Name: The 2026 Performance Enablement Shift: HR’s Role in the AI Era
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T19:16:06.536Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 8 s
Description: The 2026 Performance Enablement Shift: HR’s Role in the AI Era

Transcript for "The 2026 Performance Enablement Shift: HR’s Role in the AI Era": Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. We will go ahead and give everyone a couple more minutes to join. But while everyone joins, I would love to have you all introduce yourself in the chat. Let us know where you're tuning in from. And in honor of the cold weather for me and I'm sure many other people, let us know what are your favorite winter activities, whether it be snow related, whether it be staying inside by the fire and avoiding the cold. Feel free drop in the chat. We'd love for you to meet a new friend in today's webinar. My name is David, and I am on the marketing team here at Better Works. And today, I'm calling in from Jacksonville, Florida where some of you northerners may laugh. It is really cold today as in a high of 52 degrees. So for us Floridians, it is very cold, but I'm sure many of you may be coveting that weather. Again, thank you all so much for joining us today. Let us know in the chat one thing you're excited about for the winter, where you're calling in from, and we will get started here shortly. Before we get started, we do have just a few housekeeping items to go over. First being, welcome to twenty twenty six performance enablement shift, HR's role in the AI era. With so much going on in the world, in your lives, I'm sure in your organizations, we are tremendously thankful that you are spending an hour with us today and taking the time to learn and hear from our amazing speakers. We do have a few things like I mentioned. We have our chat that is going on. We love our webinars to be active, engaging. We love to hear your thoughts on what we're mentioning, and so please feel free to use that chat. Let us know what resonates with you. Let us know what you may be experiencing. And then we also have some polls throughout the webinar. And so throughout, we'll be launching some polls, getting to hear your points of views on the different topics. And so those will pop up right on your screen, and we'll mention it. And so please feel free. Give us your thoughts on those polls. And then we do have a few resources over in the document section on the right. So you'll see the chat, and then to the right of that, you'll see documents. We have a few resources that relate to the topic, a link to join us for our next webinar, and so feel free to take a look at those resources throughout the webinar or maybe at the end. And then I know we get this question a lot, and that is for the recording and the slides. We will be sharing out the recording after the webinar. So if you have to leave early, if you miss a spot, if you wanna share it with someone afterwards, we will be sharing that out with you all after the webinar along with the HRCI and SHERM codes. And so be sure to check your email tomorrow for those, and those that email will have all of that for you as well as some more resources. And so now let's talk about why we are here. You know, as AI really continues to shape how we work, how work gets done, organizations are being forced to really rethink what high performance actually looks like. Many of you may have just wrapped up maybe your end of year reviews. Maybe you're doing them this month or have a different cadence, but, you know, traditional reactive performance management really just can't keep up with the pace of change that we're all going through. And so instead, we're seeing the shift towards performance enablement, which is exactly what today's session is all about. And so to get us started while I introduce our speaker, we're gonna launch a poll. We would love to hear from you all. How would you describe your current performance management approach? And this is a safe space, so feel free to be honest in that poll. But we'll give you all a few minutes to answer that while I introduce today's speaker, Jamie Aiken, who will be guiding us through today's conversation. Jamie is the VP of HR transformation here at Betterworks where she helps organizations reimagine employee performance management through proven systems and processes. She brings over twenty five years of HR leadership experience, spanning organizational development, HR transformation, and employee engagement across multiple industries. Jamie is also the coauthor of Make Work Better and a McKinsey certified facilitator with deep expertise in global talent practice redesign, large scale cultural transformation, executive coaching, and change management. In short, Jamie's really been at the center of this shift long before it's become a headline, and we're really excited for her to share her insights with us today. And so I will bring Jamie onto the stage, and I will pass it over. And, everyone, welcome Jamie Aiken to the stage. Hi, everybody, and welcome. Thrilled to be here, and I'm dialing in from Nova Scotia, Canada, which surprisingly is three degrees warmer than Jacksonville, Florida by the sounds of it. We're sitting at 52 today, but, we've got a storm coming in. I'm thrilled to be here today. This is this is a a topic that I'm very passionate about, And at the heart of it is something we've been talking about in HR for a very, very long time, and I'm seeing some great movement towards this shift from traditional performance management to performance enablement. So I'm gonna talk to you about that today. I'm specifically gonna talk to you about it from the perspective of, key stakeholders in your organization and the behavioral shifts that we're needing them to make in order to have a sustainable transformation and to move firmly towards continuous performance. And so we're also going to because sometimes me talking is is not enough to bring it to life. So my colleague, Sam, is going to be showing