Episode 68: Why Employee Experience And Performance Management Are Two Sides Of The Same Coin (Interview with Greg Harris)
My guest on this week's episode is Greg Harris, CEO of Quantum Workplace, which was founded in 2003 and has since emerged as one of the pioneers in the revolution of the employee feedback market.
Greg believes that the economic value of employee feedback is probably equal to, or greater than, input from customers and that employee feedback is the first step in creating an inclusive environment. Greg also explains why employee engagement and performance management are two sides of the same coin.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
In our conversation, Greg and I discuss
What modern employee feedback looks like and how it has evolved over the last 10 years
How CEOs have used employee listening to drive communication to the workforce during the pandemic
How to drive action, behaviour change and a culture of inclusion, from the insights arising from employee feedback
How employee experience and people data is driving a similar change in HR, to the change that customer experience and customer data has already made to the marketing function
How companies should approach performance management in the future.
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in employee listening, employee experience and the reshaping of performance management. So that is Chief Human Resource Officers and anyone in an employee Experience, People Analytics, Culture or HR Business Partner role.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Quantum Workplace. To learn more, visit www.quantumworkplace.com/digitalhr.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Greg Harris, CEO at Quantum Workplace, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show, Greg, thanks for being a guest. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to yourself and also to Quantum Workplace?
Greg Harris: Thanks David, thanks for the invitation, this is a lot of fun and it is great to great to talk to you.
My name is Greg Harris, I am the CEO at Quantum Workplace. Quantum Workplace is an employee feedback platform or employee experience. So Quantum Workplace helps collect, helps analyse, helps activate on voice of the employee, throughout the organisation. We help organisations drive employee experience through those three channels.
David Green: And I think that is great, I know we will get into this in the conversation, because it is not just about collecting or even analysing, it is about activating and it is about taking action on what we learned. So let's start by setting the scene a bit with employee feedback. What does modern employee feedback look like? And how is it different from, say, 10 years ago?
Greg Harris: I love that. Modern employee feedback is, we know more, we know more about the hearts and minds of our people than we knew 10 years ago, than we knew 20 years ago. 10 years ago, the most progressive, the most attuned organisations, they had their ear on the ground. They were listening to their employees, but they were doing so probably through this massive annual research project and they had scientifically proven items that had all these beautiful statistical numbers attached to them. We haven't gone away from that science, that science has carried through to the process that we have right now but feedback today is more continuous, it is more real-time. It is not so real-time that there is noise that we are reacting to on a second by second basis, but the feedback that we are collecting, the feedback that we are activating on, is aligned to the same decision timeframes that we are making other decisions on. They are monthly or they are quarterly or they are tied to the start or the finish or projects that we are delivering. So feedback today, the cadences of that feedback are woven into the rest of the business cycle. We don't monitor our financial success just on an annual basis, so we certainly don't monitor employee feedback on an annual basis, but that is one of the biggest changes. The other big change today versus maybe 10 or 20 years ago is what we care most about.
We wanted to boil the ocean 10 years ago, we wanted to ask 80/90 or 100 questions and not leave any stone unturned. Today, we only want to ask the questions and we only want to poke around at the things that we know we can activate on, the things that we know are the most important items that drive loyalty, that drive advocacy, that drive discretionary effort within the organisation.
And so the last decade of this research, of the laboratories that are analysing the psychology and the neuroscience of feedback have helped us to create assessments, create tools, create rhythms in our feedback systems that are capturing that, that are pushing that insight to the right person at the right time.
It just dawned on me that I probably have five answers to that question.
David Green: I think that is really good because it has changed so much.
Greg Harris: 10 years ago, HR owned employee feedback. They are still probably the quarterback of employee feedback, but I would even say 10 years ago they embargoed that data, there was a reason it took a month to do a survey, a month to see the results of a survey and another couple months to communicate out to the organisation what, if anything, was being done with the survey. Today, all of that has been crunched down. We don't have the luxury of a single team or a single person sitting on this treasure chest of insight. It has to get into the hands of the people that drive that engagement and that experience the most and that is Managers.
