 Okay, welcome everyone. So this is a session on performance appraisals and how to make them actual friendly and it's actually originated in a book, the two of us co-authored and the acronym for the book is Bossa Nova. Just because we like the term so much and the Bossa Nova and you will also learn this over the course of this workshop comes from putting together beyond budgeting, open space, sociocracy and agile. So it's like the first letters of those things together make Bossa Nova. However, it's not really the core of this workshop today. We only dive into one aspect of it, which is performance appraisals, right? So this is where we're going and now I've talked already so much. So my name is Jutta Eckstein. Probably I should have started this way. Sorry for that. And I'm John Spock. Exactly. So and we are from different continents. So I'm from Europe, Germany. I'm from the US, Washington DC. Very good. Okay, are you ready to just dive in because we want to get started right away? We want you to oops. I know this isn't working. Why not? Let's go it. Oh, now we have, of course, a problem. There's always something. Okay, so now one question is, can you read this in the back? That's what I figured. The first tables, can you read it? Yeah. Oh, second table. Like, till the half of it, right? This is so bad. So we thought we have like a screen. Really, I apologize. However, so we try it like one by one. But we just read it down. Yes, right. We try it one by one and we don't need this now, John. So we would like you to individually, when I read out a statement now, think of this statement as a behavior and attitude, something that you're seeing in your organization. So if this is a behavior that's happening in your organization, right? So I read these up 10 statements. I always say like number one, blah, blah, blah. And if this is something that you see in your organization, you note down the number and at best also maybe like a keyword. So you remind, remember that later, okay? Yes or no with something about your reasoning? Well, I'm not sure if we have that much time. Okay, so ready? I start reading. First one, leadership makes information open for self-regulation, innovation, learning, and control. I repeat and you remember and write down, is this something that's happening or not in your organization? Leadership makes information open for self-regulation, innovation, learning, and control. And you just make a mark, note down, yes, no, for number one. Now, number two, management processes, set goals, fixed and cascaded. This is weird. It could be a bat right there. Ah, thank you. Management processes, set goals that are fixed and cascaded. Meaning at the top there's a goal and then it's trickled down all the hierarchy, so, right? Okay. Number three, everyone's work is connected with customer needs. And maybe you got one. Okay, for four, management processes are aligned to the calendar year. Management processes are aligned to the calendar year. That was four. Now, five, leadership restricts and controls information. This is something you're seeing. Leadership restricts and controls information. Okay, ready for six. Six says performance is evaluated holistically and with peer feedback for learning and development. Again, performance is evaluated holistically and with peer feedback for learning and development. Number seven, do you see this? There are often conflicts of interest between the customer needs and other company interests, such as shareholder value or increasing sales to the customer. So the customer might want something else, but you want to sell to the customer, right? I repeat once more. Seven, there are often conflicts of interest between the customer needs and other company interests, such as shareholder value or increasing sales to the customer. Oh, we should have done this right away. You just take a picture and then you assume it out. I'm stupid. Okay. Okay, let's hear about number eight. Is this true or not? Management sets directional, ambitious, and relative goals. Again, management sets directional, ambitious, and relative goals. What's a relative goal? Well, it's one that's changing what conditions changing. And it might be your competitors in relationship to your competitors or the market, but it's relative. Okay, number nine, we are almost there. Management processes are organized dynamically around business rhythms and events. So is it true or not in your organization that management processes are organized dynamically around business rhythms and events? The last question is performance evaluation is based on measurements only and for rewards only. So in other words, are there two separate ways, two separate systems? Performance evaluation is based on measurements only and for rewards only. Well, it's one thing, but it's only on measurements and rewards. Right. Yeah, right. Okay, it's one system. One thing. Yeah. Okay, do you want to put it up? Okay, what we want to do next, so we hope that you got something and we know it's kind of difficult. Really apologize for that. But you got a little bit of time to reflect after hearing all of these statements and thinking about if this is true in your organization or not, right? But we would like you to do now and I wonder, maybe we make this a little bit shorter than we thought so that you go together in pairs or tribbles and talk about from your reflection, just general, but do you see how this relates to performance appraisals and what do you think are the top challenges by this behavior in your organization for edge-off-friendly performance appraisals? And note these things down. Say it again. All of this is limiting to performance