you exactly what that can look like in practice. So without further ado, let's let's talk about it. As David mentioned, this is this is this I love this term, VUCA. This this notion that the world is a crazy place right now. There's lots of volatility, lots of uncertainty and complexity, and ambiguity. We've just there's there's an awful lot of things, whether it's AI or a host of other reasons, why there is, just a lot of unknowns going on in the world right now and in organizations as well. But we're finding, as we're talking through, to a lot of different organizations and HR leaders, that the companies that are really navigating well through this environment are the ones that are focusing on accountability, agility, and being able to pivot as things change, being lean and efficient, as well as being ready for the next change. So, you know, in the chat, I'd love to hear from you if this resonates. And if if there are anything that you're seeing on the right hand side of the screen is speaks to you in terms of some of the elements that your organization is facing right now in terms of, you know, calls for more efficiency or agility, etcetera. Now balancing that is this huge appetite, which has only been growing over the last few years, that our employees, whether they be at any level in the organization, but our employees are striving for meaningful work. They wanna know that what they're doing in their job is contributing to the greater good, that in some way, they can see a line between what their contributions are doing and how that relates to what the business is trying to achieve. So goal setting and tracking that and making sure that you're on point is really resonating as an important aspect for our employees. They also wanna understand how they're making inter how how what progress they're making on those, and they really want coaching from their managers to help them maybe with challenges they're having achieving that progress and helping the manager or having the manager help them get that out of any challenges out of the way. They're also looking for feedback. We know this is a a a big aspect of what employees are asking for. They don't want less feedback. They want more. And they don't just want it for their man from their managers. They also want it from their peers, maybe somebody who's running a project that they're working on for a short period of time. Feedback and rich feedback is king. Because part of what the the third element is is about allowing employees to have growth opportunities within the organization, and there's a big hunger to to get the feedback that they need to say, where can I go next? And so talent mobility is starting to become a topic in a lot of conversations, more so than I've seen in my decades, in HR. So how do you balance those two things? Well, I think performance enablement allows us to do that. So on the left hand of the screen, I'm thinking this is this describes in a nutshell what traditional performance management looks like, which is very much a top down exercise. It's about control, and it's very reactive, always looking behind to see what we've accomplished as opposed to this shift to enablement, which is about empowering our employees and co and managers having continuous conversation throughout the year so that there's no surprises and for it to be very proactive. So you you hear terms like feed forward as opposed to feedback. You talk about, managers and employees having conversations about what they what the next steps are. These are all aspects of enablement. So we're gonna launch a poll here. Of the four different stakeholder groups, managers, employees, HR, and leaders, which stakeholder do you think is most critical to get right in your performance approach right now? And, David, if you can let me know. Oh, good. Thank you. See managers, employees, leaders, managers. Okay. It looks like I'll give a couple minutes or a minute. It looks like managers are, leading the pack with employees coming second, leaders coming third, and HR with three votes. Interesting. Okay. Wonderful. So in my job, I get to talk with HR leaders all the time. And so I've had this conversation a lot, which has helped me sort of identify what I think are the key challenges for each of these groups in in terms of driving shifts across the organization. And managers, just so you know, managers are usually, the first, group or the most important group that that folks are identifying. So we're gonna talk about each of these stakeholders, why it's challenging for each of them, and then what can we do as HR leaders to help them make that the shift that they need to in order to move into the space of continuous performance enablement. So for managers, it is truly move moving the mindset from I'm an evaluator to my job as a coach. For employees, it's about moving from this is something that's done to me, so I'm a passive recipient as opposed to being actively engaged in the, in the experience. For HR so I noticed there was only three votes here. We'll we'll talk a little bit more about this. I think there's a lot that HR needs to be shifting, but they we really need to be shifting from owning the process of performance management or enablement to building and curating an experience and focusing on the outcomes that we need from the experience. And from leaders, we really need them to move from this notion of delegating it to HR. This is something that HR does, and they're responsible for it. To really being a cultural steward, and understanding that if we get performance right in our organization, it's going to drive business results. So let's get into it. So for managers and I'm not suggesting these are the only shifts that need to happen. I would suggest these are probably the most fundamental shifts that have to happen. Happy to do another webinar on each of these in a deep dive. But for today, I'm just gonna talk about that what I think are the key elements. So for managers, this notion of moving from, an evaluator to a