So 10 years ago, feedback was an HR application. Today, enterprise feedback is an organisational application.
David Green: I guess as well, if I think back 10 years which scarily doesn't seem that long ago, it almost felt that the questions are very much framed towards the organisation, whereas now I think people care more about actually what employees think and the impact on employees of the culture of the organisation or how the organisation behaves. There is a bit of a shift in that direction as well, I think.
Greg Harris: No, I think that is exactly right. The movement around employee experience is the biggest thing that has happened in the organisation since email, this is a 20 year trend that we are just now getting started on. 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, probably a small subset of organisations were curious about engagement, we wanted to tap into that feedback, but it was still early. Organisations like mine, that have been around for 18 years, still had a lot of education to do. There were still a lot of people that asked “wait, do I really want to know what our employees think?” “Why do I want to do that?” “That seems to take a lot of effort, that sounds like it is going to cost money, what is the ROI on that?” There were all these ideological roadblocks to just tapping into the voice of our people. That educational work is, for the most part done. It is not at the 100% of organisations, it is not this aha moment where everybody is on the same page with that, but 80 or 90% of organisations. 10 years ago it was probably 20%, today it is the vast majority of organisations just understand on the surface that we need to create an environment. This actually was exacerbated, was accelerated in the last 12 months, through COVID. 15 months ago, a CEO might get in the way of HR saying “hey, we need feedback in place.” “We need to get smarter about voice of the employee” and the CEO might say “well, I know what people think, I figured that out by walking out into the hallway and just observing the office.” Then last March, when all of us went home for a while, we lost our ability to do that and all of a sudden the C-suite was the team that was like, “wait a minute, are people too stressed or are people working? Are they not working? Do they like what they are doing? Are they overwhelmed?” All of a sudden there was this empathy that welled up, through lack of physical visibility, that increased the import of using digital tools to figure out what people are thinking.
David Green: It has been incredible actually, I know a lot of the companies that we work with at Insight222, so that is primarily working with a People Analytics Leader in big global organisations, that they have had to use these employee feedback tools throughout the pandemic. They have had to be very agile about how they use them and as you said, a lot of it is being driven by questions from the CEO, CFO, senior people on the Board basically saying “how are employees feeling? How are they coping? What can we do?” And for the first time, with a lot of these Executives, they don't think they know the answers. Where as you said before, they thought “oh yeah, I can just walk around the office and say hello to a few people and I will get a sense of how people are feeling” Whereas now, without these tools that they would be running blind effectively.
Greg Harris: That is exactly right and workplaces responded to that too. The first 90 days of this work from home experiment, we have 2 million completed surveys a year which represents probably several hundred million different ideas, different data points, but overall employee engagement in North America saw record high levels in the first 90 days of pandemic. That feels a little bit off, it feels a little bit different and the skeptic might look at that and say yes everybody's engaged, that is kind of the rush that you get when you are sitting next to a lion. All of this change, organisational, societal, personal change is happening at the same time and we feel engaged, we feel energised, but is that sustainable, probably was the question that was happening. But what we saw happening was rank and file employees were looking at increased effort for strategic communication, increased empathy, increased actual care from Managers from and from Senior Leaders wanting to know how people were doing, how people were coping, how people were adjusting to all of this change. That is what we point to and say that is what swelled this idea of loyalty and this idea of engagement within organisations.
David Green: Yeah, it is interesting, clearly not every organisation but the majority of organisations were putting employee wellness at the centre of their response to the pandemic in the early stages and I am actually seeing that carrying through quite a lot as well. Maybe all the things that you and your peers within your industry and as you said, you have been doing this for nearly 20 years now, you have been saying all along that if drive a great employee experience, you will see the benefit in terms of outcomes with customers, outcomes from financials, outcomes from employee wellness, engagement, better attrition, better retention, all those sorts of things. And it is almost like suddenly Executives have thought, oh yeah, we are actually going to follow that ethos.
