June 20168 IN MY VIEWBy Dan Staley, Principal, PwC T he future of performance management is in the palm of your hand­literally. And it should also be in the palms of your employees. The age of the mobile device for HR is upon us and should increasingly be the go-to medium for capturing real-time employee feedback. Is that possible, you ask? Well, as they say; "There's an app for that."First, let's start with how we arrived here. I suspect that most of you are familiar with the yearly scenario of spending nights and weekends slogging through the laborious annual review process. Yet, in the end, very few employees really seem satisfied with the effort you've invested; most fixate only on the rating and miss the developmental opportunity or the chance for meaningful dialogue.Many organizations are still in this once-a-year cycle. Specifically, according to PwC Saratoga benchmarks, 61 percent of companies fall into this category. To make matters worse, many of these reviews are not timely and/or only include feedback from one person. Fewer than half of the companies surveyed request feedback from peers, internal or external customers, or other matrixed organization leaders. Frequent and a wide variety of feedback is critical for resources to raise their game and to continue to align and adapt to changing business priorities. Gallup recently released a report, "Obsolete Annual Reviews", pointing out that only 50 percent of employees strongly agree that they know what is expected at work. Antiquated performance management processes and systems are largely to blame.This topic is also especially important to Millennials­who will soon make up over 50 percent of today's workforce. "PwC's NextGen: A global generational study" revealed that personal development was more important than financial reward; this generation are committed to their personal learning and development and this remains their first choice benefit from employers.What can be done about it? There are many in the industry taking action. I can give you one example that hits very close to home. As a result of our own PwC NextGenstudy, we questioned the entire annual performance management process and asked whether we needed any of it, whether all the process steps and goals were necessary, who was gaining value from it, and was any of it working. Employees told us they wanted real-time, frequent feedback from managers. A Transformational Approach to Performance Management is in HandBeing a part of the Big Four, PwC is committed to delivering quality in assurance, tax, and advisory services.
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