coach. So why is it challenging? Well, most managers, first of all, are promoted for technical competence. They're incredibly good at what they do, but not necessarily when they move into a leadership role, do they have the coaching ability. It's not something that they've been trained to do as part of their, role in the past. And I can share with you. I used to work for a very large aerospace company. We had a lot of engineers, and we would have engineers that would, you know, have twenty, thirty, 40 people reporting into them, also engineers. But the the leaders had never been trained on, being a good coach. So while they could talk about the technical aspects, they weren't necessarily as strong in terms of their coaching ability. And so they, as a lot of managers, feel the pressure to just jump in and solve the problem quickly as opposed to allowing this space to let your employees come in and solve it themselves with your coaching. And coaching also requires, EQ, patience, and a mindset shift, not just the skills. So what we what we see as we evolve this shift over time is supporting managers with this notion that it's not just something that you can go into a classroom for an afternoon and learn about how to be a good coach. This is something that takes time. I like to say frequency builds competency. So the idea is to is to ease them over time with this notion that they move into being a coach. So how do you make it happen? Well, first of all, and it gets to what I was saying before. This is not necessarily I'm not saying all classroom training is bad. But I think in the moment tools that can help when they need it, and Sam will show you some examples of this a little later on, that helps them with conversation guides, giving them coaching questions that may be relevant and templates to help build their confidence and competence over time is something that we can do. I know in the past, I've been very much guilty of, you know, creating a a beautiful little workbook, handing it out in a classroom setting, and then stunned three weeks later or six months later when all of our our leaders didn't become amazing coaches. This is something that takes time, but we in HR need to help support that growth and development over time. It's not gonna happen overnight. It's also about modeling it visibly. So when they're when you have senior leaders or peers showing their coaching style through videos or, in fact, in live sessions, it makes it a a little bit, frankly, more normalized as in this is something that I could do as well. And, oh, by the way, this is something that I I think I can now try and tackle myself. But it starts to normalize that actually being a coach and not just jumping in and fixing is the way we do business here now. Measuring and recognizing, you know, in all good change management strategies, there comes a point where, yes, you will enable your stakeholders to ensure that they understand and are supported in making the shift. But at a certain point in change management, it's also about accountability. And so while we recognize that this is an evolution that happens over time, we also need to understand that at a certain point, we hold people accountable to those that coaching behavior, again, over time. We don't want this to be feel something that is threatening. Rather, it's something that they grow into, but we set a standard, and we expect over time that people reach it. For employees, it's about moving them from this notion of this is something my boss does to me, or this is something HR is telling us all to do. And they're used to seeing it that way. It's it's something that's done to them as opposed to something that they are an active participant in. And many don't feel empowered to, gosh, initiate feedback for themselves or have any say, in the establishment of their own goals. And there's some uncertainty about what's allowed or expected. Is this what managers are gonna help me with, or is HR going to help me with, as opposed to really seeing that, in fact, they become their own talent developers, which is the shift that we want them to do. So we want them to become an active participant not only in their performance, not only in establishing and having a say in the goals. Now that may be in the conversation that they have with their managers, but that they have a say in crafting the goals that they're focused on. But it's also about recognizing that, you know, they are also a very, very much a part of their career growth and their career development. And so they need to be much more active in seeking not only feedback, but asking for, additional, sessions around, I'm having a struggling with a particular goal. I need some coaching from you, manager, to help me overcome the the challenges that I've got in in my way. So here's an interesting one. HR, for process owner to experience designer. So HR traditionally has been structured with this notion of, being a compliance organization. And if you think back to the early days where HR was called personnel, it was really about risk and compliance. And HR was set up for that mindset. And I still see it when I'm talking to some HR organizations. I still see this notion that it's really about, did we focus on the process? Was the process completed? How many PMP, performance reviews did we complete through the year? These are the words and the conversations I have when an HR person is still very much associated and attached to the process itself. And so the metrics they they think about are, again, very much associated with the process. Many HR teams, although I see this changing, lack lacked design thinking or user experience capabilities. And I think, over probably the last six or seven years, HR has started employing design thinking approaches when they think about recrafting the employee experience around performance and other, HR, processes as well. I've done another webinar on, design thinking for HR that I think we'd we'd be able to add to the link or the follow-up email as well if