 performance management. Who here has had their recent performance review, let's say in the past three months? Okay, good. How energized did that leave you? Did that really make you eager to go on and perform for your company and grow or were you more frustrated about it? Because that's what we see in organizations today, that we want the system that is energizing but that's not what we are getting. And performance management is probably the most scrutinized HR process out there. There's no other human resources instrument that is as criticized as performance management. And companies have already started to eliminate employee appraisals. 10% of Fortune 500 companies have realized that that's not the way for them to go and they've started to change and there are many more to follow. And it is definitely time for change because performance management as it exists today has its root in the 1950s. And we are definitely in different times now. And performance management used to be considered best practice and 91% of organizations have a performance management practice in place. And the process is fairly standard. It looks like this that at the beginning of the year or at the beginning of the performance period, you have a formal goal setting process. So 95% of companies do that. If you're lucky, you get a mid-year review and then you have the end of year or end of performance cycle appraisal. What they do is that you get a performance rating. So nine out of ten companies have a performance rating. Usually they have a fourth point scale. Force ranking or stacked ranking is when they put you into segments that they have an equal amount of people in certain categories. 30% of organizations do that. Indian companies are at 61% during the force ranking. And paper for performance, meaning the link between performance management and your appraisal to compensation to salary merit is at 89%. So the process is very standard. And you see that in any industry, any size, any organization has more or less the same system. And that should already tell you something. So how much does it cost to actually do this performance management system? We have here a study by Deloitte. They said they themselves invested 2 million hours a year in evaluation. 2 million hours. And they say that if you have 10,000 employees, you spend 35 million a year on performance appraisals. Imagine what you can do with $35 million and 2 million hours. Do you really want to do employee appraisals? So how satisfied are we with that? We have 95% of managers are dissatisfied. We have 59% of employees say it's a waste of time. Same say it doesn't drive engagement. 30% say it actually decreases performance and only 2% of age are professionals. So the people who actually invented and implemented performance management say it's top. All the other 98% say it doesn't work. So the question is, we have a system that costs us billions. We have a system that is dissatisfying that has proven to actually decrease performance and still we are doing it. So why are we so reluctant to change? And a lot of it has to do with comfort zone and to imagine what comes next. As they say, no one gets fired for doing performance management because everyone else does it as well. So I'm on the safe side. But the title shifting and agile organizations are at the forefront because they are realizing that this system simply doesn't work in our times. So what do they do? They start implementing an iterative approach. So they align it with the processes and the cadence that you already have in the natural teams. Then they set meaningful goals because we know today that most employees, they don't really know what to do with their goals. So how do I translate my goals into my daily work? And an actual approach helps with that. And they empower self-organizing teams. So I know these things are very obvious for you here in the room, but they are not for many organizations out there. And of course, we have to embed learning and development into the daily workflow. And we have to help our employees to get feedback, to get learning, and to improve. We have to motivate through mastery, purpose, and autonomy. So who here has read or knows about Daniel Pink? So that's the theory that comes in here. We say, okay, we have to really be sure if we want to link everything to market. We have to eliminate performance ratings. That simply doesn't work. And we have to accept our leadership mandate because we expect this system, this performance management system, to handle so many things, to identify high performer, to support them, to reward them properly, but also to deal with bad performers or outliers. But we have to take the leadership responsibility to deal with them straight away and not wait for a performance review. And of course, agile teams bring a different mindset to the performance management approach. So we really look for the conversation. It's forward-looking. It has to be positive, collective. We want to improve performance. We want to inspire and focus on the future and build on strength and really bring in this new mindset. But of course, there are some challenges associated with that. Like, how do we remunerate fairly individually without appraisals? How do we do that in teams versus the individual? What's the New York stick for pay and promotion? And how do we rate performance if we don't have a rating? And how do we deal with low and underperformers? So these are some of the questions that we have to answer. And there are certain answers that are similar throughout a different organization, but some of these answers are very unique to your own organization. Like, how do you want to show appreciation to your employees? That's very unique. That has to be part of your culture. So there are different ways to approach that. And what we would like to do is to really hub into all the experiences, ideas and thoughts that are here within this room. And the way we're going to do it is that we're going to give you about five to ten minutes to think about challenges that you see or ideas that you have. And then anyone who wants to present their challenge can come up here and present it. And then we're going to vote on what topics we would like to talk. We're going to have our breakout session depending on time. We're going to do two or three breakout sessions and then exchange what you've discussed in your group. So it's basically like a mini open space within the conference. Any questions to how we're going to