Speed Benchmarking at SIOP Annual 2019

Jerilyn Hayward

To facilitate networking for mid-late career practitioners, the Professional Practice Career Development Committee created a session called Speed Benchmarking at SIOP. At this year’s event, 40 experienced I-Os got together to share their experiences around featured topics. Attendees were able to benchmark with each other and our team of expert table facilitators: Rorie Harris, Elizabeth Kampf, Tracy Kantrowitz, Ted Kinney, Erin Laxon, Liz Lentz, Carl Persin, and Dale Rose.

See below for the highlights of this year’s discussions:

What’s happening now in Evolving Hiring Contexts: Selection, Assessment, Validation:

• The labor market is impacting assessment perception and usage, and users are pushing back.
• Assessment considerations like ROI, turnover reduction, ease of administration, length, face validity, and data privacy are top of mind for assessment consumers. Assessments that are “hyper” short run the risk of poor candidate reactions if they do not perceive an opportunity to demonstrate their suitability for the job.
• New techniques like AI, asynchronous video interviews, and organizational network analysis are gaining interest. Measures of competencies like integrity, agility, and adaptability are gaining interest as our jobs change.

What’s happening now in Performance Management Reform:

• Organizations are investing resources to revise their performance management processes, most focusing on simplification (rating scale, rating labels and focus, frequency of check ins, and reducing administrative steps that are not value add). 
• Feedback continues to be an important focus, and the inclusion of peer feedback is gaining popularity. Key lessons learned include providing set times for providing feedback (vs. open and continuous) and considering the culture of the organization when deciding if feedback is shared anonymously (vs. fully transparently).
• Change management continues to be a challenge, especially around separating performance management and pay decisions.
• Regardless of what unique changes an organization is making, accountability will continue to be important.

What’s happening now in Leadership Development:

• The focus of leadership development is increasingly directed toward leader fundamentals specific to midlevel management. Organizations are no longer targeting development only at the senior/ executive level.
• Organizations are responding to learner preference by providing more in-person and 1:1 learning opportunities to build leadership capacity.
• Organizations are using testimonials to highlight real-world examples of how leader development has solved specific individual/organization challenges.
• Successful leadership-development programs are driven from the top of the organization, and many are focused on retaining high potentials. Program evaluations and ROI remain a challenge.

What’s happening now in Engagement Surveys/Lifecycle Surveys:

• Despite a clear intention to survey throughout the employee lifecycle, how to best do so is still ambiguous.
• Concern about fatigue from typical survey methods is resulting in organizations exploring innovative ways to connect with employees throughout the lifecycle using alternative methods/mechanisms such as bots and site intercepts.
• How best to analyze lifecycle data is another key question: Given that the surveys tap into different constructs and different things, is there utility in conceptualizing analysis as lifecycle or is it better to conceptualize and analyze surveys separately according to their purpose?

Please join us next year in Austin!