appraisals. Well, we want to focus it on performance appraisals. And by the way, what we didn't say, this all comes from beyond budgeting. So these are beyond budgeting principles. And we're looking at performance appraisals, distinguishing that from do you get a raise or not? Do you get a bonus or not? Just the performance appraisals. Okay, now is a good time for everyone who thought this is not a workshop. It's not the whole time like that. We also present, but yeah, we want you to. So if you now go together in pairs or tribbles, share your reflection and come up with what you think are top challenges, key insights, how this affects performance appraisals. Look at the person next to you, one side or the other, start talking. Well, yeah. Five minutes, and then we are probably five minutes over, and then it's just fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Hello, I want to be here. I want to be here. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you very much. Third point there, everyone's work is connected. Would you consider HR, admin, tenets? Yes, as well. They know how it relates to customer needs, yes? and actually it should no no we should go till 20 time it's 20 minutes and so we will be 5 minutes over so it's back and what about if you will ask them so just the inside and I note them down and put them somewhere there okay so if you can whatever you want to do whatever you want, that's fine, it's all fine we're trying to be careful of time management one more minute one more minute please wrap up in 30 seconds start to wrap up please start to wrap up thank you so much that this works we didn't explain it with the Alma so very good okay okay we would like to share some of what your observations were what are the top impacts that you see what are some issues that you see it's very fixed for a year they become irrelevant after some time so when management you know set goals for us for a year after some time it becomes very irrelevant for the for the team that you know what is a yearly goal it's all about and they are not sometimes able to relate that for the entire year someone else I think one of the key points here is point number seven that there are often conflicts interest between customer needs and other company needs right there are many of often it happens that the top goals of the top executives is around how the company interest to especially to the shareholders for example your revenue numbers and all of that the goals are around that and which get cascaded back down to the teams so I felt in the entire exercise if you know everything revolves around that particular aspect of it so two more process not process not changed when the organization move into agile point number nine for example the HR department HR department and the appraisal processes remain the same but the team started working in the agile mode so there we see an misalignment of the processes as per the need support functions HR and the delivery team aspect how they do performance any John can you repeat yeah he's saying that HR never heard of agile actually at our organization we follow setting dynamic goals they're not very specific goals which will allow each individual team members to set their own goals but it will be evaluated and each of these goals will have exit criteria where team sorry the guy who's setting plus his manager will agree upon and then we we put it into the system where we will also be able to evaluate based on what is exit criteria so it is very good thing and it is easy for the communication also to the employee or the guy who said this goal and there will be a clear you know exit criteria where we will say this is what is being achieved and then performance is based on that so you sent HR home huh all right so we have some of these thoughts up on the wall and actually I missed the second no at this third one just before the HR never heard of actual okay well you just putting those up there does anybody else have any other issues or main points well actually I'm part of a large organization which is making a transformation which has been actually on a transformation journey for the past three years and we went from a stack ranked based performance appraisal system to we're now into a completely feedback oriented no ratings based on appraisal system which has been implemented from this year onwards we have we still have an organizational structure we are not flat but we are one thing where we are still transforming is bringing in agile based roles as opposed to legacy roles of a manager and a team lead but yes we are working with HR on that we are also another point I would like to mention is we've we used to have a steady a standard set of goals for the whole year which we are now aligned with our PSIs every every four months we look at our goals and we're going to change them so we are in that journey thank you the question is due to which you have the clicker yes but you can also just push the button right you never know so what do you do if you're in one of these companies that the old way of doing things is in place or what do you do in a company that's starting to make some changes to be more agile and the performance system to make it even better we are dealing with complexity which means that you really can't go look up in a textbook somewhere and say oh this is what we do 1 2 3 4 you need to be able to probe because that's what you do with connect with nothing or complexity to try to figure out what to do so what's the sample probe so what we actually want to do now is show you two examples what you can do for performance appraisals and what you might be able to try