversation started.
Feedback is all about empowering an employee to do well in his or her position. Providing good feedback first starts with building a relationship with that employee. Don’t be shy to ask how an employee wants to receive advice or feedback on their work. You might be shocked by how open they are in helping you deliver great direction.
When you understand how that particular employee registers and processes feedback, you’ll be able to more quickly deliver it which gives them the opportunity to act on it right away and succeed moving forward.
Be specific
It’s easy to have broad stroke conversations. It’s much harder to stay specific about a piece of feedback you are giving.
When providing feedback to a team member, make sure to keep it as tactical and detailed as possible. You want to make sure that individual has the opportunity to understand exactly what area of their performance needs improvement through examples and how they can correct what they’re doing (or keep up the good work!).
Take the example of reporting. Let’s say you’ve sent an employee out to complete a sales report that will help you determine how many more leads you received this quarter versus last quarter. The report comes back with a lot of information that shows increases in sales, but nothing directly related to that question above.
You can say, “I took a look at the report and it didn’t have the information I need. Can you please check it out?” Or, you can give direct, specific feedback such as, “In your latest report, I needed to see the exact percentage increase of lead sign-ups compared to last quarter. Can you please add that in?”
Big conversations that have some ambiguity have a time and place, but not when it comes to feedback. Make sure that your team members get exactly what they need from you to confidently do a better job next time.
Cut the fluff
While we’re talking about being specific, another important thing not to do is to sandwich negative or critical feedback with positive comments. Sandwiching feedback means saying something positive, providing critical feedback, then saying another positive thing again.
It often leaves employees feeling confused about what the conversation was about. Even worse, it undermines the critical feedback you were trying to deliver in the first place.
Studies show this method of providing feedback will eventually train employees to distrust praise since they’ll start to believe that it’ll soon be followed by criticism. It can also dilute your message and give them a false sense of understanding where they stand with their work performance.
When it doubt, be direct and be kind. But don’t sugar coat it.
Have deep empathy
At the end of the day, we’re all humans with feelings. While many people say they can detach work from feelings, it’s hardly ever the truth.
Studies show that feedback is best handled one-on-one. This allows individuals to have genuine conversations where they don’t feel outnumbered or singled out. In fact,
Imagine if you were in this person’s shoes. If they’re receiving critical feedback, how would you like to receive it? What would make you feel inspired to do a better job versus brow-beaten and scared to try again?
When you’re providing any type of critical feedback, it’s important that you hold space in the conversation for the individual to digest what you’re saying.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable
Did you know that nearly 70% of leaders report feeling uncomfortable providing feedback? Things such as “giving clear directions” and “speaking face to face” were listed as stressors in the linked study above. While it’s no excuse not to provide great feedback, it does give us good insight into why so many employees report that they don’t have the critical conversations they need to do their job well.
One thing to help curb that is practice. The more we make giving feedback part of our daily or weekly routine, the less we build it up in our own heads. It’s also productive for our team because they’re consistently getting micro-bursts of feedback that help them improve their output.
“Feedback should have a clear business focus,” Lipman said. This helps take the pressure off of having hard conversations, since you’re simply tying employee actions into larger overall company goals.
According to Lipman, great feedback is specific, timely, meaningful and candid.
“It makes no sense to say, five months after the fact, ‘You know, Tom, you did a terrific job developing that new dog food back in April,” Lipman says. The window of time where that feedback would have actually been impactful has long past.
And of course, being candid, as we’ve mentioned before, is important. It’s easy to duck tough issues when they happen. But when you do that, you run the risk of losing the trust and loyalty of your team. As a leader, they expect you to tackle the big issues so they can continue to be effective at what they do.
Schedule time to follow up
All too often, we cut out the final and most important part of providing feedback: following up. Actually giving the feedback should be the first step in creating positive change or reinforcing great behavior.
Before you end the first conversation, make sure to schedule a meeting within an appropriate amount of time to be able to accomplish something from your conversation. This will give the employee a clear path forward and a timeline to get there.
Document or it doesn’t exist
A crucial part of following up is documentation. Here at Kin, we use our employee feedback feature to gather employee feedback and record both the manager and employee’s thoughts. This helps us have clear communication and not forget anything that was discussed.
Beyond following up, documentation is vital for employees so that they can see a history of their conversations with their managers, so managers have the ability to make decisions based on feedback over time, and so companies can justify raises, promotions and more within their team. If you’re not practicing feedback documentation currently, now is the time to start.
