A prominent psychologist is hoping to find ways to innovate performance reviews in the age of remote work.
Key Details
- Psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant is teaming up with the coaching platform BetterUp to improve workplace performance methods.
- “There’s an ugly truth that HR leaders are slowly coming to terms with: Managers don’t know how to measure performance in our new world of work,” says Fortune.
- “The human transformation company announced that renowned psychologist Adam Grant, a bestselling author, and current BetterUp Science Board member, is expanding his role with the company to serve as Chairman of BetterUp’s newly launched Center for Purpose and Performance,” says the press release.
- “Employers are realizing what folks like Adam and the scientific community have been saying all along—employees are at their best, and they do their best work when they’re finding purpose and meaning in that work,” says Bettup CEO Alexi Robichaux.
Why it’s important
Companies are struggling with metrics for determining productivity and performance. The proliferation of remote work has only made this worse as higher percentages of employees are now working from home and away from the eyes of their employers.
“The shift to dispersed work is also pushing HR leaders and managers to rethink the way they go about evaluating employees. Companies have historically relied on ratings from managers to determine employee performance. But managers can only rate what they can see,” says Fortune.
As we previously reported, employers are responding to productivity issues with remote workers by tightening surveillance on them or mandating they return to the office.
Grant hopes that his work can help employers rethink the ways they handle performance in light of changing employment conditions.
“We need to radically rethink that. We need better ways to measure performance, [and] we need better tools for managers to know what good performance looks like so you can trust that people are doing great work, even if you don’t happen to sit in the same room with them every day,” says Grant.
Notable quote
“What if we could rethink management and use evidence to help managers improve performance along with quality of life? I think that’s something we need in the world right now,” says Grant.
“One of the things that drive me mad right now is the number of jobs, and frankly sectors, where managers don’t even know how to measure performance. I can’t count the number of Silicon Valley companies that I’ve worked with, for example, where they say, ‘I have no idea how to objectively measure whether an engineer is productive or effective.’ That’s sort of the lifeblood of your product development.”