and we just jump in with that and then give you some of the foundation for it right so we're jumping ahead and then we're going to go back more carefully and lay the foundations for how you probe I'll do this for sure so here's an example in the probe you've done some reflecting and you say okay we can see that the company values are kind of offering lip service and other values are often rewarded like how much money did you make as opposed to how well did you take care of your customer so you can come up with a hypothesis like a good scientist and say if customer focus is the foundation for performance evaluation then we think customer satisfaction will improve how do you know if that's so one thing you might be able to do is to come up with an experimental unit maybe you have four units serving the customers you pick one as the experimental group and tell them write your own performance evaluation criteria related to your work and reflecting customer interests and you don't even have to get the boss's approval what happens if that happens and you can then do an experiment and see oh does customer satisfaction improves if we do that so that's one possibility you can do coming up with a more edge-of-friendly performance appraisal another possibility that we picked out is this one oops and that was too you clicked and I clicked as well that's difficult okay another thing you can do as well and I need to move because otherwise I can't read it so often that maybe the mindset in companies is we need to provide a reward otherwise the people will not perform right and so the thing is the question we are having will aligned individual growth happen without that reward that's because that would be more edge-of-friendly with not connecting this so having it separated out so often individual objectives are not revisited and the market changes the objectives might become out of date actually a colleague of mine has this standing bet now standing better I think for over 10 years and his bet is whenever he sees someone in a company doing something sorry to say that really stupid then his bet is probably there is a personal objective that drives that behavior that has been agreed upon with that individual and so far that was always true so it wasn't then afterwards revisited and looked at and well maybe this objective is stupid now it was good several months ago right so it's not completely stupid but now it doesn't make any sense anymore but that person of course still works towards that objective maybe knowing for him herself that it is stupid but because the bonus is attached to it the person would be stupid not to do so to be very honest right I would do it because of course the bonus is attached so if we separate bonus incentive payments from the learning process individual growth will happen in alignment with the company strategy that's the hypothesis so it is the hypothesis separating it out and it will be better for the company completely right so but you should do as an experiment also coming up like with one unit business unit or one team and try the experiment measure and if it's working you can roll it out so the way John described it for the other probe so if you have changing conditions increase the frequency of performance evaluations and we heard your example right you said like you do it every four months I think you said four months four months he said yeah yeah so some quarterly so I heard it quarterly okay yeah right so revisit because that's maybe the rhythm you are seeing where things are changing and where you feel you need to adjust right and the other thing is use OCR so objective and key results which are more defined bottom up than top down so this is also I think that was somebody else who said that I thought this was somewhere here didn't pay good enough attention so that it was that the team is actually coming up with something that was it you right that's serving their performance and their value creation so these are things you can try and we have already examples here in the room but you're trying to get away from the traditional way of working we should go on to lay the basis so I have a starting question how many people in the room in their company consciously use probes to develop their system probes experiments a couple people there's a couple of experiments we see more hands up yeah okay so why don't we lay the basis for that yeah right so first we want to look at what are the underlying values for probes and for doing well probably you would say implementing really company-wide agility because that is what performance of racial is also fostering or hindering and the values that are actually the thing that driving it are transparency self-organization constant customer focus and continuous learning and if you think this kind of sounds familiar or this isn't really new then it's because it's not really new it's directly derived from the actual manifesto but made it kind of software it free but it's the same underlying value and well we hope you can read it but oh i spread out the cards on the table and on the table you see also the definitions so for you you have to turn them around does anybody not have cards so there are these little cards on the table so then you also have those with you and you can read them um but still i guess we should read them out the definitions do you want to okay remain with that sure transparency create transparency for all involved in two directions by providing information and lowering the barriers to those seeking information so the interesting thing is it's a two-way thing and it doesn't mean everything is transparent that's not what's helpful