Name: The 2026 Performance Enablement Shift: HR’s Role in the AI Era
Uploaded: 2026-01-21T16:16:27.083Z
Duration: 58 min 12 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": Hi, everyone, welcome. We're just gonna give it a couple minutes to finish to let people join the room. But while we wait, please feel free to introduce yourself in the chat. Let us know where you're joining from and something interesting about that place. It's always great to see how global these sessions get. So my name is Justine, and I'm from Betterworks marketing team, and I'll be your moderator today. I'm joining you from Hampshire, which is also known as Jane Austen country. So I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out a clever link between Jane Austen and performance management and eventually gave up and asked Gemini to help, and it gave me this perspective. So the original title of Pride and Prejudice was actually first impressions. In the HR world, we're trying to move away from first impressions or once a year impressions and towards continuous conversations. So while Jane Austen was writing about nineteenth century manners, she was actually describing the need for clarity and fewer surprises, things that still stand the test of time, especially for HR leaders. So before we kick things off, I'm going to run through some housekeeping. We love to keep these sessions active and engaging. So please keep the chat moving, share what's resonating with you or what you're seeing in your organizations. You'll find some resources in the document section on your screen, and we will be recording the session, which will be shared. So, yeah, I think let's kick things off and we'll get started with a with a poll. And we'll just flash that up for you momentarily. So this is a safe space. So please share, how would you describe your current performance management approach? Please be honest and and share where you are in that journey. And while you're answering that, I'm going to introduce Jamie, our VP of HR transformation at Better Works. Jamie brings over twenty five years of HR leadership experience and is the coauthor of the book Make Work Better. She's been at the center of this performance shift long before it became a headline. So I'll pass it over to Jamie to talk us through the results and dive into the session. Welcome, Jamie. Hello, everybody. Boy, I I missed the memo on how to connect, where I'm calling in from, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada, to performance. But I will say, it is a a lovely little town nestled on the Atlantic Coast, and I'm very happy to be here. So I I wanted to talk a little bit today about performance enablement and the and the shift that we're seeing moving from traditional performance management to one of performance enablement. And so when I think about traditional performance management, I'm thinking about the idea that you start the year off, and you set the goals. You have a conversation with your manager. You may, if you're lucky, have a midyear conversation with that manager. And then at the end of the year, the always exciting and enthusiastic, dreaded performance review conversation that happens. And that's, that's per traditional performance management, that really, let's face it. In the twenty five plus years that I was an HR practitioner, I was never getting anything positive back from, the the people that we serve in our organizations. Managers thought it was a burdensome administrative task. It was always very difficult from an HR practitioner because you're chasing people around try trying to get the process complete and forms filled. Employees felt anxious about it, and leaders really just saw it as an HR task that was being done to the organization. Well, we moved to a shift in thinking about it philosophically that it's it's more about a continuous continuous conversation and engagement that happens throughout the year. We'll be talking a lot about this, as it relates to each of the stakeholders that I just talked about, and how we move from this notion that it's only a once and done type of activity to one where we're actually fostering support, growth, and engagement, and providing value in business outcomes for our companies and for our individuals. So let's start with where we are today. And what we're seeing in the marketplace and the world is a lot of volatility, a lot of uncertainty. Certainly, there's a complexity around and a lot of ambiguity. And when we're talking to business leaders, the ones the companies that are seeming to navigate these choppy waters are really focusing on four key elements, accountability, agility, and the idea that you can pivot and shift as all of these different elements come at you. There's a focus on lean and efficiency and the idea that you need to be ready for change. And so organizations that are still managing to navigate through these very uncertain times are really honing in on at least a few of these elements of high performance. But that said, the the the employee population, the individuals that work in our organizations are having an ever increasing appetite to focus on the elements of performance enablement. They want meaningful work. They want to understand how what they're doing in their role is contributing not only to their organizational, goals and priorities, but also their professional and personal goals. They wanna have an understanding of how they're progressing, and they wanna have conversations with their managers that help them overcome any challenges that they're having as it relates to, you know, achieving either a project goal or a a development goal. And there is an ever increasing appetite for feedback, not only feedback from their managers, but also from their peers, potentially from a project leader that, they're they worked on for, you know, a three month gig with them. So the appetite for feedback is ever increasing. And, of course, I I referenced this before. They wanna see development opportunities in the organizations that they work in. They wanna see how they can grow into different roles and build different skills. And so the philosophy of performance enablement is that we are able to drive both of these things at the same time. So the