Greg Harris: That is exactly right. 5 or 10 years ago, wellness in the workplace was exercise challenges and step contests and it was the hope that physically healthier employees will lower our benefits claims or health claims. Today, I think there is an awakening about mental health in the workplace and probably the core of that is stress. As much as we love to say, in fact our mission for all these years has been to make work better every day. We wake up, the people at Quantum Workplace, wake up thinking about our work and how it helps people at the centre of their lives. Work is at the centre of our lives and whether we like it or not, how we are doing at work, how we are feeling at work affects our personal life or our contribution to the community, it is rarely the other way around. So if work is the epicentre, if work is what is pushing that effectiveness out in our personal lives, then we have to be thinking about and we have to be cognisant of the obstacles in mental health. Stress is probably the core of that and work, as much as it gives us the stroke of joy when we succeed, it is a large cause of stress in our lives and we have to be smarter about that as workplaces. I think we are very early into that game.
David Green: Yeah, I agree and I think certainly we have seen that coming through the pandemic. It is great I think that a lot of the tools that we are talking about here and getting that employee feedback, we understand the challenges faced by caregivers, by people that may be living in accommodation where they are sharing the broadband with their kids, with their partners, you have got all sorts of things going on in the background. We have certainly started to understand more about our employees and our Manager's home lives than maybe we did before.
What would be interesting is, as you have clearly seen a shift in terms of engaging with clients, perhaps there is an example you can share of an organisation that you work with, who delivered clear impact with this new approach to employee feedback?
Greg Harris: We think the epicentre of employee feedback is the Manager and employee relationship. It is how we launched and started broadening our toolset back in 2015, we went from a measurement device of surveys and using surveys to score this thing called engagement, to create the digital tools that improve Manager, employee relationships. So that monthly check-in, or that bi-weekly check in, the one-on-one between Manager and employees is the epicentre of that. We have a really cool client, it is a top 15 accounting firm in the US, BKD is what they are called, several thousand employees. They came to us a handful of years ago, they had an annual survey and they were doing annual employee reviews and they recognised that their business was changing at a pace where their feedback tools weren't keeping up. Simply by going from the annual review to a quarterly performance review for their people for those performance conversations, increased retention by a measurable amount within 12 months. This is an accounting firm so accounting firms are really smart about their hours spent and the time spent on administrative tasks. Something counterintuitive happened when they went from all employees doing one annual review to four quarterly performance conversations, different than a review but a performance conversation. The administrative time that they had dedicated to those reviews actually went down. In other words, 4X the frequency of the review process and the administrative burden of that goes down. It is almost like cleaning your house, if you wait until the end of the year to clean your house, it is going to take you longer and it will be immeasurably nastier to do so.
So simply solving for frequency, improved performance, improves retention and decreases amount of administrative burden on the process.
David Green: It sounds pretty compelling to me, that is for sure. I think one of the things we were talking about before we started recording was around how we have gone from these 80 to 90 questions 10 years ago, and let's be honest some companies are still doing that, it is not just about reducing the number of questions and making the questions more focused on what we are trying to drive but it is also looking at open text questions and then getting some analysis from that. You will recognise this from being in the field for such a long time but it is almost like we are playing catch up with Marketing and the approach to getting feedback from customers. Yes, we do ask to score this one to five but we also ask a lot of open text questions to get really rich feedback.