approach this? If not, let's get going with your ideas. I think there's some paper on the table or if you need some sticky notes, I'm going to hunt them out. Otherwise, you can just start discussing and brainstorming your ideas of what you would like to discuss. Yes, yes. What do you think you would like to have discussed? So it can be either some of the questions that I post or it can be something that you experience in your own company that you said, okay, I would really like to post this question to this room because we have so much knowledge in the room and experiences that we can really tab into that. Excellent. Any volunteers? Who would like to present a challenge or who would like to go first? Okay, so my name is Zingade. So my role is actually a line manager for the developer. So basically in the agile, so what we follow. So it's a scrum of scrums. So there are total 32 scrums are there and 320 people are working. Okay, so I am the developer for four scrums. So basically and for within the scrum, there are the roles like PO, scrum master and architect. And then there are developers. So this is the organization, which is one scrum. In one scrum, there are 10 people out of that six are the developer and four are the key roles. The main challenge is I am not part of the scrum for day to day activity because this is one of the biggest problem. So as a manager, because I am from the outside. Okay, so when what is happening inside when it comes to the performance management. Okay, first thing is I need to understand what the developer feels from his performance perspective. Okay, then the complete different picture is getting from the PO's scrum master and it's very difficult for me to assess who is actually telling correct and all these things. So it's very difficult as a line manager to understand what is exactly happening because I can have one-on-one meeting with the developer regularly, maybe monthly basis. Okay, so I can get the feedback and all these things. But when it comes to the performance appraisal, the key roles like scrum master, PO and architect, they take the complete the discussion ownership of that. He's not doing good. But when I have the individual discussions, but they feel that they are really doing good. But this is one of the challenge where I need to understand how to have the performance management in this environment. Thank you. Who would like to go next? I'll probably explain a process which we used to follow in my previous organization, just Tesco. So we used to have this brag system. Anybody familiar with brag? What it stands for? It stands for blue, red, amber and green. So if you're a blue performer and you are exceptionally good and if you're a green, you meet expectations. And if you are amber, you're not doing so well, you get a feedback and you need to improve, you need to buck up. And then in case if you are rated red, you are out of the system. So that's the brag system which we used to follow. And typically the performance cycle used to happen twice a year, mid-year and the final year. Mid-year is when you will give him for the first time that when you're not doing so well you're doing really well. And you'll be, in case if you are an amber or in case if you are an amber, you'll be given with a performance improvement plan which everybody is familiar with. And he needs to work on that for the next six months. So this is arguable in terms of how effective this could be. So what I started doing in my teams, I used to play the role of a Scum Master and Agile Coach and the Product Owner. So what I used to do with my teams is that, I used to have this monthly one-on-ones, everybody does that, a quick half-nose session with every member in the team and then discuss what his achievements are. If there is any feedback from himself or from the team, what are his challenges, try to address them. At the same time, end of the meeting, you brag him for that particular month or that particular Scrum Sprint cycle. So that when every month you tell him that when you are green, you are blue, you are amber. So it's a continuous feedback and a continuous brag. So whenever you're giving him a mid-year review as green or amber, he's well prepared for it. At the same time, he knows clearly that these are the things which has been pointed out in month one, month two, and I have acted on it or I have not acted on it. And accordingly, you get a chance, you give a chance for him to kind of like correct it month on month rather than give him a surprise by the end of six months or end of one year. So this surely worked for me, but I don't know whether this could be the solution for the problem which the gentleman just stated. But I would love to hear your views as well. Thank you. Any more challenges? Hi. My question more towards we talk about team, team, team and agile, right? So how do you differentiate a performance between a team and a team player? Because that's going to be critical end of the year. They are rewarded for something because that's the biggest challenge. I can say the last three months I have been dealing with just finished performance last week. I can tell you everybody nobody thought about team. They said, what did you give? Okay, I'll talk about two things. One is expression management and I don't know is properly giving opportunity for somebody to perform. The challenge I see in our company or most of the places I saw that when you actually do the performance analysis with a person, his biggest question is, did I get the opportunity to perform in my core area? And you as a company, as a service company, you don't get all the opportunities to give the proper opportunity for somebody to perform in his core area as well. So end of the day, you know, he doesn't he's not happy. Not only for getting not right, the opportunity as well as the performance of pleasure happened to him. Also, expression management, we all talk about teamwork together. But end of the day, they go home in their individual houses. They have their own aspirations, their own social status. So there is an area of conflict between you judge a team by their teamwork and individual people with their own social aspirations and challenges. Anyone else? Hi, I'm Surabhi. I'm from performance and talent management company itself. We are having a software development into that area. I think I would agree with the guy just told about frequent reviews. And that's what we are also doing, that we are doing more status reviews quarterly. So