shift really means moving away from performance management, which is really a top down control and very much a reactive, I e, we're looking backward over the course of the year and seeing what happened, as opposed to this notion of enablement performance enablement, which is much more grounded in the principles of empowerment. It is a continuous conversation. It is a continuous stream of feedback, and it's very proactive. So we'll even find things like feed forward conversations happening, not just feedback. So given that I've just described performance management, I I I wanted to take a poll here. Which stakeholder group is the most critical to get right in your performance approach right now? Is it managers, employees, HR, or leaders? We'll give you a minute or so, and then maybe we can put the the poll results. Managers seem to be trending high. Yeah. By far, I would say, yes, managers. We're seeing leaders at 11% 10%, managers, 70. And okay. I think we've got a fairly good we're still seeing managers being, I would say, by far, the the one that you imagine is, the most challenging. So let's go back to the slides. So I'm gonna walk you through what I think are the key behavioral shifts across the organization from those four stakeholder groups, and we're gonna talk about what is challenging about or why it's challenging for each of these different stakeholder groups, and they all have unique challenges, but also how to help. And then my colleague, Bruce, is actually going to jump in throughout this conversation and give some real examples of what that actually looks like. So let's start with the the one that, you identified as the biggest, which is managers. And that, you know, of course, there are other challenges for each of these stakeholder, groups, but I just wanted to focus on what I believe, have the biggest or it represents the biggest challenge for this particular group. So from a manager perspective, it's the shift from being an evaluator to being a coach. From from the employee perspective, it's the shift from being a passive recipient, I. E, HR or my manager makes me do this, to being an active participant in the in the process and the experience. From HR, it's about moving from being a process owner to being one who is the curator of the experience and a designer of the outcomes. We'll talk about that one in particular because I don't think we talk enough about this in HR. I don't think we talk enough about where HR needs to make the shift as well. We might earnestly believe philosophically that it's important for us to make this shift, but I think there's some things that we can dig into as it relates to HR and HR's role here. And then from a leader perspective, it's this notion of moving away from delegation of the process, I e, this is something that HR makes the organization do. It's a compliance exercise. To one where they're really moving into this space of cultural stewardship. What I mean by that is really setting the tone and living the values of performance enablement in a way that becomes this is just the way we do things here. And we'll get into each of those. Just gonna take a quick So let's talk about the managers first. And why is it challenging for managers to move, to this this idea of being a coach? Because we all want and have been talking about for many years this idea that if managers become a coach, that suddenly they we are uplifting our employees and really getting the productivity and engagement that we want from our employees. But, frankly, most managers are promoted for technical competence, not coaching ability. I used to work at a large, global aerospace company, and we had an awful lot of engineers who, through the course of their careers, would advance to suddenly become a manager of many. And while they were able to, for example, talk about why a particular plane wing was not constructed properly. You can tell I'm not an aerospace engineer, a plane wing. But, but they didn't have the coaching associated with or the training associated with coaching. And so pulling them into a classroom once a year, and role playing how to be a a coach is not enough. Certainly, that's what we I I think my in my previous, years, we assumed that a once and done kind of training was going to help, but it didn't stick. So I think that's one aspect that we need to pay attention to. Managers are also very much feeling under the pressure to solve the problem quickly, And so, they are not in a a space where they can, take the space to do the coaching. They're more in an effort to solve or answer the problem. And so that doesn't allow room for the individuals that they're coaching or they're that report into them to solve the problem, together. And coaching requires emotional intelligence, patience, and a mindset shift. So it's not just about the skills. It's not just about knowing how to do it. It's also about the the why to do it. And so part of part of what we're talking about here is also this notion that we are bringing them into a space that they can make it happen organically and holistically. So the first aspect is providing ready to use tools in the moment. So guides, coaching questions, and templates will help managers build confidence, and it will help managers build confidence over time. This is not something that happens miraculously overnight. The idea is that, that we are enabling them in the moments that they need the support is very important here. And I think the other aspect of it is this notion frequency builds competency. And that the more often we are putting managers in a position where they are giving feedback and having continuous conversations throughout the year, that frequency builds competency and that muscle over time, which I think is really key. It is not something you're going to have an opportunity to to develop if you're only having one, two, or three conversations a year. But rather, it becomes a much more natural, confidence and competence, for your managers. Modeling it visibly is also important. So making sure that you have senior leaders or peers demonstrating their coaching style and normalizing the notion that this is this is now how we expect our managers to operate, but also normalizing it in a way so that it has