we all know that like information overload right that's not helping anyone but if you want to or have to make a decision you should be able to find all the information that's necessary for making that decision and that information is no longer like a power thing continuous learning always learn and contribute to others learning get feedback and adapt whoever has been here in the morning when a rash that is opening and was talking about the law of two feet that speaks directly to that one and you recognize that i saw that like let's hop over to self-organization use accountable cross-functional teams that select themselves and follow their passion with responsibility that's a lot in there so it's about teams or actually individuals can who can follow their passion joining a team and working on something they want to work on so it's not assigning people to functions and tasks it's people select right but bound by responsibility it's not that everyone can do just anything it has to be aligned to the greater goal of the whole company constant customer focus focus wide in quotation marks on every aspect of the company product and process structure and strategy and individual contributions and people that's a lot well yeah and that was actually the thing that came up the most often when you had your reflection on those beyond budgeting principles so what is one of you saying the most difficult part is the conflict between customer interest and other company's interest this was you right so this is often the thing that's the hardest really to get everyone aligned to the cost creating customer value okay so this were the underlying values now there's also an underlying approach what you can do and chun you started already talking about that and so i think so we're not we're saying there's not a formula do one two three four but there is an approach that's like that formula it's the scientific method to come up with a probe to test what's true in our complex situation you need to reflect on your situation that means shut up sit down and think maybe you think with somebody else but it's time to just step back and this is a very general thing for instance you can do it in a retrospective it's a time to sit and think and i want to say one thing with the retrospective at least i often coming from the edge of field different than chun often think retrospective of course these are my scrum teams or whatever or me being in a scrum team that's not what we are talking about well we talk as well about that but retrospectives can be done at all levels right with all groups all teams it doesn't have to be like a scrum team yeah it's it's a time to think yes which can have many formats so you think well what's our situation and this is important here let's look at the theory that's out there beyond budgeting sociocracy open space agile and other things that you pick up and say what does the theory say we could be doing about our situation the theory is very important it says compare what you've reflected upon and what you've seen to what others have done and these are the probes for example the two we just presented right maybe i jump back right now so that would be one or maybe i go for that that's a bit better to see so you have in a probe on the one hand the context that's the background you're in then the hypothesis you are coming up with however the hypothesis should always be in a way that you can also disprove it otherwise it's not a hypothesis if you always come up with something and you can tell well yes that's good i always knew it maybe then it's not so helpful then come up with one or several experiments and i if i say come up actually what i mean in this case you can just use what other people have done like we heard from some people here in the room like what we've brought up already and we will show more examples from other companies just in a in a minute or so and just try that yes no oh that's a good point actually we refer to probe and i don't really want to go completely in that direction but for the people who know about it what can have an understanding with probe and for here for this setting the probe is really the whole thing so it's a background a hypothesis and it's one or several experiments so this is a probe so the whole thing and maybe one word for in the direction of can happen so probing is actually the only thing you can do if you are in a complex situation where you can't apply as john said earlier a recipe like do one two three and then you are there you don't know where you end up so you have to start with like analyzing what is kind of your situation reflecting on that high hypothesizing and then experimenting and this is not unrelated to agile where you do a sprint for a couple of weeks and say oh that failed great that was your probe are we actually developing something that is useful to the customer that's a special kind of probe if the customer keeps on changing do we write new evaluations that's kind of what i find difficult with that question is because it can go in many directions so it could be in a direction that you have a customer and the collaboration doesn't really work out then the customer tries to get just as much as possible out of you so you actually need to probe around the collaboration and the joint jointly working together so that could be a probe or if it's really that the customer and yourself you are uncovering a completely new field nobody has done a system in that thing in this field yet then it's really the only thing you can do like you to try and then actually what i prefer is then learn fast and not fail fast and saying that actually we have a full day