E-Performance at Work: eFollowUp

By Tony Karrer and Elizabeth Gardner

Most experts agree that altering behaviors requires consistency. When you set expectations, clarify benefits, provide milestones, check progress regularly, and recognize blunders, people are more likely to achieve their goals. We contend that the failure of many performance interventions is due in part to a lack of appropriate follow-up strategies. Even when employees approach performance initiatives with enthusiasm, work load increases and old priorities resurface—and so do old patterns and old behaviors. But if training and performance practitioners could automate follow-up strategies, perhaps our initiatives would be more successful.

Here’s a look at some organizations that use technology to assist managers and training practitioners with follow-up tasks. TechEmpower refers to this as eFollowUp, which it defines as using technology to prompt people to follow through on requested performance.

Aspects of eFollowUp

There are several common themes among eFollowUp strategies and tools.

How do you reach employees? The first critical element of eFollowUp is how the organization uses technology to communicate with learners. TechEmpower finds that most eFollowUp implementations make use of “push” technologies, such as email, voice mail, and screen savers. Non-push approaches include posting information on the company intranet.  In some cases, multiple communication paths were used, such as at Sterling Performance (see below). 

Who receives information? You must decide who will receive follow-up information. Do managers receive messages regarding each employee’s progress? Do you send top-level executives reminders to promote learning opportunities to staff?

Who is the sender? Be careful about only sending messages that appear to come “from the system.” These are easy to ignore. If the message appears to come from the program coordinator or an administrator, it’s slightly harder to ignore. If possible, have managers send messages to employees. Most systems enable managers to send a message that is essentially instigated by the system. This is a type of controlled communication. Another example of controlled communication is how one company used its eFollowUp program to initiate its mentoring program. At the start of the relationship, the program uses a basic template to prompt the mentor to formulate a questionnaire to learn more about the mentee. Once the mentor receives the response, he or she can construct an agenda for their first meeting. This entire initial conversation is controlled and prompted by the system, keeping it focused on specific communications that help the mentee/mentor relationship progress appropriately.

What do you communicate? In many cases, eFollowUp tools relate to goals in an employee’s development or action plan. In other cases, eFollowUp can take the form of periodic email messages about new resources or information and surveys that assess behavior change, assess results, or collect best practice information.

Some examples include

• periodic, automated reminders to employees that highlight progress towards goals—pending actions, completed actions, and other status
• aggregated information to managers that outline how the group is moving collectively towards goals
• reports to executive management that summarize department-level status against action plans.

Most important, be clear about what you’re asking the recipient to do with the message? Is it informational only? Should the recipient take some sort of specific action?

When do you send messages? How often do you contact each recipient?

The timing and frequency of messages and interaction will depend largely on the content that’s being related to the employees and the culture of your organization. Some common uses are to send warnings about milestones or updates about an employee’s progress.

Be aware that you may need to repeat your communication efforts. For example, survey response rates increase when non-respondents receive reminders after the survey’s original launch. Another option is to send messages at regular intervals, such as bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Many companies find that developing a consistent pattern works best. 

eFollowUp in Practice

Clearly, there are many choices for using eFollowUp tools.  Here are four success stories.

California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS)

CalPERS has been using a 360 Feedback tool since 1997. After compiling data from all participants, CalPERs holds group meetings to distribute results. During group sessions, participants define development plans to address behaviors that are hurting their scores. For the most part, participants would leave the sessions with a burst of activity. As you would expect, enthusiasm diminished once people returned to the reality of daily work.

To help address this issue, Pat Santillanes, manager of  all staff training and development at CalPERS made two changes to the program. First, CalPERS started using The Development Engine, a product by Fort Hill Company (www.forthillcompany.com). Second, it engaged a supplier to coach 360 feedback participants on an ongoing basis via telephone and email.

Managers still receive feedback during the initial orientation meeting. Then, the Development Engine assigns individual coaches to each person. The coaches help interpret the reports and create action plans in the Development Engine, linking specific performance suggestions to each of the competencies assessed. Next, the manager and coach select and outline the best suggestions. For example, the manager might choose to plan and conduct a teambuilding meeting. The details of the teambuilding meeting, such as sample exercises and deadlines, are then captured in the Development Engine.

Santillanes originally configured the Development Engine to deliver a monthly message about goals, tasks, and deadlines to each participant. But managers found that a month wasn’t always sufficient time to make progress and requested a change to the system. As a result, messages about progress were alternated with messages about general updates to the system. “Most of the kinds of performance change we are looking for occur over relatively long periods,” says Santillanes. “It didn’t make sense to send monthly reminders when that was often not a long enough period to have progress.”

Even though Santillanes jokes that the Development Engine is a “nag engine,” initial feedback on the system has been positive. More important, six months after orientation, follow-up activity holds steady at 50 percent. “This is a voluntary system that’s primarily developmental,” says Santillanes. “Getting 50 percent follow-up is quite a success for us.”

Sterling Performance Corporation

Alan Brisco, founder and CEO of Sterling Performance, has created a Web-based Performance Center for sales organizations seeking measurable performance improvement. The system owes part of its success to its emphasis on reinforcement.

“Reinforcement is valued by almost everyone,” says Brisco, “but the reality is much different. Most organizations are so focused on delivery that they fail to give equal attention to reinforcement. Reinforcement is integral to our process, and our use of technology offers huge capability extensions to our clients.”