a familiarity to, managers over time. And then, ultimately, with any change management, there there comes a point where you, start introducing some accountability. I'm not saying day one. This is an evolution that happens over time. However, at a certain point, you start introducing the notion that this is this is part of the expectation of being a manager, that you have this coaching ability, making sure to reassure your managers that you're going to help get them there with whatever enablement they need, but ultimately, that the coaching is part of the behaviors that we expect to see in our managers. Now let's move to employees and this idea that employees see performance as something being done to them, not with them or by them. And the idea here is that, in a lot of cases still and I talk to HR leaders every day, every every day, all day. The the idea that, you know, employees are still feeling very much that either it's something that managers are doing to them, I. E, having performance conversations, or it's something insisting that they do. They don't feel like they are the captain of their own ship. And there's also some uncertainty about what's expected or allowed, as it relates specifically to goal setting or development planting planning. It's something that they need to wait for as opposed to something that they can be actively pursuing on their own. And you may find that there are some manager or some employees that will definitely be unique in, driving those kinds of conversations. But in a traditional performance management, I I would suggest that more often than not, employees are waiting for those milestones in the performance process as opposed to, being, like I said, the captain of their own career ship. So how do we make it happen? How do we make that shift happen for employees? Well, we provide toolkits. So, again, this notion of templates and prompts for setting goals, preparing check ins, and or requesting feedback. So, you know, take the mystery out of it for them so that they feel like they can self serve. Clarify the expectations here. So reinforcing that employees are expected to take ownership, that it's not optional, and it's not something that they have to wait on. I certainly saw that. Again, I'll go back to the aerospace, company example. We certainly had a lot of folks that felt really frozen in that they felt like if they were asking for feedback, if they were asking for it out of cycle, if they were asking to build their own goals and include those in, they felt frozen that that that wasn't something that they knew when to do or how to do. So clarifying the expectations and actually providing them templates to guide those conversations took some stress out of the equation for them. Recognizing, those folks that are actually going out and actively requesting for feedback and suggesting and telling those stories so that people start recognizing that, oh, this is something that I can do as well. And I think this is an important one as well, modeling co creation. When you're talking about something as as, simple and basic as building a goal, making it something that is a a dual conversation is one that managers and employees can build together as opposed to it just being very top down. This is my favorite one, to be honest. It's about HR and how can we as h r leaders shift, and what do we need to be shifting? Well, historically, HR has been structured as a compliance exercise, so through whatever processes, policies, and forms. And there are still many of us who operate within this headspace that this is an HR exercise that we must, enforce. And so we become HR policy cops, chasing folks around to do something and to make the process a 100% complete. But we're not thinking about it in terms of the actual impact on our employees, and our managers. And many a time, I'm guilty of this, many a time, I have sat in rooms with other HR colleagues, and we've built out what we thought was the most beautiful performance process experience. Then we flung it over the fence to our employees and our managers, and we're absolutely stymied that, you know, it didn't. It it fell flat, we weren't getting adoption. And I think design thinking is one way that HR can really start opening the door of those, process creations and inviting some of the end users of the those experiences in so that we start really understanding the implications of how we design our programs. And the other shift, I think, and I I sort of touched on it, was this notion of shifting from process completion, I e, did we get a 100% of our PRP forms in, to one where we're looking at it from an a human centered impact and a business outcomes impact. But it it requires us to be thinking about things differently. I mentioned the idea that we become curators for the process as opposed to the owners of the process. That shift needs to move to the business, I. E. I'll segue over here to our business leaders. Oh, sorry. I got ahead of myself. So I mentioned design thinking. So the idea that HR, really becomes equipped thinking about, becoming a design, an experienced designer is really important. And the idea of cocreating with our users, and inviting those managers and employees into their room while you're designing the the conversations or the feedback, I think, is really critical so that you understand, ultimately, how you can create something that is engaging, enriching, and drives value for your employees and your managers, but ultimately also for your companies. And measure your experience and business outcomes different, not just about did the process get completed, but rather was it helpful? Did it impact productivity? Did you evolve to a a place where you can actually start aligning productivity goal goal completion, to business outcomes as opposed to, yes, we got a 100 of the process completed. But this also requires a really important shift for leaders because currently, in a lot of organizations, leaders still think that performance management is HR's job or something that managers need to do. And they in avoid getting involved until there's a problem. And, if it if the problem is something like underperformance, poor engagement scores, high attrition, they they won't get involved because