the people get some chance to work on those things that they need to improve on and they can align their goals according to what is the organization goal. The challenge again, the same is that in agile teams, we talk about the goals of team. It's about how we assess individuals in that case, right? So when it comes to individuals, at the end of the day and at the end of the year performance assessment, when it is going to be happening, how we assess that what person is contributing, how he is contributing. Because the agile teams doesn't have any role of managers into that. Manager has to sit out and look at that. And that is very difficult. Though what we do is that we involve the scrum masters or the people who are working, like we have the leaders into that team also. So we involve them to discuss about their performance. So it's kind of one way that way. Because we are taking a feedback from team leaders about the team members. But then we prepare it and then we do it. But I feel it's a one way. And though they have a dialogue, at that time they can explain all of those things. But then a mindset gets prepared while you're preparing for the appraisals for those people. So yes, that's a challenge. Another if there's someone who's higher performing in the team, how we reward them into that area. Because that's a recognition that we want to give for the effort that they're doing. So when we talk about the salary part of it, how we pay them, that's actually creating a problem. Because now we have a team effort instead of an individual effort. And at the end of the day, that's a payment that they want to take home and they want to actually acknowledge for. So I think that's a challenge I would get an answer for. Thank you. Even though the party seems to be in the next room. Yeah, yeah. So my name is Ajay. I work in a company called IG, which is into financial trading. And I'm the team lead there. I'm also a bit of a stock trader as well. So I have a challenge while, you know, not much into performance appraisal, but much before that while setting goals to people. So what generally happens is we follow a culture where we have frequent discussions with people and it's not a end of year review where it's a big occasion or anything like that. We have it every two weeks and we have frequent discussions, informal discussions with people. So what ends up happening is that, you know, I do not like imposing goals on anyone. It just doesn't make sense. It's never going to happen. It's never going to work. So sometimes the personal goals of the person and the company objectives do not always match. I find that, you know, so if you end up asking someone, you know, what goals you want to set yourself, he comes up with a goal or he comes up with a goal which is, you know, sort of completely away from the company objective. So my, I would like to know how to handle such a situation, you know, what would be best so that he can, you know, do his personal goals as well as company goals. So it should be a good mix. So that's my challenge. Yeah, I do, I do end up doing that, but still there is always a thing where, say for example, the person wants to work in a technology that is not, nothing to do with our company. Maybe I can partner up the two of you or anyone who's interested in discussion later if you can just take the challenges and then we have plenty of time to get into the details. Thank you. My name is Rajesh. I work for society general. It's a 150-year-old bank. So we have traditional systems and things like that. What we did end up last year is kind of agreed that we will no longer enforce the traditional bell curve. So it is no longer enforced, but you have some systems and mechanisms in place that you don't go overboard. Yeah. So this was a proposal that I had made to the head of HR and, you know, the CEO and etc. And it kind of has started as the first step. What I would like to hear from you is what is the next step? What I've proposed is that we should go to a continuous evaluation process as well as not just the evaluation, the giving out the money, doing the promotions. All should also happen as and when it is appropriate and not depend on media or, you know, the annual appraisal cycles that we follow. So I want to hear if there are people who started doing it and how do you manage the whole budget thing? Because what tends to happen is if you don't utilize your budget, it vanishes. So I'd like to hear if, you know, there are people who are doing it and how do they manage? Anyone else or are we ready to start with the first session? We have someone else. Some of them are brainstorming some questions that we'd like to get answers to, I guess. There's some degree of skepticism about alternate performance management techniques that could work, especially given the global nature of teams and a lot of software companies having highly distributed teams. On the same lines, you know, people were wanted performance management techniques for distributed teams, but not with very socialistic tendencies. They didn't believe in everybody gets a flat 10 percent hike because it doesn't help to differentiate the good performance from the average performance. One other question, again, within this that came up is funding is generally limited and, you know, how do we ensure that there is, you know, I guess, fair recognition and not forced without having a rating system? So all kind of different aspects of the same big question around is there really anything else that would work for a big organization with distributed teams, but without socialistic tendencies? Thank you so much. So I think we've heard some really, really great questions and great challenges and I suggest that we start with the first session of 20 minutes. Either find the person who presented a great topic that you would like to discuss or stay at your table and pick a topic that you would like to do. 20 minutes and then we'll have a little recess and exchange ideas and then do the second round. Thank you. Don't be shy. I don't bite. Sorry. Then we're going to mix you up before the second round. Okay, please. Yeah, so my challenge was about the goal setting, you know, how to align personal goals with the company objectives. So I got a quick answer from that lady, which I think, you know, during the discussion there also came up. It's more to do with coaching. So, but with the caveat that, you know, it's going to take some time before you really coach them on to the right track. So