you're interested. But I think it really unlocks the idea that we are designing for the for the end user as opposed to from a compliance perspective, I e, we need to do these three things that we need to check off and and finish to complete the process. So shifting from process completion to this notion of human centered impact and business outcomes. I'll talk a little bit about this later on in the organization. Think thinks it it requires a new way for HR to be thinking and working. And I hope this resonates with you because I think there's I think this is a stakeholder group that many of us in HR miss, and it's easy. I've I've done that poll many, many times. I think it's very easy to identify managers, employees, and potentially leaders in this, but I think we miss the fact that HR needs to make some shifts as well. I mentioned design thinking and cocreating with users. Imagine if instead of, and I've been guilty of this too. Sitting in a room with my HR colleagues and designing a process, all of you know, and and us high fiving each other because we think we did a great thing, flinging it over the fence to our employees and managers, and then wondering why it was not being adopted. Well, part of the reason is we didn't create the space and open the door to have some of our end users actually come in and help cocreate with us. And, again, here we go with the accountability piece again. It's measuring the experience and the business outcomes. So it's not just about how many forms we got completed. Did we get a 100% on our talent review conversations? But more about, did we increase productivity for the organization? Did we have a higher percentage of goal completion this year than last? Are we, in fact, affecting in a positive way not only productivity but employee retention? These are the types of things we need to be thinking about, And I'd be interested in the chat. If you are, doing this type of work right now, kudos to you. But just know if you're not, you're in in good company with a lot of HR organizations that are just starting to think about this. K. Let's shift to leaders. Because if if HR start starts sort of lessening the grip on the ownership of process, then that allows leaders well, first, if they if they lessen the grip, somebody needs to to pick it up. And what I would suggest is that leaders of your organization, your CFO, your CEO, etcetera, they need to stop assuming that it is an HR process, that HR is managing it, but rather it's an an important aspect of what I call the this is how we do business here. And what that why that's challenging is that, traditionally, that hasn't been the case. It's always been HR's job or something our managers do. Again, you see this sort of this notion of if it's not a problem, then I'm gonna avoid it. And it requires proactive involvement in culture shape shaping, which many leaders weren't trained to do. But if you take the idea that the reason that the leaders will take this on and be a cultural steward to this notion that performance of our people actually is good for business, then they start doing, a completely different activity or shift. They start creating visibility. So dashboards showing enablement behaviors, I e, how many people are doing check ins, what is the how many how many divisions in our organization are having continuous conversations, and having coaching sessions that that our employees are are giving feedback that are very helpful? Well, what would that do for your organization? If your organization as a whole has strong alignment with what you as a leader have set for your business priorities, and everybody understands that alignment and is focused on it and is enabled to perform to such that the productivity and the achievement of those business objectives happen, I, as a leader, can make the connection, obviously, that performance of our people is going to help make the organization achieve its business results. And those are the kinds of moments for leaders where they stop thinking about performance as something that HR does to us, and rather it's something that we do here because it helps not only the individuals at our organization, but it also helps us achieve our business objectives. So I've been talking for a little bit here. I I thought it would be really helpful at this point to actually move from con practice. And so the first one, you know, we talked about managing performance to enabling it. We talked about moving from static processes to a continuous flow and alignment and from evaluation to clarity and ownership. So let's see where that enablement starts. Pass it to you, Sam. Thanks, Jamie, and thanks, everyone. I'm thrilled to take you through part of BetterWorks solution for driving alignment and clarity around what folks are working on. So as I start sharing my screen, much like our attendees today, I'm gonna be focusing in on the manager. And one of the aspects of the Better Works platform, our goal tracking means that managers and employees have real time visibility into how they're tracking. And so Michelle, our manager here, has clear visibility into what she's accountable for as well as a dashboard directly telling her how her team is performing on their goals. And I also saw in the chat how important it is to drive good goal practice and alignment from the top down. And so I'll also take a second just to show you some of the really powerful views that Better Works provides when you're considering a, a goal alignment methodology. And quite frankly, just having a place to house things like your top company goals and and put a priority on them. But beyond that, you're able to actually drive alignment by cascading goals through the organization from layer to layer so that folks can see very clearly how the work that they're doing directly contributes to one of those top line company goals. And so whether I, as a user, am directly contributing to a goal, meaning as I update progress throughout the quarter, it will automatically update the progress to the