Mobilising the Messy Analogue Moving Parts - Introducing our new 6-week series

As HR progress their digitalisation journey with new tools for engagement, performance, self-service and so on, let’s not forget our people who are definitely ‘analogue moving parts’ in this puzzle and often ‘messy’ in their unpredictability, different perspectives and values and skill or experience blind spots.

We’ve talked a lot about the shift in the performance management world to a culture of continuous feedback and conversations, away from ratings and forced ranking to a more agile, responsive, person-centred approach.  It’s also clear that in a working world where flexible hours, WFH, hot-desking, mobile working - a huge variety of different working patterns and ways of connecting with our colleagues – feature heavily, we need to have the technology to support work-based communications and the management of our people.  This has been the driver behind the development of new features in talent management software, such as Head Light’s Feedback Centre and Check In functionality.

What we’ve said less about recently, perhaps, is how we create the right enabling conditions to support effective use of such software.  Having great performance management software could actually encourage less rather than more face-to-face interaction and this has widespread implications for the workforce, so how do we counteract these?  Clearly this takes us right back to people (skills, behaviours, attitudes) and culture. 

So over the next 6 weeks in a series of blogs we're excited to be sharing what we think organisations need to help their managers develop, to help organisations get the most from talent management software, to enable those conversations to have meaning and positive impact.

In the first of the series, we’ll be focusing on emotional intelligence.

In week 2 we'll look at how to give really good feedback to your direct reports.

Week 3 will feature coaching with an exploration of talking about health, wellbeing and work-life balance.

Bringing people together and creating a team identity will be the focus of week 4.

Motivation and engagement will be week 5’s topic.

With Empowerment and delegation in the final week and having a supportive culture to enable change at all levels.

We hope you’ll tune in for the first in the series next week.

If you have any questions in the meantime do please get in touch.