your first few appraisals and stuff might go a little, you know, you might have to agree to their goals, even though, yeah. Yeah, so my concern was more about, you know, new recruits and when you bring on new recruits into the organization, you know, when you ask them, you know, what goals you want to set to yourself. Yeah, so they might not align that much to the company objectives because they just don't have the experience. So if you want to then go and even if you say coach them, etc., etc., they might not really understand what you're talking about and for that you will have to, you know, play a little nice for the first few appraisals but then, yeah, again, it's more about coaching and then bringing them on to the right track. So that is one of the things. One of the other things that Chris mentioned in our discussion, he was talking about having a set of framework. So basically we are trying to move away from sort of a checklist which says that, okay, you have met this, this, this and hence a grade. So we want to move away from that. So you sort of have a competency framework that, you know, we are expecting this from your role and what you have been doing and then, you know, though your personal goal is this, we still want you to work on something that fits into the competency framework. So that would be another thing. Another thing that one gentleman mentioned also was about, they have something called a survey cycles. So they, he has a team of around 70 to 80 people and what they do is they have teams among those 70 to 80 people and then each one sort of keeping a vision of the company in mind comes up with their own goal ideas towards the vision and then they have again a brainstorming session where they find out key areas where they want people to align. So these are some of the things that I got from, thanks. Thank you. What group would like to go next? Does anyone have anything to share? Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Raj and I'm from Philips. So let me start with saying that I'm an HR person so it qualifies me a bit to talk about this topic and I'm also HR transformational person who's helping Philips move to Agile. So we're doing some interesting work around creating the Agile culture. I'm also speaking the after tomorrow. On performance process itself, you know, one of the key piece, you know, that we realized was our traditional process of setting goals, appraisals and all of that is designed keeping traditional structures in mind, hierarchies in mind which are, which means the top leaders and the managers are now have the authority to evaluate, right? And you try to tweak anything but don't change that then it doesn't work. So you can have more frequent review mechanisms but if it's still the manager driving it then it's not in the true spirit of Agile. So what we are trying to do is how can we break this and how can we have the spirit of self-managed teams taking the complete ownership of the performance. So we have come up with few processes, few models around that. The first one is that the team takes the full ownership of performance. Both individual performance as well as the team performance, they are now, they have access to a lot of dashboards, metrics which is very external focused, looking at customer values and all of that. There are also mechanisms where they can give a very quick feedback to each other and the feedback part is very, very critical, okay? These are not very elaborate 360-degree feedback. This is like a quick stand-up where people just stand up, they give feedback to each other saying, you know, what made you great in the last program increment or last quarter, what stopped your greatness in the last quarter as effective person and the team then has a very good idea of what the other members in the team feel and when we say the team, this includes not just the scrum team but also the product owners, the RTEs, all of them are part of the team. And the traditional manager role has been changed to a coach, a performance coach and they are now the competence leaders or the cluster leaders who own a set of people in a same competence area and they act as performance coaches, okay? So the employee then goes to the coaches, they have a formal session every month and at the end of every quarter they discuss that these are my key achievements and some areas where I feel I need to improve on because these are the inputs that I'm getting. So as a coach I would like to work with you. So the relationship completely is now changed from the manager who is assisting and evaluating in a person, the owner is still the employee and the coach is really guiding and but it's a very rigorous process, it's not a very loose process because there's a clear goal set on the development so the entire process is more forward looking. So these are some piece of work that we are trying to do which is at this point looking very positive, okay? One big challenge that we, you know, ideally I would like to remove the entire rating piece and not have the rating because you know we are looking at this to build performance, yeah, let's see how that goes. Thank you so much. Anyone else? Okay, we've got about 20 more minutes left so we have two options, we can either do a second round, a quicker round of discussions or we can do a Q&A session. What do you prefer? Who would like to have another round in teams like another breakout session? And who would like to have Q&As? Okay, good. Okay, questions. And Q&A means anyone can ask questions and anyone can answer questions so it's not just going to be me. If anyone would like to come in. Okay, who would like to start with a question, please? Let me just give you the mic. So for every role we have some competencies and at the end of the year or for any of the period that we are evaluating them on is the time when we can say that okay, how you're doing on it but you didn't get any chance to work on those things. So I mean how to evaluate in the person doesn't get any chance to work on those things? No, I mean not all the competencies you'll get the chance to work on after a particular period. So like for example there's a competency that you get really get a chance to work on. For example, you're into the maintenance team and your competency says that you must have some good knowledge of database but then database is not much a role when we go into maintenance team. So you get the task all to do some tweaking into the functionalities and not much about the