top company goal. Or as an individual, I can actually just align or I can actually just associate or relate to one of those top company goals. And so again, the power there is both the combination of directly contributing. I can see exactly how my work is contributing to the the greater good, but it's also illuminating to me as the user how important the work is that that I'm doing. And then lastly, I just wanted to touch on how effective our goal creation, can be. So as that coach as opposed to a manager, we do provide the ability to cocreate your goals with the the employee. They can be agile, meaning as goals become less important, they can be moved out or adjusted. And as priorities change, so can the goals. But one of the really powerful pieces for both employee and manager, our AI goal assist, it's gonna be looking through all of the good information that it knows about our manager as well as the employee, all in an effort to really assist the goal creation process so that we're focusing more on the coaching and the development as opposed to getting stuck on that blank page. Oh, what what am I gonna be tracking this quarter for goals? And so just thinking back on the goal module here at Better Works, you know, we're we're really keen on driving that alignment, that clarity on how folks are are affecting those top company goals, and all around making your managers change ready so that they can face whatever the the next quarter brings them. At this point, I'll invite Jamie to hop back in, and you'll hear from me in a little bit as I rejoin the the conversation and share how Better Works can help with our topics. Thanks, Sam. Okay. So now let's talk, about because we we talked about it in the poll a little bit, managers as coaches and employees as owners. And I thought I'd share a story, particularly as it relates to, employees as owners. And when I say owners, I mean of their career, of their development, of their accomplishments, and goal attainment. So when I was working in that aerospace company, we had, a lot of, misaligned, shall I say, when we started, we had a traditional performance management. Goals were established sometime in they were supposed to be January, but sometimes it would be March until, those goals were communicated. And employees always felt, you know, a lot of feedback to HR that they didn't know what they were supposed to be working on, etcetera. But there was also, I think, a struggle that they were not understanding what they were doing and how it was connected to what the business was trying to achieve. So what we were encouraging employees to do is to request conversations with their managers and have that level all the way up to the top because sometimes organizations are not to be are not that agile. I'm trying to be kind here at communicating the goals at the beginning of the year or whatever whatever your cadence is. And so what that did was it actually over time, it created a tension that that really brought to bear to the, leadership team that in fact, oh gosh. You know what? We've created a situation where in fact there's a gap, and it's only because we haven't been as diligent or as disciplined around the idea that our employees need to hear so that they can craft the goals that they, need to focus on. And so it actually created a bit of friction until such time as we got a lot better, at the leadership level crafting those goals. So employees can own not just their own development and their own achievement, but, you know, in some cases and I I hear this a lot that, you know, sometimes the the goals of of the year, can actually take, a couple of months to get articulated. And in those cases, if you encourage your employees to have those conversations, so really take ownership of it, that can help, make a cultural shift of its own. I'm curious, and would love to see in the chat if any of you experience this lag for goals in the organization, that, say, if you start in January and you're not seeing them until February, March. I've heard it from a lot of HR organizations that that is the case. And so while we can do what we do in in HR, I think it's also important to have that tension created with the employees as well. It helps it becomes a bit of a wake up call for leaders and the behavioral shift that they need to make as well. But performance shifts when managers coach and employees take ownership. And I think we have a call on this. Thank you. What best describes your biggest manager performance challenge today? So is it that managers don't have time for meaningful conversations, that they lack confidence or capability? Is it the performance conversations happen too late? Or that we don't have consistent approach across teams? Love to hear your thoughts on this. And I think David will pull up the poll once we've given it enough time. Now this one's a little bit, more dispersed. Still moving, though. Maybe fifteen seconds more to get your votes in. It looks like managers lack confidence or capability to coach. There's not a consistent approach across teams. Yeah. We you know, we'll find that as well. Some some folks have an instinctive or have been incredibly well trained in the past around, understanding how important this experience is and how vital performance enablement is. So they will bring that. You'll you'll you'll see a particular division or a business group that does this incredibly well, but it's not consistent across all of your teams. But it looks like lacking confidence or capability to coach, is the is the majority of voters here. So let's talk about why coaching is hard for managers then because they were never set up to coach. We know that managers are under pressure, and this idea that this is just one more thing that managers have to do. One of the many refrains that I hear, the most is that continuous performance management means that our managers are having to have more conversations instead of just once or twice a year, oh my goodness. They'll kill us. That's that's there's they don't