E-Performance Essentials
By Tony Karrer and Elizabeth Gardner

Businesses are under pressure to prove performance. However, line of business managers and workplace learning and performance professionals tend to rely on the same tools and techniques that they've been using for years. Opportunities and easy wins are frequently overlooked. What can we do when a fast turn-around is required but typical interventions take time to implement?

Since March 2003, TechEmpower has talked to approximately150 line managers and senior HR, OD, and T&D practitioners at some 50 companies with more than US$1Billion in revenue and 1,500+ employees. What we heard wasn't surprising. Nearly every company is changing rapidly. Business models that once held for 20 years, now work for three. The reasons are numerous. Companies are shifting from product-centric models to customer-centric models. They're defining new customer segments. They feel that they have little pricing power. Competition is increasing from a variety of insurgents. The global economy offers both opportunity and new competition. Costs need to be squeezed out. The list goes on.

The point: Managers in these organizations are feeling the heat. Probe a bit further and their biggest concern soon emerges: They need to be able to execute-quickly. Training professionals understand that the biggest barrier to execution is the performance of their people. But how do you meet performance challenges head-on? How do you go from strategy to human performance-at all levels of the organization-rapidly and repeatedly? 

Enter e-performance. Practitioners need to find fast solutions, and technology can help-especially if we broaden our ideas about where and how to use it. "Clearly the world is moving at a faster pace. We need to use multiple channels to provide information and development opportunities faster. We can't depend on people coming together and so online systems have to be central to how you think about solutions," says Ken Goldstein, director of management development at Mattel.

Unfortunately, most organizations take a very narrow view of the possibilities offered by technology. They see it as a way to support performance reviews, employee tracking, or distance learning. In other words, they want to use technology to support the way things are already being done. Organizations ask the wrong question: How can we automate our performance review process? They should ask: How can we use technology to improve the process? 

Defining e-performance
Before you can think of new ways to use technology to support performance, you need to understand the meaning of e-performance. TechEmpower uses the following definitions: 

ePerformance: Improving individual performance by leveraging technology

ePerformance = eDevelopment + eInteraction + eSupport

At the highest level, e-performance has the following elements.
  
E-Development
   Performance reviews
   Development plans
   Virtual classrooms
   Self-paced online learning
   Informal learning
E-Interaction  
   1-to-1 (e-mail)
   Online communities
   Threaded discussions
   Communication templates
E-Support  
  Tools and job aids
   Resources
   Knowledge bases
   Search capability

E-development encompasses technologies, interactive models, and tools aimed at online learning and development activities. Some examples include
* Online performance reviews. Most performance reviews capture the feedback of a single person, but e-performance enables multiple input sources, workflow between different parties, and so forth. This change makes for a broader, richer review.
* Online development plans. A common outcome of a performance review or other intervention, online development plans identify development activities, associated resources, and time frames that outline and support concrete action for the employee. An online development plan includes mechanisms for automatic reminders and other follow-up tools to keep the employee on track.

E-interaction encompasses technologies, interactive models, and tools that allow interaction between workers. Email, of course, is by far the most common application. But don't overlook the value of email tools because it's easy to use. For instance, using templates allowed one user to easily send emails to her manager requesting help with specific parts of the development plan.

E-support encompasses technologies, interactive models, and tools that provide help with specific tasks. For example, an online job aid might be in the form of a checklist that defines the individual steps of a certain task. The tool might include automatic reminders, prompting the user to complete a task by a certain date.

These tools and techniques aren't new or revolutionary. But consider how you can apply them in new ways at your organization.
   * Are job competencies in your organization linked to online resources and activities so employees can help themselves to suggested development opportunities?
   * Can employees access tools and best-practice behaviors online or do they reinvent the wheel every time they prepare a meeting agenda or status report?
   * Do employees participate in virtual lunchtime seminars with peers, SMEs, managers, or leaders?
   * Do you use online surveys and assessments to direct activity, collect best practices, identify barriers, and provide metrics?
   * Do you use technology where it has been very successful to precede events, such as sales meetings; to follow up events, such as performance reviews, learning events, and action planning with reminders or surveys; and to increase the frequency of events with, for example, a quarterly refresh of performance reviews?

In our interviews, we were surprised by how few organizations could answer yes to more than one of these questions. Several answered no to all of them. 

Looking for quick wins

Although suppliers talk about vision in terms of human capital management, less than 5 percent of the people we interviewed had a big picture view of how to approach e-performance. But success doesn't need to rely on a single, holistic approach. Instead, point solutions seem better suited to current business environments, mainly because you can develop and implement them quickly-sometimes using technologies that you already have. While this portends integration issues downstream, it allows you to go ahead and do something rather than waiting for a future total solution that may never exist. The key is to find quick, targeted wins.

Reprinted from Learning Circuits, published by ASTD

Tony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower. Elizabeth Gardner is e-training and e-support developer for TechEmpower. Contact them at www.techempower.com. If you have examples you'd like to share, please contact the authors at akarrer@techempower.com.