they, in in a lot of cases, don't even participate in the process themselves. And it requires, me, it requires proactive involvement in culture shaping. It needs their voice to say, this is how we do things here, and here's why performance is important, not only to the individuals in the organization so that you can grow and develop, but also for the organization in terms of achieving our business goals and strategies. So how do we help leaders move from this notion of delegating it to HR to this idea of cultural stewardship? Well, first of all, we need to create visibility. So dashboards are a really good way of showing enablement behaviors by team. So what are the check-in rates? What is the feedback? How is that impacting engagement? How is it that impacting performance? Not only a performance at an individual basis, but performance in terms of maybe that divisional goal. Sponsoring workshop groups, having senior leaders colead performance culture efforts. And what I mean by that is imagine if you had, a leader above and beyond the beginning of the year when you're launching your program for the year, but rather every week or every month when they are in their own group meetings and holding up, and asking folks to be accountable for the amount of feedback that they're giving in their organization, the amount of conversations they're having with their employees, how many goals are being achieved, and really making the link that those elements are critical to the business performance, I think, makes a real difference. So sponsorship doesn't happen start and finish at the beginning of your program. It needs to be highly visible throughout the program. And make it a CEO level topic. So the CEO needs to be standing up and talking about this throughout the year and rewarding and recognizing when it's done right in a division or, you know, in a particular unit so that people start seeing that it is our normal way of doing business, not something that's sort of stuck in the corner, and it's something that HR, is in charge of. So now we're gonna move from this notion of concept to practice, and we'll do this a few times here. But the the first one we talked about is managing perform moving from managing performance to enabling it, moving it from a static process, I e, maybe twice or three times a year, to continuous alignment and moving from evaluation to clarity and ownership. So now let's see where this enablement starts. I'm gonna ask Bruce to join us now. Over to you, Bruce. Thank you very much, Jamie. Yeah. Looking forward to this. And just to very quickly jump in on Justine's comment about how does Jane Austen link in with with performance management. My brain's been wearing away. Also, I've been watching the first half of the presentation. And I would think straight away that that well, if we think about recognition, that's very much about the pride that you have in your organization. And then I'll be showing some AI tools a little bit later on, some calibration, which is all about how you remove prejudice and bias. So we naturally have pride and prejudice built into our our platform as we we go through today. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to just share my screen with you. I'm gonna walk through and don't worry. Jamie will be back shortly to continue on, but I just wanted to give you a very quick practical example in Betterworks of how we have supported some of these activities. So I'm gonna jump in and pretend to be Michelle, one of my managers. Hello, Michelle. And looking at Betterworks from her point of view, she gets a really quick overview of the key things that she needs to know about what her team's focused on. We split it up really neatly into focusing on the what, looking at the the goals that they're progressing on, looking at the conversations and interactions they're having with their manager, making sure these are all being done. If they're not being carried out, then the manager has an easy way just to remind the employees nudging them so it appears in Teams or in Slack or whatever mechanism you choose to carry that out, but also allowing the manager to to remind themselves of the how, of the behavioral impacts that they're they're making by the conversations and the things that they're carrying out. They've got a way here of just clicking through to any of their team members and carrying out a quick summarization of the feedback their employees have been given. Because we're in a new year. I better go back to last year to make sure we've got some good data to show. So Better Works will actually summarize all of the feedback they've received from all of the different sources throughout the year and give them that quick snapshots to help the manager to understand how the the employee is is performing in the eyes of of their colleagues and the people that are interacting with their employees. So it's just a really quick and easy way to help the managers to get ahead and understand how things are going for the team. But Michelle, at any point, can go and click on goals, and this is how she starts to understand oh, she looks at her own rather than everybody else's. She can now understand the the priorities that she has at this point in time. She can see how all of her goals are going. She can see color coding to indicate whether they're on track, so green showing they're on track, orange if they're falling back, and red if there's a danger that they can't be completed. So it's very simple for Michelle to understand from her own perspective. And similarly from her team, she can jump across, look at her entire team, see what they're working on and focused. Just Damon, her team member at the moment, is focused on their own particular activities. This just gives a really easy way to understand how things are going within the team and prioritize and help support the people with the things that they're working on. But where a manager gets a lot of support when it comes to goals is the creation. And we find that often creating goals is one of the biggest struggles that both managers and employees have because there's so many things that they should be thinking about. They should be really considering the job role that they carry out fairly