Greg Harris: Yep and that has evolved, open text comments have evolved over the years. Speaking of HR quarantining or embargoing data is something that was much more common when all comments that were submitted, for a 5,000 person company that could be a 50 to 100 page document to read all of those comments. You don't want to let those go dormant, but at the same time, you don't necessarily want to put all of those in the hands of Managers to read verbatim because we tend to hone in on that one, some employee on some team is going to say too much or name names. So to use natural language processing, to put those comments into themes, to score them based on positive versus negative or neutral. We are 5/6 years into some of that science and we are not at 100% accuracy on having AI do that comment theming and the categorisations for us, but we are probably 85 to 90% accurate and it is changing, it is making that process more efficient. Managers that have a team of 100 people aren't spending 6 hours on a late night anymore reading those 40 pages of comments, but they can see the theming, they can see the positive, they are going to be able to see that change on a quarterly basis, time sequenced to know what ideas and what concerns are popping up and getting squashed.
David Green: I guess at the same time the technology is improving so are the skills within HR with the emergence and growth of people analytics, most people analytics teams are in HR. You have got the opportunity to work with partners like yourselves to actually do that analysis, but also you have got those kinds of data analysis skills, those NLP skills, actually within HR teams themselves now to do some of that analysis as well. It is a nice compliment of skills and technology coming together.
Greg Harris: That is one of the most exciting things, I think, that is happening in HR right now. HR is a data field, I don't know if that was the case 10 years ago, maybe we thought it was 10 years ago, but it probably wasn’t. We looked at finance, we looked at marketing and we know they spent their lives in Excel and we in HR spent our lives in PowerPoint and Word, but that has changed and we are not talking about that change in a future tense anymore, we are saying that in real time now. HR Leaders are data decision makers, data-based decision makers.
David Green: Yeah and not before time, that's for sure. We talked about how the pandemic has really accelerated a change that was already happening anyway. Employee listening is even more of a hot topic now than it was 12-15 months ago. Let's talk about some of the key challenges for organisations when they are delivering effective employee listening strategies and what they can do to overcome them. What do you think the biggest hurdles are?
Greg Harris: The biggest hurdles probably haven't changed, we aren't overcoming different challenges today with listening. The technology is the lubricant, it is what makes everything easy in real time but the prioritisation on what themes we want to ask for, we see listening today as this two way conversation between Senior teams and employees. We still have the problem today, which is the problem that companies like ours have been trying to solve for decades. Executive teams and Leadership teams have a murky, fuzzy view of the perception of their people and employees have the murky, fuzzy view of their perception of Leadership. We have to bring those two things together. So separating signal from noise is still the biggest challenge in a listening strategy and it gets to what we were talking about, David, about surveys a decade ago being 90 items surveys. We still do full deep dive assessments now that might be 35 or 40 items, but we know that the questions that we ask, send a message of the things that we value. So if we ask questions about trust in Senior Leadership, we are sending a message that we value trust in Senior Leadership. But we aren't going to ask questions that we know we may not need to know or want to know or be willing to solve for in the future.
So being very strategic about the questions that we ask, the cadence that we ask them in and that is probably still one of the biggest hurdles, it is a question about what and maybe is not so much how and when.
David Green: You touched on another challenge there about listening analysis and then, you didn't say these words but, taking action. I have heard from a variety of sources, there is no such thing as survey fatigue there is survey inaction fatigue. What are some of the steps that organisations can take to drive action from this?
Part of it is asking the right questions in the first place, clearly, and at the right cadence as well. What are the other steps that organisations can take to drive action?
Greg Harris: It is agreeing on what the signal is. In this round, in this cycle of performance reviews, we learned that… And it is understanding that data the same way we would if we were understanding our customer data, the same as if we were analysing our financial data, what is the story in the voices that we have collected?