workshop on exactly this on saturday i think we should keep moving the and the context of this if you could go the context is be thinking as we go through this on your challenge what kind of a probe could you come up with that you could start doing monday morning so be thinking of that as we're going through this background you try an experiment and go back and reflect on your situation but if you're a good scientist you also publish to your peers that can mean within your company it can mean coming and giving a presentation at the next agile conference but you need to get it out there so that as others reflect they have the base they have your experiment and they can either try to replicate it or change it a little bit and tell you about what they did so this process by publishing creates a network of people that are poking it at this beast about maybe it's performance appraisals or whatever it is you need to be working together we now want to dive into these four values remember self-organization transparency constant customer focus continuous learning and give you a few examples sometimes only one example of what can be done in order to put forward this value for edge-off friendly performance appraisals so starting with self-organization that was me right okay so we have from two different companies one is Accenture the other one is Echinor which was called Steador formally so first of all Accenture what they do is they have frequent conversations frequent check-ins so it's not an annual performance appraisals or performance evaluation thing it's like a frequent thing where you can learn from each other how are things going what kind of support is necessary for making the next step in your learning process then realign goals to respond to change well we talked about this already so I guess I can skip that then conversations reflect both like they go back to the past but also go to the future now the interesting thing most often if we talk about now I use that other term performance evaluations they are only looking at the past now Accenture says well maybe it's not a good idea and that's why they do it now in a different way they say well we want to look into the future so that this conversation is more future-focused than past-focused because you want to build up an environment that people can grow and if there are people from Accenture here I don't know and you say well this is not done here like that we have that from Accenture US so and we don't know if this is done everywhere right so this is kind of a disclaimer and and it's our understanding that they arrived at this after a series of experiments or probes yeah so it wasn't like we are doing it right now like this then from Echinor is that oh this is right away as we heard it before from you will hear so individual performance goals can be changed by the team they have to coordinate the change with other teams because if their goals change maybe it has an impact on a different team and if it's really like a big change then it has to be approved at a level higher up so that's what they do transparency how many people have heard of a 360 degree review that means in most cases people offer anonymous feedback about you and then they present it to you that's not transparent so andenberg electrotechnique which is a dutch engineering company said let's make it a real review it will happen not with anonymous comments but in a live meeting that has your supervisor somebody who's at the same level as you and a couple of people reporting to you in the room talking with you it's like a retrospective in that each person starting with you offers things that you're doing well and the system is doing well because it can be a review of the system and that each person and and you go around on that and then you say and here i think our improvements i could make and then they come up and say well yeah maybe but you need to be thinking of this or that a quick question which of these two steps is usually more difficult yes yeah surprisingly it's often more difficult to hear about what you're doing well i actually saw a manager one time break into tears because she said i didn't know people could see what i was doing so it's a powerful system and then you say all right i think this is how i should develop and everybody else consents to your development plan and maybe they say well we object to that and you work that out and then you go back and you get your plan approved by the full group of people that you work with so that everybody approves your development plan so yes i didn't understand repeat that repeat it right they're right there saying it to you so are you saying that it so now it's not anonymously but it's within that group and it shouldn't be go outside of that group the results the results of the experiments the results of the experiments is that if you trust you get truth we're only reporting something that came out of a series of experiments there was another question or comment which goes in the same direction right right yeah right we could go into a long conversation about this and try it out and all this kind of thing we're simply reporting to you what you could be looking at if you're doing an anonymous 360 do you want to experiment with this and see what happens we're only reporting things for you to think about and there's a lot to it and maybe the first step is to only make the positive thing anonymously and this is your first thing so like think of in terms of experiments okay constant customer focus so that's the thing that everything that we do in the organization should kind some kind some way being aligned to creating value for the