obviously, but but they should also be thinking about the conversations that have taken place with their manager throughout the year, about the feedback they've received from everybody, about the strategy of the business that you've outlined to them, what they should be making sure that all of their goals aligns to. And rather than people manually having to create this, which they have every capacity to do very easily within our tool, they also have the ability to use AI. AI knows all of those things I've just mentioned. It knows their job. It knows the feedback and the conversations that have taken place and all those really key things. It knows the skills that they hold and where they need to develop. And it can then generate almost instantly a set of potential goals for the employee to work on, give suggestions on what they should focus on, and highlight not only potential goals, but also measurements around how they can be achieved for the employee. And we can ask for more suggestions focusing on developmental areas of business. And, importantly, whenever we bring up any of these items, it will allow us to understand where they've come from. Are they linked, as many of these ones are to previous goals we've worked on? Are they linked to the the job title or the feedback that we've received? So, immediately, the the tool is helping us to align our goals and make sure we're linking through to all of the key things that we need to focus on when we're setting up goals. And as an individual, I can as well as looking at my own goals and at the team members around me, I can also focus on what is seen as the priority for the company, reminding myself of the strategy. I can drill into that. I can change the view over and start to look at what's important to the business and how that's been broken down. I can click on any of the examples here, and it'll open up and explain to me how those have been taken and given to different people in the business. So not only am I able to align and link my goals through to the strategy of the business, I can see how other people have and how they're beginning to form and shape the things that the business do collectively. So I'm gonna hand you back to Jamie for her to continue on, with this, but I will be seeing you later with a few more examples. Jamie, over to you. Thank you, Bruce. Wow. Pride and Prejudice, like, man, that was pretty smooth. I don't know how I could top that, my friend. And there's a couple of questions in the chat. Bruce, if you would take a look there as as I move on to managers as coaches and employees as owners and the idea that performance shifts when managers coach and employees take ownership. So, let's do a little bit of a poll here. What best describes your biggest manager performance challenge today? Managers don't have time for meaningful conversations. Managers lack confidence or capability to coach. Performance conversations happen too late, or we don't have a consistent approach across our teams. And I'll ask Justine to put that poll up live as we go through there. So the question's what best describes your biggest manager performance challenge today? Time is definitely we don't have a consistent approach across teams, and they don't have time for meaningful conversations. So it looks like it's a combination. It's pretty close. Managers don't have time for meaningful conversations. Managers lack confidence or capability. We talked a little bit about that. And then there's also an opportunity with those of you who don't have a consistent approach across teams. I think we will, you'll definitely see, the, Bruce will show a little bit about this notion of, building confidence. But I think it's also important for us to understand, and certainly the philosophy of Better Works, is the idea that if we make it simple, if we make it easy, if we remove the friction for managers to have these conversations, then that goes a long way to, to move away from this notion that in some cases, we're hearing from, HR leaders that managers are spending, you know, upwards of five to six hours a year per employee on the performance management process. So part of the idea here is if you make it a lot easier and less burdensome, it allows for the space for them to move into this notion of approach. But we know that managers are under pressure to move fast. And part of the element here when we talk about leadership sponsorship is recognizing that if managers are are coaching, we're actually becoming more productive. But we need to set a standard and normalize the notion, that, they need to be coaching, and we need to defriction the process in a way that, that understands this notion that they're just, you know, moving too fast, that there's too much for them to do. This is just yet another thing we're asking them to do. Coaching capability is assumed, not built. This is why managers were never set up to coach. There's this this notion that if you move up in the organization and become a manager, that somehow you're immediately a 100% capable of doing coaching. So, Bruce will show you a few examples of how we actually, in the moment, support the building of that muscle. And without structure, coaching becomes inconsistent, or if you're not comfortable doing it, avoid it completely. So the idea is that HR is there to set the experience and to create the experience for both managers and employees and to give it some structure and some support and enablement in in the in the moments that matter so that it's not inconsistent. So HR then, what are what's our role as the curator of this experience? Well, I mentioned creating consistency where managers experience chaos currently. Providing guidance instead of relying on this notion that all individuals have this ability and skill, and reinforcing coaching behaviors in the moment. And not just about the outcomes of the the goals or the completion of the process, but also rewarding and acknowledging when coaching gets better and and that muscle is being built over time. So let's move back over to Bruce here. Coaching and ownership requires better conversations. The idea here is that annual reviews I think we can all admit annual reviews are too slow. If you're talking about goals that are set up at