It is not a one-to-one communication when we are looking at organisational feedback, it is what are the one or two things that are the most interesting in the data and the most actionable. Once we know what that is, then we communicate that out to the team. Before we decide what to do about it we communicate to the entire organisation or to the team, or whoever was involved in the feedback, what we learned. Once we agree on what we learned, when employees say our organisation doesn't do anything with our feedback, what they are usually mean is our organisation doesn't tell us what they learned. You know, we talk a lot about inclusion and building inclusive environments, feedback is step number one in creating an inclusive environment because by definition inclusivity means that a person has been heard, a team has been heard, a division of the company, a group of employees has been heard. And so, step one in dealing with feedback, before you even figure out how to solve a problem that surfaces, you communicate what you learn. Then all of a sudden the expectation for that solution changes, it is all of a sudden I am going to measure my organisation's success in this, by how they create a solution for that insight, that takes the aperture down from this broad sea of data to something very narrow, very specific and it will shape my perception one quarter from now, six months from now, 12 months from now, when I am asked a series of questions again.
So yearly, you are going to action before we know what the solution is, step number one is to communicate what the insight is. Don't just think about it because if we think about it, that will be fleeting like when I look at my inbox and forget about it, but communicating out to the organisation what the insight was and what was learned is the most important step. Even more important than the absolute perfect silver bullet of a solution.
David Green: And I guess that helps you then around prioritisation in terms of what are the one or two things that really are going to resonate and is going to really drive change. Then I guess an important part of that communication is around how you communicate and as you said, tell the story. So for example, how important is the data visualisation aspects of the employee feedback and employee listening program?
Greg Harris: It is critical. It is how we learn. It is how we do storytelling. Visualisation is why we do Board presentations in PowerPoint and not tables, in most organisations. We need a visual to tell a story and this is something that has evolved immensely in the last decade. We used to print out massive paperweights, six inch thick binders of charts and graphs doing the filtering but a dash-boarding feedback and being able to connect the dots, we are not just talking about these big survey projects, but being able to look at point employee feedback. So it is the engagement survey, it is the pulse survey that was done about psychological safety last summer. It is the return to work survey that went out in March of this year, when we first started putting the strategy in place to reopen the office. Having those all in one place and being able to visualise is step one, but it is the step that comes right before crafting that into a story and how to communicate that to the whole organisation.
David Green: Yeah, I suppose there is the saying that, a picture paints a thousand words, for a reason actually. Interesting point there, you mentioned about return to workplace surveys, obviously you are probably doing that with a lot of your clients at the moment. Are there any aggregate findings that you are seeing from that?
There is lots of talk about how we are going to have a hybrid future and people are going to be working more from home, but I would be interested in what the data is saying?
Greg Harris: It is a mess. I don't like that to be my answer on any kind of question, but employees don't know what they want right now, at the end of the day, that is the reality. We know from work from home that we feel isolated, we know we feel less connection to our team, we know that in most cases we are probably more productive, we feel more productive. Maybe there is less balance in our lives, there is less distance between personal life and work life and that creates stress. So we know all those things and we say, I can't wait to be together. I can't wait to be shoulder to shoulder again. But if you asked me if I am ready to come back to work five days a week, over half of employees say no, they say the workplace has changed.
Those feel like two competing ideas, like I am isolated, I need social connection. Oh, go back to the office five days a week, yeah, no, I am never, never doing that again. I kind of want to have my cake and eat it too. I want to work from the office when I want to and I want to work in the coffee shop when I want to, or from my living room or from Costa Rica when I want to. And that is going to make a really big challenge in terms of space planning and office planning. The only thing I think we are certain about is that the real estate world will change. We will architect, we will design our workplaces very differently starting now. But I don't think we know, I am not willing to say that we are moving closer to a work from anywhere world. I have seen that chapter, I have read that chapter, too many times in the last couple of decades where an organisation, 2020 aside, will go to work from home. We'll take teams and work from home and then within two or three years, they come back. There is something, there is incidental communication, incidental contact, there is serendipitous communication that happens in a workplace when people work side by side, that drives creativity, that drives innovation and so very few companies have been wildly successful, being innovative and being completely remote. So hybrid will be here, but what hybrid looks like. Right now, the talk about hybrid is, will I be in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and somewhere else, Monday and Friday? I have got a feeling that two years from now, our definition of hybrid will be much more nuanced, much more evolved than that.
