Posts Tagged ‘Development’ Blog Index

• A performance appraisal is done twice a year for feedback
• Provides a chance for development and planning
• Facilitates communication between employee and manager
• The performance appraisal forms a basis for personnel decisions
• 1:1 review discussions and goal setting

Doing a performance appraisal

A performance appraisal is a part of guiding and managing career development. The performance appraisal is an analysis of an employee’s recent successes and failures, personal strengths and weaknesses, and suitability for promotion or further training. It is also the judgment of an employee’s performance in a job based on considerations other than productivity alone.

Performance appraisal chaos or smooth sailing with Rypple?

This seems like an easy answer, Rypple! But there are still many companies out there who spends days on preparing for a performance appraisal that isn’t even helpful to the employee.

If the intent of the performance appraisal is learning and this is not going to happen when the context of the dialogue is evaluation and judgment. Should you wait 6 months to have a 1:1 conversation with your manager? Employees need feedback constantly if improvement is in mind.

Rypple: the new way

Rypple is a tool to help you get rid of the annual performance appraisal. It makes it easier for employees and managers to communicate and develop:

• Constant communication. Rypple provides a simple way to continuous communication. Having 1:1 talk with your manager once a year is not good enough.
• Tracking actions. Using the tracking and reporting aspect of Rypple allows managers and employees to easily keep track of actions and tasks throughout the year.
• Collaboration. Making actions public allows managers to see what the team is working on. This makes it easy when it comes time for a review (for people who still feel the need for a performance appraisal)
• Coaching and mentoring. Coaching and mentoring with Rypple allows managers and employees to communicate easily. Have no surprises on a performance appraisal – give feedback when needed – don’t batch up what needs to be said.
• Rapid 360 feedback. Managers and employees are able to get anonymous feedback from everyone around them using Rypple’s peer review feature.
• Improve. Rypple makes it easier for peers to uncover their blind spots and improve on what they are already great at with meaningful feedback from colleagues.

Get Started with Rypple

Rypple is easy: no more wasted hours on an annual performance appraisal – give continuous feedback throughout the year. Rypple is a simple way to improve faster in your business with ongoing feedback. Join leading business thinkers like Marshall Goldsmith, Steven Miles and Don Tapscott. Sign up for Rypple today.

Tags: communication, Development, doing a performance appraisal, Feedback, performance appraisal, Rypple, what is a performance appraisal

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• Give employees feedback during performance appraisals
• Improve overall performance
• Identify employee training needs
• Opportunity for organizational diagnosis and development
• Set future goals during performance appraisals

What are performance appraisals?

Performance appraisals are a process by which the job performance of an employee is evaluated (usually in terms of quality, quantity, cost, and time) typically by the corresponding manager or supervisor. performance appraisals are part of guiding and managing career development.

The most significant benefit of appraisal is that, in the rush and bustle of daily working life, it offers a rare chance for a supervisor and subordinate to have “time out” for a one-on-one discussion of important work issues that might not otherwise be addressed. They are often tied to pay-for-performance and help to determine the compensation for employees.

Downside to performance appraisals

Performance appraisals are a fixture of the modern workplace. There’s a growing movement to supplement them with continuous feedback throughout the year — or even to eliminate them entirely. Here’s why:

• Expensive and inefficient. Performance appraisals are a costly, slow, batch process that can only happen once or twice a year because of the enormous time and cost involved.
• Too infrequent to improve performance. Getting feedback at annual performance appraisals doesn’t help employees actually improve performance. Their infrequency results in having to tackle large course corrections instead of small re-alignments.
• Focused on the past, not the future. Annual performance appraisals focus on feedback from the last twelve months and how it impacts compensation. Employees need feedforward — or future looking advice — in order to improve.
• Suffers from the recency effect. Managers only report on the last few months of work that they can remember, not the full picture of the last year.

Rypple: better than performance appraisals

• Constant communication. Rypple provides a simple way to continuous communication.
• Tracking actions. Using the tracking and reporting aspect of Rypple allows managers and employees to easily keep track of actions and tasks completed throughout the year.
• Collaboration. Making actions public allows managers to see what the team is working on. This makes it easy when it comes time for a review.
• Coaching and mentoring. Coaching and mentoring with Rypple allows managers and employees to communicate easily. Have no surprises on a performance appraisals – give feedback when needed – don’t batch up what you want to say.
• Rapid 360 feedback. Managers and employees are able to get anonymous feedback from everyone around them using Rypple’s Peer Review feature.
• Improve. Rypple makes it easier for peers to uncover their blind spots and improve on what they are already great at with meaningful feedback from colleagues.