the beginning of the year and you don't touch them for twelve months, having a conversation at the end of the year about goals that may have actually changed pretty significantly given our current climate, I think is is unfair, and employees definitely resist and are very articulate about that fact. Ad hoc conversations are too inconsistent, and enablement depends on frequent, high quality check ins. Again, that skill builds over time. So then the question is, how do we make great performance conversations easy and consistent? And I'll pass it over to Bruce now. Thanks very much, Jamie. Yep. Very, very good questions, ones that I like to help organizations to find answers to. And and one of the simplest ways that we find that people can enhance their their processes, enhance their conversations that take place between managers and employees is to build a kind of a a dual structure to it. One is we understand the importance of having those those check-in points. We know that no no matter what you you do with your continuous programs, you still need certain lines in the sand, your year end reviews to be able to bring things together for people to understand. So the ability to schedule any activities that you want within the tool and and make sure that at the appropriate points in time that that you define within HR, maybe on a quarterly basis, maybe annually, you can set up and schedule activities to occur between a manager and employee. So for Michelle, Damon, we've been talking about through the process here, they're gonna be given initiated conversations to carry out. But what we can do to really support that is to give a lot of information to to carry out the the correct kind of conversation and make sure they've got everything to support that conversation. But before I go into that, one other important thing is, yes, we have the scheduled activities, but also a manager and if you choose an employee, can actually decide to initiate a conversation themselves outside of that structure. And this is really powerful, particularly for your high performers because there are people that are actually saying, do you know what? Actually, I know most people say they don't like performance reviews. I do. I wanna focus on my career growth. I wanna do more. Or a manager who feels this is the right time to have a conversation around the growth mindset or the the right kind of career conversation with their employee. Think how powerful it is if if at the time when that goes through your head as a manager, you can say, okay. This is the right time for this to occur. I'm gonna just go and initiate that conversation today with my employees. So I'll pick Damon from my list of employees, and it will just outline to me what are the questions that we'll be running through together, making sure that I'm comfortable. You can even pop up a video or a guide here to make sure that the employee really understands what needs to be carried out, and it will then allow us to go in and carry out that conversation. Now within any of the conversations that take place, whether it's this kind of career style one, whether it's that end of year review, we have the information on on the left here for me to fill in as a manager, as Michelle. And what I'm do, just to make it easier, I'm gonna give myself more space, move the bar to the left to give me even more room to carry this out. We also on the right hand side, we'll see the information that Damon provides as he enters his responses to this conversation. We can initiate that it happens in sequence or that it happens both at the same time, and we share and see our responses as we both complete. We have complete control over what questions are in this template so you can adjust and change and make them relevant. But, also, whilst I'm going through and thinking about the career process with Damon, again, I can just change over and look at the current focus he has on the goals that he's working on and understand what are his priorities and how they're going. This will help inform the conversation that takes place. And whilst I'm here, I can do the same with feedback. I can bring up that feedback summary that we were looking at earlier on, and I can I can forget to last year? I can then bring up that information to to inform and guide me through this. So all the way through the conversations that are taking place, the manager's not left on their own. They're supported with evidence, with information to help them to make the right kind of decisions as they go through. But even then, when you when you're carrying out responses as a manager, as Jamie said, you're you're not an expert coach. You're not naturally always gonna get things right. This can be quite a nerve wracking thing to do as an employee or a manager. What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna cheat rather than write you along a response into one of these things. I'm just going to write a quick example in. If I just write this, it should generate it for me. There we go. So imagine as a manager, I'm writing a response to tell an employee how they could potentially focus on something they're not doing so well. If I've written it in this way and I sent that to an employee, it's not gonna be received particularly well. Thankfully, built into Betterworks, we have an AI writing assistant. If I click underneath, it will read whatever I've written above. It will see if it's if it's appropriate. It will check it for bias, getting rid of that prejudice for us. It will check to see if it's professional in nature, if it's using any wording that wouldn't necessarily be understood by our employees. And if it thinks it can do a better job, it will give us a a recommendation of how we can change that or how we can update the language. We might read this and think our one's better. We we might want it write it in a more casual style or a more professional style, shorter or longer. We've got ways of adjusting the suggestions that it makes to us through the process here. And it also helpfully explains to the manager what they weren't thinking about when they wrote this. So here, you can see it's picking up the fact that I'm not very clear in the message I'm trying to bring. If I'd written anything that was