customer and that's not always obvious and it's not always what we are doing often at least what i'm seeing we are doing in company stuff where we are so far away and so disconnected from value creation that's often also something where people wonder why are we actually doing it the way we are doing it well because it was like 10 years ago somebody found out that blah blah blah right but we don't know anymore what it's for now so the question you should start asking is how does the performance support creating customer value how does whatever you do support this then does the performance inspire others to create customer value that's actually directly from a company i know who does even salary increase this way so these are two questions they are always asking so what's with this one person we are talking with in a 360 actually how does that person perform towards creating customer value and how does the person help others to perform towards creating customer value right so it's not only the individual because we know we are better in a as a team and in collaboration and going away from the individual performance reviews and then as a team and this is probably not new for you here because you know about lean and so on but as a team it's really helpful if you start creating or doing a value stream analysis and see what's really done what kind of things are done that contribute to creating customer value however if you manage to have these kinds of experiments be done also in different let's say groups levels of the hierarchy then maybe something else is happening because you might do it with your again with the scrum team but it's not necessarily so that it's done whoever i think yeah yeah you asked at the beginning is this also like hr or so yeah right it applies to everyone so what are you doing how does it contribute to create customer value one more example of results that you need to know about the publishing process related to continuous learning there's a company called Cox Automotives that puts performance review goals in terms in terms that encourage cross functional teamwork somebody from over here and somebody from over there taking the initiative to get together they learn the learning and adapting goals are changed throughout the year and they get feedback on goals and development equinoor which is the the one of the major developers of beyond budgeting carefully separates performance appraisal from how you get money bonuses and that kind of thing they use the analogy of 100 meter sprinter you can be the world's best sprinter but you still need feedback we just took a video of you at meter 75 you turned your foot slightly this way and then at 90 you turned the other foot the other way and that cost you three hundreds of a second in each case you still could be the best time in the world but you get performance feedback and the process of giving you a bonus is an entirely separate set of questions do we all get a team bonus do we get individual ones do we combine them somehow none of the above we don't give bonuses at all those are completely separate questions from how fast did you run the sprint or how fast did you create value so from the book agile people another thing that you can do is invite team members to evaluate their contribution to the sprint so if you're sprinting together how did you work together use the retrospective to do performance appraisal okay so those are remember in the we just went through examples from these four values of innovations that are done out there and it's a kind of publication to you as input to your reflections actually where we want to go now is maybe you haven't seen that and also because it's not good visible in the back is that we say now here design probes beforehand it says compare to probes which are existing probes other people have done but now it's about you coming up with something that helps you in your context and so this is what we want to do now remember the key challenges you found out at the beginning of the session and the impacts you have seen and in small groups like at your tables i don't know maybe at least two groups per table yeah good or also triples or something it could be triples come up with a possible probe or several that can address the top challenges you found out beforehand using those underlying bossa nova values like transparency self-organization customer focus continuous learning and this probe cycle thing so come up with an idea of what kind of experiment you can run and maybe it's your own thing or it's the one from your neighbor so what your neighbor can do in the company to come up with agile friendly performance appraisal do your very best to try to make it real you can you have control over trying it next week or whenever you return to work so this is a real exercise and at best come up with a hypothesis as well and then experiments to it hypothesis and then what's the design of your experiment two things you've already done the background from earlier what's my hypothesis and how would i how will i do the experiment one other hint is that there's going to be a lot of talking in the room and if you find yourself raising your voice or wanting to raise your voice lower it and that will keep the sound more manageable okay let's try okay so in triples at that in in in triples or four whatever you find helpful whatever is helpful help each other design your experiment and say your hypothesis this one is better readable from the back yeah right that's one this bigger yeah probably you have talked about it already before right so you can yeah this one which is harder to read in the back that's why i used the other