have any time. But the idea here, which Sam is gonna show you a little bit, is if we make it easy and if we make it simple and if we remove the administrative burden of a traditional performance management process, we make it lighter and more agile, and we help enable them over time, just in time, then, they they're able to build that competency over time. And it is something that is built over it's it's the the the hard part is that we just assume everybody's gonna be a good coach, which in fact is not the case. Frequency builds competency, and support in the moment is what's gonna help, your managers become better coaches. It won't happen overnight, but, you you know, having a continuous approach to this allows them multiple times throughout the year to build that muscle. And if you don't give any structure to it, coaching becomes something that's cons inconsistent, or just downright avoided because people are are uncomfortable with not being, able to do it in a confident way, if that makes sense. And HR has a role in this because we have to acknowledge this is not just about pulling managers, as I said before, into a classroom and giving them a, you know, a a two hour course on how to be a good coach. You really need to enable coaching by creating consistency. You need to provide guidance instead of relying on an individual manager's skill. So if you see that parts of your organization are doing this really well, then they become your sponsors. And the parts of the organization that are not or maybe struggling a bit, that's when you double down on your enablement with that particular group so that you're not peanut buttering, learning, across everybody in the organization. You're really becoming strategic about where you provide that support, and you're reinforcing co coaching behaviors. You're not not just about the outcome. So it's not just about process completion. It's about how well did you, did your employees or your team, respond to your ability as a coach? Like, how how meaningful was it to your team? And you can ask questions and poll your your employees about that. But, I'm gonna pass it over to Sam because I think it's important for us to talk about it, but also to see it and what would that would look like. So the first, thing we're gonna talk about is coaching and ownership requires better conversations. We know annual reviews are too slow. And when I say annual reviews, I mean the kickoff at the beginning of the year, maybe a midyear conversation, around the spring summertime, and then the absolutely fraught with angst end of year conversation that you have with your boss. If they're too slow, because the goals that you've set at the beginning of the year may be completely redundant by March or April or May. And so you you may have a a group of folks that are looking to you for feedback, but the goals that they have were redundant six months ago. So it's too slow. It's not agile enough. Ad hoc conversations are too inconsistent, and enablement really truly depends on frequent high quality check ins. So how, so the question then becomes, how do we make great performance conversations easy and consistent? So I'm gonna pass it over to Sam. Thanks, Jamie. And, again, y'all, I'm gonna take a couple of minutes to show you how Better Works can help with our topics today, and then Jamie will come back up and continue the webinar. So let's revisit our our manager, Michelle, here and and how can we really enable her in continuous conversations throughout the year. Before we show you how the conversations themselves act, I wanna talk about how managers actually prepare for these conversations in one on ones. Right on their home page, as we've seen previously, your managers have a dashboard of everything they need to know for their employees. That's their goals. The conversations that we're about to look at, they do have the ability to send a proactive nudge for those that maybe are tardy on filling out their part of the conversation. But probably the most powerful is they can actually generate an AI provided feedback summary right from their home page. And, again, when we think about managers with ten, twenty direct reports, lot of getting ready and and making sure that we're showing up the way that we want to can can be a lot. And so just by providing the right tools for your managers that includes certainly AI and and making sure that we're enabling them with the most powerful, and that's gonna be information. And so, again, as folks or as managers are preparing for these, they do have things like a summary of all of the feedback that Damon has received to make sure that they're bringing them best their best selves to these coaching conversations. The coaching conversations themselves happen in two ways. So we're looking at a scheduled example. As Jamie mentioned, these can happen continuously throughout the year on a monthly, quarterly basis, whatever the cadence is best for for your organization. But when we think about a really quality coaching conversation, there's some elements that I'd like to pull out for you. The first is on the right, all of Damon's answers are gonna be visible as Michelle is responding to this get together. We also have visibility into Damon's goals. Again, providing the what Damon is working on, and these are in real time. So, as we have gotten together throughout the quarter for our one on ones, both manager and employee are aware of if these goals are green, tracking well, or red, we need to double down with some resources. Something else I'll draw your attention to as the manager is actually responding and and coaching in the review itself, They also have AI to look over their shoulder and basically give them some some pointers before they actually submit their response. So in this example, there is a ton of slang being used, probably not the most professional response. And so we have AI to look over our shoulder, tell me a better way, a more effective way to to get my point across. But even more powerful, it's gonna