a bit more biased, it would indicate that to me here. So the manager's not only getting a better response for them to consider using. It's all the manager's also getting an understanding of what they need to be thinking about, what mindset they should have as they're writing these kind of responses. This gives managers and employees a lot of psychological safety. They're understanding what's really working. They're understanding that this is something that's acceptable the way it's written. And finally, they have control. They can take this. They can accept it and and replace what they've written, or they can say, nope. My version is better. I'm gonna keep that, and I'm gonna share that with the employee. So a lot of coaching, a lot of help and assistance, and a lot of support to the whole performance conversation that takes place between the managers and the employees. So that's it for me. Until a little bit later on, I will pass back over to Jamie for for the next section. So now let's get to the idea of measuring what matters because what you measure shapes how people perform. But before we do that, let's get a little interactive. How confident are you in linking your performance conversations currently to the business outcomes that you have in your organization? So how confident are you in linking performance conversations to business outcomes? Are you very confident, somewhat, not very, or we can't do this today? Take a moment to cast your votes, and we'll pull up the poll as as we, see the votes come in. Looks like somewhat and not very not very confident. Well, the the good news is that's an opportunity for us to build. And I think you'll recall when I was talking about HR, this is a shift that we we do need to I firmly believe we do need to get better at in HR is linking what we do in HR to business outcomes. So there's a great opportunity, I think, overall in HR for us to to do that more confidently. So if you think about why it needs to change, and if you think again about traditional performance metrics, there's been a focus on this idea of the process completion. And so the focus is on the process outcomes, I. E, did everybody fill out the form and ratings? And it and it sort of stops there. Unfortunately, it's also very much in traditional, structures or programs. It's very backward looking, I. E, we're looking back in, say, December if that's your year end. We're looking back over the course of the year, and it's infrequent. So we don't have a lot of metrics or data as well. And it doesn't give very much insight on is, you know, in the middle of the year, is is performance trending up or down? It's very much a static measure. And why why do leaders struggle to link performance to outcomes? Well, outcomes show what happened, but not why. And annual signals don't give us enough, information, and they arrive too late for us to actually make any changes. So imagine if at the for an example, if at the beginning of the year, the the goals that are set up, but because of changes in the marketplace, in the business that you're operating, those those, you know, those priorities change. Well, if you're stuck with an annual performance conversation and goal setting, you're stuck with those old, set it and forget it goals as opposed to having a very agile way of moving and aligning the organization as things in your business and market changes. And there's no behavioral data that's happening as well. So we're not able to see how our coaches are performing and how our coaches are developing over time. So without behavioral signals, confidence stays low. So let's talk a little bit, and we'll introduce our friend back to the stage, from measurement to meaningful insight. To enable performance at scale, leaders need visibility, and they need constant ability. They need early signals so they're able to pivot. They don't need surprises or things that have happened as opposed to things that are happening that they can make decisions on, and and move and act upon them in with immediacy, not something that is a reactive, or it's too late situation. So let's see what this can look like in practice. Thank you, Jamie. So there's a few little examples I wanna run through briefly here. And for me, one of the key things is is really around that that reporting element that you mentioned, Jamie, and and making sure that the information is more than just completion rates. Timing is is critical when you're talking about your performance activities. And having graphs like this one, which indicate to you the timings that it takes for people to complete the conversations between their managers. It starts to give you indications of where there might be gaps. I'm looking at it across the entire organization. We can break it down. We can kinda focus in much more to different courses we choose alongside, obviously, the more traditional kind of ways of measuring, looking at the manager versus the employee status of of conversations, for example, might be useful one. Looking at the engagement levels you have or just the standard way of looking at the the adoption and the way that people are completing those through. So the the tool really helps to support those kind of insights into the way that your organizations are working and thinking. But for me, there are a couple of other areas that really help with that focus on making sure you focus on the right thing. And if we go back to the goals, for me, this is a really simple way to help your leaders to understand what it is that should be focused on. Now with all the filters we have at the top here, we have ways of jumping to different sets of data and being able to focus on key things. Excuse me. I may just need to reset my Wi Fi. One second. I can tell that I'm doing a live demonstration here when we get a nicer screen like this. We will get a response in a second, I'm sure. While that's coming through, so what the the tool allows us to do with the filters is focus on those kind of key areas and key elements. So for your leaders, maybe your, you know, your senior leaders in the business, they might have a filter that says, bring up all of the key projects across the entire organization. Much as the I was doing at a managerial level or as an employee