one picture of the other one okay okay okay already or did come up already with a hypothesis and who wants to share it what's the hypothesis for your challenge and i see you got something yes and maybe you come with a mic because that's typically one of the well once you know your background that's the next thing you do you come up with a hypothesis like ice cream yeah right um so we literally just finished the type in the last word of hypothesis so that's perfect timing so the hypothesis is that if we decouple the bonus slash payment with performance appraisal we decouple this too yeah and focus the appraisal on individual's passion and personal growth then we should be able to see a personal growth at a different higher level as well as an alignment of that with the business goals okay that sounds good so this is an example hypothesis that they came up with like separating the bonus performance evaluation right and you put more around that what you want to do in order to see the personal growth and the assumption is if you separate it you can foster personal growth and so now on the next step would be it probably you just start working on that is come up with one or two experiments and they can be really tiny and they might not go all the way right so but it could be like a first step where you can prove for this proof that type hypothesis that's exactly the and so you have to say how you're going to measure it how you make it safe for the people that are in the experiment okay that's good too yeah i have a problem with that because um it's it's good and well to separate this performance with the payment but then that doesn't solve the problem of how to help the organization determine who should get paid more and who should get paid less yeah you can come up with different probes around that we're struggling with that so we're going to win for the easier one so now i think for here it's just come up with a decision where do want to focus on now so you don't well you will not create world peace now right and not our goal so just focus on one thing and what i can do because we have a blog article actually on that topic which might not fit your situation right but it might give you a pointer where you can where you can look at for salary increase for providing bonuses we'll write the blog address yes well actually it's on this so because if you go to edge of wasanova.com i think we have here also not all but what which you can't read anyway um and there's a block and then i i think well you see the title says something about salary the others have something else great thanks i'll check that out but also i want to use opportunity to offer this challenge to the floor if anyone would like to take that one as a pro go ahead and tell me how very good okay so keep going and come up with the experiment oh right you want to share in hypothesis yeah cool sorry so yeah so i would also read the background so that the hypothesis makes more sense so today higher individual performance focus conflicts with the team-based outcomes that we are trying to promote that makes sense yeah that's the background so the hypothesis is if the performance evaluation of an individual will include teams aggregate outcome as well as well as that individual's performance then the team-based behavior will get some attention that we need right right so it's more on the value of cross-functional teams and so on and collaboration very good right so now your your task is to how do we measure that and how do we make it safe in case it doesn't really work yeah anyone else want to share hypothesis in the room or maybe you you now know also where to head after having broke those so i suggest we keep going keep going yeah because at least five more minutes i think we can spend our night It's in two minutes, actually one minute and 59 seconds. Fifty seconds. So take time to wrap up what you're doing. Begin your wrap up. Start writing your last sentence. You should be halfway through with that sentence. Pressure up. Push the brake a little bit more. Ends up. Time to stop. Okay, would somebody please share their probe? Give us quick background. Hypothesis and what you're going to do. Yes. We did not actually finish our whole probe. The whole background that we started off with was that qualitative goals are really hard to assess. Hypothesis was that maybe a lot of frequent peer feedback would really help in assessing these goals. We didn't reach the experiment part. We were talking about improved cadence, getting peer feedback from trans functional teams, having some sort of a team happiness index, which would feed into these qualitative goals for assessments. So you came up with a hypothesis. Somebody else? Here we go. No, you don't eat ice cream that far away. Right up to your mouth. As if you were eating ice cream. So the background is, is it fine now? Yeah. So the background is we are talking about performance appraisals and everything. Let's talk about additional value that can be achieved and showcase in your performance appraisal that along with fulfilling my targets. This is something additional which I did individually and along with my team. So what I'm talking about here is regular team meetings. Just like we have a quarterly business reviews, why don't we have regular team meeting, make it a process until the appraisal cycle is near. Not just wait for the decision date. So talk about what I learned well, what went well, what did not go well, what the whole team can learn. For example, I did a training on seven habits of a manager. In my weekly meeting, I can tell my peers how it helped me to understand behaviour, attitude, thinking