be coaching our managers on why it made that suggestion, enabling me to become a better coach as I, continue to do my reviews and and interact with employees. So this provides a really great foundation for managers to be continuous, to be, in the moment in terms of knowing how their employees are tracking. But probably even more important is showing up in the flow of the work of managers on their day to day basis. And so what do I mean by that? That means showing up in places like Microsoft Teams. So I may actually find myself requesting feedback on behalf of an employee right through Microsoft Teams, and all that happens without even having to leave or redirect from the the Teams application. In addition to Teams and being able to generate, feedback as well as conversations in real time, I can also leverage things like Microsoft Outlook. So being able to add agenda topics to any of my upcoming one on ones all without even leaving my Outlook client. So in addition to some of those topics might be a place for a private note to be added around performance. Again, all serving both employee and manager in a continuous but really thoughtful way so that folks can get that continuous coaching throughout the year. I'll invite Jamie to join the stage again so that we'll continue on the next topic and I'll be back here shortly to show you around a little more. Sorry about that. I I was on mute. You think you'd think at this point we would remember or I would remember to unmute. So let's now talk about measuring what matters and the the idea that what you matter shapes how people perform. So I'm gonna, put a poll out here, though, because I I really wanna if you recall what I was talking about earlier around HR's own shifts about measuring going from measuring process to measuring business outcomes. So the poll is how confident are you in linking performance conversations to business outcomes today? Are you very confident, somewhat, not very, and we can't do this? And it's a safe space. I'll be interested to see what the polls are. Very confident with four board votes. That's great. Somewhat confident. Looks like somewhat confident. And maybe in the chat, you can you can maybe say, you can maybe describe a little bit about what that means in terms of somewhat confident. But, again, I'm gonna tell you a little story. And it's it's a good story, I think, because it you know, we learn from our successes as well as our failures. And I'm gonna tell you probably one of the biggest mistakes I made as an HR practitioner a few years ago, and why it's relevant here. So I had taken on a new global role at head of talent, and the first thing I did was go out for the first sixty days and talk to all the business leaders that I needed to, about sixty, sixty five of them. And I asked them the question, what is broken right now in our, performance? I was talking more about all of the talent, processes, but it's still relevant. What's broken and and and where where what needs the most fixing? And, of course, I got for the 65 people, I got 65 different answers about all the things that were broken in HR and all the immediate urgent things that needed to be fixed. And what I realized was I had a laundry list as long as my arm, but I hadn't asked the right questions. So I went back. So there was my mistake. Don't don't make the same mistake as me. And I went back and I asked those same, business leaders, what are your biggest business challenges, and how, therefore, can I support in talent management and in performance? How can I support you overcome those challenges? I got a completely different list of business challenges and was able to craft my talent strategy in answer to how do I support the performance challenges that our business leaders are having and and link my, our my talent strategy to an articulation that supported what the business was trying to achieve. Massively different, very much more focused on business outcomes, which I think if that's somewhat confident I was very confident that after doing that exercise that the business leaders understood why my talent strategy was relevant to them. What that allowed me to do, therefore, was to get this the resources and the budget I needed to help solve business problems. So why must it change? Well, the problem is traditional metrics. If I'm going into a room competing for budget and resources with my c suite, and I'm focusing on we need a new tool or the process is clunky, I'm not going to get the support that I need. Traditional metrics also, if you think about it from a process perspective, are very backward looking and infrequent, and there's little insight on how what kind of impact they're having on the business itself. So the traditional way of, measuring, our success needs to change. So why do leaders struggle to link to business outcomes? Well, they struggle because outcomes are showing what happened, but not why. The annual signals arrive too late to course correct, and the data that we need, the behavioral data is missing or invisible. So without these behavioral signals, confidence stays low. So in order to enable performance at scale, leaders need visibility, not more reports. They need visibility. They need early signals so that if you think about our first slide, they are able to pivot and adjust as required, that there's no surprises, and they need insight that they can act on. So, Sam, over to you again to show what this looks like in practice. Thanks, Jamie. Alright. So let's talk about how we can enable both our managers as well as our leaders to be really impactful in the moment as opposed to having to wait until the end of the year and get that final report. So one of those ways in in particular with your managers, we've looked at our goals before and and, of course, we have a view specific to our direct reports. But our managers here at Better Works actually keep an entire filter, say, directly pulling out what are the goals on my team that I need to pay attention to? Since these goals are all tracked