Transcript
Transcript: EXecuTALK: Unlocking Employee Engagement and Retention with the Performance Management Process
[Video opens with animated CSPS logo.]
[Joseph Silva appears full screen, seated in a chair.]
Joseph Silva: Well, I say the best recruitment strategy is your retention strategy. How do you focus on making sure that folks are engaged and are happy to be in your particular organization? The performance evaluation process, it's an opportunity for managers, when well done, to bring about things that they've seen throughout the year, provide employees with dates of occurrences, context around certain projects that the person delivered, kudos that were provided to that employee, their networking, in terms of successful partnerships, or team type of work that they did with others in the organization. But in detail, when you provide the detail, it shows that you have taken the time to observe, taken the time to annotate, and now you're taking the time to give that feedback. I developed my system based on weekly bylats. So every week when I met with my direct reports I would structure them in a way, again, going back to that experience that I had in the private sector with the individual value propositions.
How are you, how was your team and how was the work? So we would structure it and we would talk about the individual. We could talk about the team, and we would talk about what was going on in their portfolio. So by engaging in that conversation, and the other point that I would have to make, it has to be a true conversation without distractions. So your phone needs to be put aside, your phone calls, you shouldn't be on that. And if you have something urgent, you should provide that ahead of time to the employee saying that you're waiting for a particular call. And if you're too busy, just reschedule. So it has to be a very open, honest, respectful conversation with that individual. Give them their due time, and if you're having that conversation about how they are, how their team is, how their work is, you can then take note of what's going on.
So here is an opportunity for you to record what is being done, how it's being done, whether there's any partnerships that are happening at that time that you can take note of how the person is behaving in terms of delivering their results, how they're managing their team. These are all notes that you can take. So I take the notes bylat by bylat, and then that forms part of my evaluation at the end of the year. So I use OneNote where I have one sheet per employee and I put the date-information, date-information, date-information. At the end of the year, I do a cut and paste, put it on a document, and now I can build my evaluation with and using my own words. But when it comes to the good and great employees, I think sometimes we cut some corners because we feel automatically that that person is already engaged, they're doing a good job.
So they probably don't need a lot of coaching or feedback, but guess what? They do. They do and they love it. They may not ask for it, but again if you're doing it, that is going to differentiate you from another manager that's not doing it. So to me, I have made a point of doing it and making sure that that employee knows that I know what they're doing, I see what they're doing, I feel what they're doing. I know the efforts and the sacrifices they're making, because that creates a stronger bond. So again, that speaks to retention.
[The CSPS logo appears on screen.]
[The Government of Canada Logo appears and fades to black.]