David Green: Yeah, I think you are right. I have got a hypothesis that people are going to respond very differently now, not everyone is working from home because some people have gone back to the workplace or never left because they are critical workers. So I am talking about people that are almost exclusively working remotely and I have got a hypothesis that people are going to answer very differently now compared to how they will answer in six months, 12 months time when they are coming back to the office for so many days a week. That is going to cause companies a challenge because as you said, there is going to be a lot of work around real estate, maybe some companies will cut the amount of office space particularly in very expensive cities and they will reconfigure offices for the type of work they think people want to do in the office or they think will be best done in the office, so I guess it is going to be slightly more collaborative or innovative stuff. But some of these will be driven by employee preference of course, those employee preferences might change because yes, we do miss those serendipitous encounters that we get by the water cooler or in the kitchen. It is going to be really interesting and I guess the questions that your clients will be asking in their surveys will have to evolve to fit with that?
Greg Harris: Yep. I agree fully.
David Green: It is a good question, I get the fact that Executives are now honed in on the importance of listening to employees and I think that was happening before the pandemic, it has definitely been a focus of the pandemic and let's be honest it probably won't be over for a while yet. But do you think that this renewed interest or new interest in some cases, in the voice of the employee, will continue long term after the pandemic?
Greg Harris: 100%. This isn't new and it is not going away, this isn't a phase. I think I mentioned earlier the idea that we are going to organise our workplaces based on to build loyalty and to build engagement, not just efficiency and productivity, that is a 20 year old idea and it will be a 100 year old idea, 80 years from now.
It is the most revolutionary thing that is happening in the workplace and so the last 15 months has accelerated the digital tools that we use to facilitate that and our reliance, our acceptance and our deployment of those tools, but it hasn't changed. It is here to stay. Organisations will live or die based on the cultures they create.
And it is not just voice of the employee, it is understanding the relationship between voice of the employee and performance of the employer, performance of the team.
employee engagement and performance management are two sides of the same coin. We saw them as different things five years ago, HR departments had separate Leaders or separate Managers for engagement than they did performance. Those two things create virtual cycles or circles, or vicious circles and they need to be talking to each other. The re-invigoration of voice of the employee, of listening, in the last year is here forever, like it or not, it is here forever.
David Green: And as you said earlier, the key thing in both of those areas, which clearly should be together is the Manager. The Manager is a critical point in helping drive engagement and the right culture and then the performance that comes out of that.
Greg Harris: When the CEO of Microsoft two months ago, announces a new product release and says that employee experience technology is a day one opportunity. As a small Midwestern growth software as a service company, I get terrified that Microsoft wants in on our space. I am terrified for about 15 minutes and then I realise, oh wow, the pump that we have been priming, that we have been building for 20 years is just now starting to hit the S-curve. It is just now starting to create mass adoption. That is exciting and that is why I can confidently say we are not going back. Organisations will organise themselves for that loyalty. The employee experience category is probably five to eight years behind what the customer experience category is.
Companies like Qualtrics, like SurveyMonkey, like Medallia, built huge businesses on capturing data, driving action for customer experience and for marketplace insight. It is now employee experience’s time to do the same. EX is probably five to eight years behind CX, but I would argue that ultimately the economic value of our employee’s feedback is equal to, or greater than the economic value of any single customer feedback.
They create the long tail, the long opportunity in our innovation, in our customer loyalty. So this is a secular trend that we will see for decades to come.
David Green: I think you are right, you mentioned obviously Microsoft entering your space. I guess they entered it via LinkedIn's acquisition of Glint and then all the work that they have subsequently done in terms of bringing in some of the passive data that they have got from some other acquisitions they have made and other technologies they have already got. You have seen SAP make a huge splash in this space by acquiring Qualtrics and then listing some of it. Obviously Workday have spent a huge amount of money on Peakon recently. Your space is arguably THE place to be in HR technology.