Reinforcement, believes Brisco, takes many forms. Some messages are merely reminders, while others bolster capabilities that have been developed in individuals or teams. Still other messages reward users for accessing a resource, achieving a required test score, engaging in some related work-related activity, or enhancing the entire performance system by making a notable contribution.

“Our system provides a variety of ways to prompt people,” says Brisco. “Different people respond to different interventions. Sometimes the same prompt must be delivered through a variety of resources. Email has become so pervasive that people often ignore them. So, we often communicate a series of complimentary messages through different channels.”

For example, email reminders nudge participants to take some action or review a resource associated with their performance plans. As employees complete required tasks, they check them off, which dynamically updates their personalized to-do list. Sometimes, a marquee message delivered via the sales portal directs a group of users to a particular required action.

“The frequency of reminders depends on the type of reminder, goals, and the culture of the organization,” says Brisco. “In some cases, employees can’t rely on management to oversee every aspect of each employee’s progress, so the system must augment, but never take over, managers’ roles in communicating with their people.”

To help with this effort, Sterling Performance provides diverse resources, such as email templates to managers and employees. Some templates even coordinate communication with customers and supplier partners. These templates streamline workflow, standardize vocabulary and content, and encourage actual performance because they’re easy to create and send.

Brisco says that Sterling Performance’s combination of follow-up approaches is pivotal in achieving performance gains. He adds, “This is useful both with helping sales people sell to customers and also with helping managers sell change to their salespeople. The right follow-up approach can be the difference between achieving real changes in behavior and simply teaching someone that while you talk loud and long about change, you don’t really expect anything to happen at the end of the day.”

Adventist Health

Greg McGovern, CTO at Adventist Health, has created something a little different. Recognizing the power of basic reminder messages, he developed a reminder engine that works as an “overlay” to a Vignette workflow system already owned by the company. Workflow tools, fairly common in large organizations, are designed to control the flow of information between systems and people. In essence, these tools automate a particular information flow process.

For example, Adventist Health’s HR system lists due dates for employee reviews. HR created a rule that says “a month before the review date, send the following email message to the employee and his or her manager.” This particular reminder describes the review process and embeds a link to a form for the current year’s review. Recipients easily download, complete, and submit the form, thus completing the first step in the review process. Next, a message notifies managers and prompts them to schedule meetings. Additional reminders continue to guide the review process.

A nice benefit of using the workflow engine is that it captures data throughout the process. During performance reviews, for instance, participants and managers agree to objectives and due dates. Because that information is captured in the forms, the dates serve as the basis for additional reminders.

McGovern advises practitioners to remember that only targeted and meaningful reminders are effective. You need to establish trust and instill value in each message to get consistent follow-through.  “Adventist Health has a culture that necessitates things like ticklers. We manage by exception.” With eFollowUp, they can rely on the system to tell them when action is required.

ALLTEL

As a telecommunications company, ALLTEL faces a tough, rapidly-changing environment. Recently, the company needed to inform some 19,000 employees in a relatively short period of time about major business transformations.

ALLTEL used two separate sessions to start delivering the new messages, each with approximately 1000 managers. In turn, the managers were tasked with communicating the message to every employee over a 16–week period, with a new lesson every two weeks. For each lesson, the training organization delivered an instructor guide and supporting materials, such as slide decks and videos. At the end of a lesson, employees accessed an online assessment, which tested both basic comprehension and understanding of some complex materials.

This sounds pretty similar to what many organizations do—until you look at completion rates. ALLTEL achieved over 90 percent completion rates across the eight lessons for approximately 17,000 non-management employees. How did that happen?

Steve Mosley, vice president of training and employee development, attributes much of the success to the right follow-up tools. To keep attention focused on the effort, Mosley developed two reports. The first report identified completion rates for each top-level executive. It was delivered every two weeks to the CEO and the executive team (14 executives in all). A discussion of the results was an agenda item at executive meetings. The second report, an Excel spreadsheet, showed completion rates for each manager, down to the individual supervisor. This spreadsheet also was updated every two weeks and distributed to executives and their administrators.

“Using these reports, executives could instantly see who was doing well—and who wasn’t,” says Mosley. “As you can imagine, there was tremendous peer pressure to have high completion rates.” While Mosley wasn’t responsible for ensuring participation, the reports that he provided enabled the people who cared most about participation would send the right messages at the right time.

Wrap up

Currently, trainers and managers have the capability to communicate with workers more frequently and in smaller increments. Unfortunately, there’s great disparity in the use of technology as part of a follow-up strategy. This is due in large part to a simple lack of awareness. But more important, a shift in thinking needs to occur. Training practitioners need to start thinking in terms of access capabilities and a process-based approach rather than learning as individual events. The only question you need to ask yourself about eFollowUp is how your organization can best use this new communication path.

Finally, many people express concern about using follow-up tools to send reminders because either the culture won’t accept it or people will consider it nagging. We strongly challenge you on that point, however. Consider a situation in which you send progress notes against a development plan. People that have made progress deserve recognition that they may not receive without an eFollowup system. Likewise, employees that are having trouble making progress may need some gentle prodding.

Is that nagging? Perhaps? Is that annoying? Probably. Is it showing that your organization is committed to improving performance? Absolutely!

Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower. Elizabeth Gardner is e-training and e-support developer for TechEmpower. Contact them at www.techempower.com.