Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
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Dear Bev,
I want to implement a performance management process in our firm. We are up to 32 people and finding there is no way to manage feedback, put people on notice when necessary or create improvement plans. I’m not ready to hire a full-time HR person and I have leaders in roles to oversee others in the firm. So it isn’t like everyone is reporting to me. I came from a large organization where the process to do performance reviews – twice a year – was dreaded by everyone. It took hours and hours of our time and I’m not sure we ever got the results we really needed. If it came time to let someone go, I had to spend hours with our attorneys, even though I had the feedback in writing.
I’m looking for a process that works and is easy to implement and use. What have you seen other firms like ours doing to accomplish this?
M.S.
Dear M.S.,
Have you considered outsourcing the HR function so that you have access to the expertise you need without making a full-time hire? I just worked with a much smaller client (smaller than your firm) and helped them to off-load some of the HR function to an outsourced firm. They found this to be an excellent answer in place of hiring someone or burdening one of the existing team members with this important function.
Outsourced HR can cover everything from helping you hire to administering benefits, depending on what you need. I don’t have a firm I work with or recommend, but you might find this article helpful in terms of resources. Hopefully other readers will write in and give some suggestions too.
If you don’t want to hire an actual firm, consider implementing a performance process one step at a time so as to increase the likelihood of adoption and not overwhelm everyone who needs to be involved. I have another client we’ve helped to implement this process. These are the steps they took:
- Ensure job descriptions are up to date and relevant for the current roles. It can be a great time to re-examine them, if you have them, or write them if you don’t. Make sure the descriptions have measurable outcomes – quantitative and qualitative so employees know how they will be measured.
- Have employees set personal development goals – no more than three. These are the annual goals the employee and manager agree are relevant to the employee’s role or contribution to the firm.
- Create a template that is no more than two or three pages. Have some be multiple choice: “The employee excelled with their team contribution” on a scale of 1-4 (we shy away from five-point scales because most people pick the middle rating!) Or have qualitative written boxes asking the manager what the employee is doing well, and what they need to change relative to the element being measured.
- Schedule a time for reviews. We recommend more than once per year – ideally quarterly. If you don’t have a really cumbersome process you can manage once per quarter.
Start by taking one step, put that in place and then move to another. You will find your employees react well to knowing they will be given feedback. Most people want to know where they are excelling and what they need to fix.
Dear Bev,
We recently had our firm team offsite. We held it in a conference room in our building, but not in our offices. When we asked for feedback from our team on what worked and what didn’t we had over 50% of the team (26 people in total) say they wished we had actually gone truly offsite – i.e., left the building entirely. They didn’t say they wanted an overnight location, just somewhere other than our building.
I’m confused by this. We weren’t in our office and there were no phone distractions. Many team members seemed to like being able to get back to returning client calls (we broke at 2 p.m.). Is there something important about having a team meeting away from home?
Y.O.
Dear Y.O.,
This is a timely note – I just came back from facilitating an offsite for a wonderful client in the Poconos. Ten hours of roundtrip driving for me, but what a great facility we were in so it was well worth it. In short, the answer is “yes.” I’ve run hundreds of offsites over the years – some in people’s offices, some in their buildings, and the majority offsite. I will affirm there actually is something magical that takes place when you remove people entirely from the normal environment.
When people are in the office, or even close to it, like you were, the normal pull is to worry about what is going on closely nearby with clients, with the markets, with portfolios etc. The mental distraction can’t be avoided knowing you are right nearby and possibly could do work if you just walked those few feet away…
When you take people offsite, and it is really offsite, the only focus is the work at hand and communicating with team members and trying to reach goals and define next steps. It’s a focus thing where you don’t have anything else to think about. In most offsites I’ve run team members put their phones away and didn’t even check to see what was going on – they are really devoted to the time and effort the firm has put in to create the event and have it somewhere engaging and (sometimes) fun. I know it is more costly to take a whole team offsite. You don’t have to do it at a fancy resort, but consider doing it somewhere away from your everyday building and see what happens.
It’s all about the results. If you get better results, you will know it works for your team.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate students Entrepreneurship. Beverly is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here. 