Greg Harris: Yeah. Microsoft doesn't chase small opportunities, at their scale they are past looking for a little niche markets with which to differentiate.
David Green: As I said, your space in HR technology is probably the space to be at the moment, so as a CEO of a company in this space, it must be an exciting time?
Greg Harris: It is, It is thrilling. It is funny, a couple of years ago The Lumineers, a band, they get a Grammy for new artists of the year and they bring the lead singer up of the band to say, how do you feel? He is looking in the cameras like, new artist of the year, that feels kind of weird since we have been touring for 10 years.
So yes, we are on the very forefront of this opportunity, of the S-curve, of growth, but we have paved the way. Not just Quantum Workplace, but a handful of other firms, have been paving this path and building this language and the science and the data and the tooling for some of this. I think about our one-on-one product, we built our digital one-on-one product almost to facilitate a face-to-face, Manager to employee conversation. It helps you prepare for it, it helps Manager and employee both blind set their agenda, take some notes and then come in after the conversation to document, so that you can align to make sure what was said is actually what was heard and being activated on. March of 2020, our digital one-on-one product became this asynchronous actual one-on-one. It became the conversation and then to have 12 of those over the course of the year, when an employee goes into that one annual conversation where they are going to talk about or build a case for their performance bonus or their raise, they have real data, real visualisation, real feedback that they have collected. That is different today than we have ever had. The balance of power within an organisation will always follow the balance of data and we have more balance of data within organisations than we ever have had.
David Green: Well, Greg, unfortunately we have come to the last question and this one we are asking everyone on this series. We have talked about performance already actually, so I think I know what the answer might be. Many companies have done away with their annual performance management cycle over the last few years and we talked about some of the reasons why, but we haven't seen a new consistent model replace it as quickly as perhaps some people expected. How do you think companies should approach performance management in the future?
Greg Harris: I think there comes a day where we lose the language of performance management. We start talking about performance conversations, we start talking about coaching. You are in the UK, I am in the US, wherever you are in the world, humans love athletics. One of the things we love about athletics is we love observing people perform at their best. We even love coaches standing on the sidelines, providing performance feedback in real time and making adjustments.
The next phase, the phase that we are in right now, for performance management is number one, changing the frequency. We talked about this already, changing the frequency with which we think about this. Performance management is less about any single score and it is more about the expectations, the alignment and then the goals that we are tracking throughout the year. So any business has to look at how they do reporting. Do you do quarterly reporting, do you do annual reporting or do you do monthly reporting. If you have Board meetings every three months or quarterly, look at every month as a period in a game and the quarter is the game and the year is the season. So every season has four games and every game has three periods. That is how we build our employee listening and we couple our employee listening with the performance measures that we are listening to voice of the employee and it helps employees know what the organisation's valuing and what they want to get feedback on and it helps us understand any obstacles that are standing in the way. But attaching it to the goals that we are doing, the recognition that is happening throughout organisations when employees all over a company are giving this team praise or this person praise, that is ambient data. It becomes really valuable in the performance process.
So it is multiple sources of data, all creating the same visualisation that a Manager and an employee has in one place, for one conversation. That is the future of performance management.
David Green: What a perfect way to end our discussion Greg. Thanks for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders podcast. How can listeners stay in touch with you, maybe follow you on social media? And how can they find out more about Quantum Workplace?
Greg Harris: Absolutely, I appreciate that opportunity. quantumworkplace.com is where you can find us. Gregory Harris on LinkedIn or Twitter that is @gregoryharris is where you can find me or simply greg.harris@quantumworkplace.com to keep conversations going.
I appreciate the time David, a big fan of your show and your team. I think you guys are doing very important work in our space.
David Green: Well, thank you Greg and likewise. It has been great to have you on the show. Thank you.