database. So how you evaluate such a in such situation? Because he must have worked upon his competencies, he must have read through things, he must have implemented proof of concepts but you can't say anything, you know, how well you are doing on that because you didn't get any chance to evaluate him. So if I understand you correctly there are two questions in there. Question one is how do you rate competencies and the question two is how do you ensure that you can actually build your competencies through the tasks that you're given that are actually coming up. And there obviously comes in that is a problem with our goal setting. The way we set goals at the beginning of the year or performance review, we don't know what's going to happen down the road in 12 months. So obviously we can't really set the goals for 12 months. So that's why we have actual iterative approach where we just have iterations and set goals for those iterations. But development goals are something different because our capability goals, they are about the individual. How do I grow as a person? How do I grow as a professional? And obviously you can't as a company the question is how do you do that? How do you grow people and do you do that for giving them goals? Or do you do that for giving them great challenging opportunities? And in the future HLHR, you're going to have HR career counselors who will work with you on your development. And if you see that you need to develop certain skills, but your current team does not give you that. It might be time to move to a different agile team. And that's where flexible workforce planning comes in. That HR must have the opportunity and the organization must have the opportunity to grow you as a person, as a professional, by moving you around the network if need be. So there are different things, but we would definitely not tie it to the performance management system the way it is today. Okay. Handling this, I was in Elkudil Lusin then and we were working on support. So like you said, right, we had our own team's goals also, which was actually driven by employees, the team members. And we identified, okay, for a support team, we probably need to understand the performance of KPIs. How does it impact us? Impact. Because we are getting, you know, issues around that. So we, seven people of seven of us, we sat together and found what is priority for us, right? And it is being driven by the goals that we say. Then every and the best thing is we had a list of it and every month we had a retrospective for those points also. So even if you're not working towards that, after a month, we know that we are not working on it. Probably we need to decide whether it's still valuable. We need to just strike it off or we just need to take it on priority. I think Ajail is still working there. Absolutely. And I love the point that you made that it's not just the manager who has to come top down and give you goals and make sure that you work on the right thing. It's also us as employees who have to say, okay, that works or that doesn't work. We have to change. And if we say that our people are intrinsically motivated, with that right also comes the obligation to actually give yourself a voice. And the talent management of the future is that you get yourself a voice. You don't wait for your organization for your manager to come to you and say, Hey, you're always doing a great job. Why are you not taking the next steps? It's going to be a dialogue, but you are going to be in a in a pole position as well as they say, Hey, I want solutions. What can you do? What can we work to do together? So it's going to be highly collaborative and not just a top down approach. Okay. Any other questions or comments? Yes. Actually, it's more I wanted to know your experience in helping a company move from this performance based approach to alternative performance. Like how was it done? And, you know, just your experience if you could share. We usually see two different approaches. One is that the company says performance management is not working for us. Let's do something. And we've already seen a lot of companies, they eliminate employee appraisals. And that has nothing to do whether they have agile work methods in place or not. And then we have the agile teams who come with another set of challenges because they already are on an iterative approach. They already have daily feedback, daily interaction. And of course, traditional performance management cannot keep up with that. And where they hit the road is usually at the end of the year when corporate HR or corporate comes in and says, okay, please tier teams, tier managers, we want you to do the appraisal and they say, come on, this doesn't work in our setting. And obviously they come in with their mindsets, okay, we have to change something here. And then we start the dialogue with HR. But performance management is just one piece of the puzzle when we change agile HR. And we always find that when we discuss these topics that agile teams always try to fit their mindset within the given box. Like, how can we still be agile while having force ranking? And the approach to do that is that we say, okay, we have to think outside the box. What would we do if we didn't have corporate telling us how to do it? What would we do? And then we take that mindset and that solution and discuss how can we find a bridge to corporate HR to do that? And cross that bridge and then over time we can work on the corporate side of the business because there are some companies out there who say, okay, yes, we realize it doesn't work, be it for agile teams or any other of our teams. They change it or they say, okay, we need some time to change it throughout the organization. But how would we change it? And how can we still have the agile mindset for the agile teams and comply with the governance? But anyone who's interested, leave me your card and I can send you a business case on that, how to bridge that. But the important thing is if you come up with new solutions, think outside the box. Allow yourself to think outside the box. We can do the governance later and discuss with HR how we can implement it. But we need to know for ourselves, how would we do it if we could do it without the corporate constraints? Any other comments or questions? If not, I'm going to be around for the whole week. If you have any individual questions, please feel free to approach me or to contact me. Thank you so much. It was great working with you.