level, I can see everything that's going on. I can see things like related items, things that are linked to the projects that are taking place. I can quickly focus and see things that are going really well. The progress is taking place there. If something's going really well, I've got the ability as a leader to cheer and say great work or to indicate and celebrate the successes that are happening. And then at the other end of the spectrum, when things are not being focused on, I might want to send a message or nudge people to say, this is something that's really important to me. These little indications from senior people in the business can really shape and change the way that the whole performance activities work and really help the the senior team to basically keep keep their hand on the radar and make sure that people are thinking not just about their own progress, but also the success of the business as a whole. And we already talked about that alignment that we have, that way of linking the objectives through the organization to understand how they link together. You saw the visual of that earlier, so I won't go back to that. The last thing I just wanna highlight and mention, I I probably won't even dive in, but I'll mention is also calibration is a great way to really help with this as well. Calibration is a way of making sure you take all of the performance data you've carried out throughout the year, bring it into a a process, and then design an outcome that gives you fairness and, remove some of the biases that will happen in your business. So a way of looking at it either as traditional approaches, some people have a performance versus potential, but also using any other kind of data points, looking at the behaviors that you're seeing versus the outcomes that are being driven or the successes that you have. And having a tool like ours really helps you to build and shape that and and give an easy experience to carry that out. But I'm just gonna hand back now to Jamie for the the final section. And if there are any questions or anything people wants to know more about, I'm very welcome to answer them. Thank you, Bruce. And in fact, thank you particularly for showing what I think is a fairly subtle element. But, you know, if you think back to when I was talking about business leaders and having them having them really, lead, as it relates to setting the tone that performance enablement and this approach is critical to the organization and not just standing at the stage on the stage at the beginning of of the launch of your program, but really in a continuous way. And it's that very small thing that Bruce just showed about cheering and nudging. What we have found in our stats is that if a goal gets a nudge or a comment, it has a 56.7% increase in the chance of that goal being accomplished. And so if you think about that from an impact perspective, having your leaders actually going in and showcasing that they are engaged and involved and are cheering on. Our CEO does it all the time, and, certainly, it catches your attention when the CEO of your company is, sending you encouragement or a nudge on a particular goal. That's the kind of change management piece that's very easy to accomplish, but it really has huge impact in terms of adoption and, you know, ultimately, productivity. So enabling performance, what comes next? Well, the shift, I think, I think it's clear. We're moving from this notion of evaluation to enablement. We're moving from annual processes to continuous performance. And we're moving from this notion that HR is the process owner to the fact that HR is the culture and experience designer. And performance then improves when people have clarity, support, visibility, and I would also suggest simplicity. Because if we make it easier for our employees and our managers, if we allow them the enablement when it matters in those moments that matter, and build their competency around this, we actually see higher levels of engagement, higher levels of productivity, and higher levels of talent mobility. So this shift also you know, I I've been thinking a lot about, HR in the last few years and the idea that it also means that, you know, if you think about HR, there's especially in a large enterprise, you'll have different pockets of HR focusing on different processes. And so there'll be somebody that works only on succession. There may be another group that only works on employee engagement, another one on performance, etcetera. And the idea here visually is the expression and the challenge that I put out to all of, my fellow HR leaders is to really shift the thinking, to move the employee and the manager into this center and recognize that for for our employees, all of these are moments that matter for them and that we, as the curators of that experience, need to see that instead of them going through each of these different processes in a silo, they're actually experiencing them continuously throughout the year and driving the kind of human centric experiences that ultimately become more valuable, not only for the employees and the managers, but for the organization. I'm gonna pass it back to Justine now to, finish the session. Thank you. I did the usual thing of of being muted. So just wanted to say thank you so much, Jamie, and thank you, Bruce, for showing how this all kind of comes to life. We're just gonna launch one final poll. So, you know, if today sparked an interest or you'd like to continue the conversation or see anything a little bit more specific to your organization's challenge, you can let us know there. And then we would also love to invite you to our next webinar featuring Lucy Adams, the CEO of Disruptive HR, and she's a former HR director at the BBC. Lucy is a true pioneer in the field, known for challenging traditional HR roles, and we've partnered with her on a couple of these discussions, and they always resonate really well. So, again, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate you taking your time to join us for this conversation. And it looks like we're just kind of rounding up the hour now. So please get in touch if you have any other questions and really look forward to engaging with you all further. Thank you so much.