in real time with a progress bar that indicates how I am pacing, your managers now actually can, with just a presaved view, have a priority on those that are falling behind so they're not pacing well through the period or that may have not gotten off the ground at all. So again, when I think about Michelle, our manager, at just one glance at her goals that are at risk or off track can really start to understand how Breanne needs the attention and extra coaching. In addition to our managers, I did want to take a second and just really recognize the powerful reporting and insights that we do provide around the review process. Of course, HR needs to know who has started the review and who has not started the review. Maybe even more important is the engagement by group. So being able to tap the relevant leaders, make sure that we are, being on the microphone about those relevant next steps. But probably, you know, most effective or more important than anything is how can we make sure that both employees and managers have a clear line of sight of what they're accountable for and where they, and and where we can enable them with more coaching and and more direction. And so, of course, we're looking at the current status for the reviews. All of this data comes together to provide the Better Works, users with a really comprehensive workforce analytics dashboard. And so as Jamie mentioned, the goal work, the coaching, and conversations, this is all leading to tangible business outcomes. So now HR has a real time dashboard into all of the inner workings for their organization, head count by all of the different, metrics that matter to them. And again, probably one of the more useful ones that they're gonna be referencing, certainly attrition. And so again, I just wanted to take a second and highlight how we can help managers in the moment know how their team is tracking. That gives them the ability to double down on their coaching and and actually have an impact on their goals throughout the year. Of course, HR needs to know in the moment where we are in the process and have the relevant workflows in order to ensure everybody is completing that process. And then at the end, we wanna come back to the business with real tangible outcomes. How has the program enabled coaching and the goal setting to a point where we can now again really rest our laurels on some of the tangible business outcomes? I'll now invite my team back onto the stage. Thanks, Sam. Appreciate it. So the shift is clear. The idea is to move away from a traditional performance management of an evaluation and move to performance enablement, one where we're supporting and empowering our employees. We're helping building and enhancing the coaching capabilities of our managers, and all of this with an idea that HR moves from being this compliance cop of a an HR process to one of a cultural and experienced designer. All with the notion that performance improves when we make things simple, when we have clarity about what we're supposed to be focusing on, when we give our individuals as well as our, manager support, and when we have visibility on what we need to be talking about and focusing on from a business perspective. I'd like to leave you with one last thought, which is something that I think from an HR perspective, it's certainly our vision here at Better Works, but I'd like to like you to think about it from an HR perspective as opposed to being a process owner. And I know some of you run, these specific processes, whether it be feedback and recognition, whether it be employee engagement, talent development, performance, succession. In some larger organizations, there may be different groups focusing on each of these. And my prediction is that, because I'm seeing it happening, is that those walls of those processes, those silos in HR are melting down And that we are now at a place where we can, with the help of AI, start sharing data around each of those different moments in the experience of our of our employees, and that data only makes it richer for us to be able to help our employees become, grow in in their development and and their growth. The idea here is that instead of thinking about it as different parts of HR, if we think about it as people centered and the idea that the employee and the manager are at the center and that these little bubbles around it, each are conversations that are important and make up the overall experience for an employee or a manager, that I think we start shifting, this notion that it is one process after another after another that our employees have to go through, but rather that HR is helping curate a completely integrated experience for our employees and our managers. With that, I'm gonna pass it over. Thank you so much, Jamie. We are almost right at time. So I just wanna start off by saying thank you. Thanks, Sam. Thank you to all the attendees who tuned in. We just launched a poll. If there was anything Jamie said, if there was anything that Sam showed, and you would like to continue the conversation with one of our performance experts, please feel free answer that poll. We will have someone reach out. They'd be more than happy to show you what this could look like for your organization, especially as you're planning for the year to come. We also would love to continue the conversation with you in other ways, and so stay tuned to that follow-up email we'll be sending out, which will contain more resources for you, a link to just tour the platform on your own. It will have the HRCI and SHRM codes. All that good stuff will be in that email. And we also would love to invite you to our next webinar. And so I will drop the link in the chat. This will be a great time. It'll be a a webinar in partnership with LifeLabs Learning, so please register for that. But, again, thank you all so much for attending today. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. But be on the lookout for that email tomorrow, and we hope you all have a great rest of your day.