of other peers around. And probably if my team member is behaving in a certain way, I'll be able to better understand that. So that cumulatively forms part of the appraisal cycle. And what experiment we are going to do, I think Siddharth can tell. So that's the background. You get to eat ice cream. So I think we took a small example of how can you implement weekly reviews. So if you've learned something in a training, you try and implement it in a slightly lower risk, low impact kind of environment. Like maybe an internal project that you would use. This is where sort of my world view is slightly on the tech side. It's a little deeper, a little bit of puja. So any new learning that you have, you can try and apply it on a lower risk or a low impact project. And that would be the experiment. So you would minimise, I mean, you don't want your flagship product to crash and burn because I decided to hack Haskell over the weekend. So, for example, but whatever. So maybe use that low risk, low impact project as the experiment and then do weekly reviews and see how you coping with this new process or whatever and use that as your platform for sharing your learning. Not innovation day because that feels gimmicky to me. So how will you do the experiment? How will you measure? So measurement, not just success and failure of the project because there's a lot of unknowns or uncontrollable things over there, but maybe a good way to measure would be the learnings that you got out of it. What practices did you like so seven habits? Were you actually able to identify and observe and see those habits and were you able to? And one way you might improve that would be if you could somehow do a control group, some other group that measure that and then you really have some data. Another one, please. Yeah, I would say that the last one. Yeah, this will be the last one. So I work for a startup on employee number one with the startup. And so I was thinking that there is no there is no performance appraisal. And so the hypothesis is if we set the performance appraisal process in place, then what we want to see is we want to see individual growth happen in alignment to the company strategy. So we kind of we kind of twiddle your words a bit. Yeah. Sorry, not at all. And then really the one of the experiments that we thought of was maybe that we could try talking about it a little bit in the hiring process to see whether or not that had a positive effect on recruitment. So how do you measure that? Well, I was thinking probably like a qualitative survey. A qualitative survey? Okay. And will you have a control of any sort? We can basically see whether or not some of those come to this. We simply don't mention it. Right. Yeah. Or you could look at what happened before the experiment. That's another kind of control. I would like to do kind of a quick wrap up. First of all, lessons learned for actual friendly performance appraisal. So there are some things that came through with your experiments and probes, but also with the ones we shared from the other companies. So one is to have personal conversations and not having it in an anonymous way and written and something like this, but make it personal. Then it's more than one-on-ones. Remember the 360 that John shared? So it's more than one person, like a manager talking to the sub-ordinary. Then it should be more a regular feedback thing and not like a one time per year, right? Then no long-term fixed objectives, but more like relative objectives that can change over time because they align to something in your conditions, in your environment. Like compared to what does the competitors do or what do other teams do or whatever. Then separate growth development from bonus. So that's another thing. Then focus more on future than on the past. That's, I think, a really big one that's forgotten. And lastly, which is probably even the most important, align the goals to customer value creation. So these are kind of the things that are important for agile, friendly performance appraisals. And now I wonder how many seconds do we have? 58. 58, like one minute, because I was wondering if we could do a feedback thing. How was this creating a probe? But no, you're saying no. I want to do a shameless commercial first. As Yuta mentioned, first of all, we've just got books. They just arrived. They just arrived. Like three minutes ago. So they'll be in the bookstore. They look like that. Yes. The second shameless commercial is that this Saturday we're doing an all day workshop that goes much deeper into the concept of the bossa nova concept and probing. And it's about using building for learning for learning class. And maybe there's one other kind of commercial. I'm not sure if it's really commercial, but we do have a link in crew. So, well, you can look it up. It's agile bossa nova on LinkedIn. We have here the tiny URL. So you can take a picture if you are interested in joining the conversations that we are having around that topic. It's our attempt to create a way for peers to be sharing what they're doing across industries. So learn from one another. So it's not so commercial actually, not at all commercial. Okay. No, not quick feedback. We have 13 seconds. Minus, right? So we are over. Yeah, right. So I think we just do it this way. We really hope that with the exercise you did, you got an idea of what probes can do for you and that you can really use them in all aspects, not only for performance appraisals for all kinds of things and coming up first with a hypothesis and then with small experiments in order to start changing your world. So thank you very much. With that, thank you. Thank you.