Get Started with Rypple

Rypple is easy: communicate, track and record for easier performance appraisals. Rypple is a simple way to improve faster in your business with ongoing performance appraisals. Join leading business thinkers like Marshall Goldsmith, Steven Miles and Don Tapscott. Sign up for Rypple today.

Tags: Development, Feedback, goals, How to, HR, overall performance, performance, Performance appraisals, Performance Reviews, Rypple, training

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How much do you value feedback? Would you leave a job because you don’t get enough of it? David Simms, in Emerging Nonprofit Leaders: “More Feedback, Please”, uncovered some interesting insights into how important a culture that encourages feedback really is. David attended the Independent Sector’s annual conference, where he engaged 200 next generation nonprofit leaders in a group conversation. He discovered that most of the group planned to stay in their current organization for at least the next three years, but almost all said they would be gone in 10 years.

Why?

Because of an organizational culture that does not recognize the value of feedback:

What these young leaders recognized is that without candid feedback, both praise and developmental in nature, we deprive our teams, our organizations, and ourselves of the information needed to get better.

The fact that these young leader are willing to leave an organization because of a lack of a feedback culture has some interesting implications. It demonstrates just how crucial a culture that encourages learning and development is for keeping and acquiring the most driven people. As more of the next generation start to fill management roles, it will be interesting to see how corporate culture shifts towards one of feedback and development. Would you leave a job if you didn’t feel like you were getting enough feedback?

Tags: David Simms, Development, execution, Feedback, Harvard Business Publishing, next generation, performance, Rypple

Community Marketing

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With my new beard and my kid’s drawings over my shoulder, I’ve finally crafted the first of what I hope will be many Rypple video blogs!

In our first installment I build off of a concept discussed at the end a recent blog on how to use Rypple to engage your clients.

The technique I mention here, know as the “signature hook”, is something I’ve seen a number of Rypple users do lately and it’s so awesome I just had to share it. After watching the video, if you’d like to try the technique for yourself, I’ve included the instructions at the bottom. Enjoy…and long live Chuck Norris!

Instructions on how to create your own “signature hook”:

1. Login to your Rypple acount (or click HERE to get one)

2. Start typing your “signature hook” question in the feedback box (see video for ideas).

3. Edit the custom URL (for instance, “howsmydriving”) for your question and click “Ask Now”

4. Paste the URL into your email signature

Tags: chuck, customers, Development, email, engagement, execution, Feedback, norris, performance, Rypple, signature

Product & Community

33460 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Fthe-signature-hook%2FFirst+Video+Blog%3A+The+Signature+Hook2009-11-16+15%3A02%3A42David+Priemerhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2F%3Fp%3D3346

Rypple is a product oriented company so it’s essential to get people excited about our product. We are also often praised for our customer service. Is it possible to maintain this high level of user satisfaction with both our customer service and product quality? Can a company, especially during its early stages, afford to focus on both of these battleground? Here at Rypple, we believe we can do both.

Zappos is a great example of a customer service driven company. They rely on other companies for products they sell but Zappos customers can call them at any time and they will experience a friendly, expedient, and efficient service. Not to mention their unmatched free shipping and free 365-day return policy. On the other hand, have you tried calling Google after your Gmail inbox became sluggish? Gmail became the fastest growing online email offering because it simply beat the competition by its unmatched performance, simplicity, and massive storage. Unless you pay for the corporate edition, however, you will have a hard time reaching their representatives over the phone.

I’d like to share a personal story to show you how we at Rypple imagine offering a great customer service while building the best product.

I joined Rypple in May 2008. One of the first features I implemented was an AJAX-based auto-complete widget. It was an elegant solution that performed admirably during my benchmark testing. I was proud of it! We wanted to prove our design quickly so we immediately got it out to our alpha user base. The following day I heard that an executive at our alpha site could not use my widget at all. You can imagine my utter disbelief and embarrassment. So, my first customer support call at Rypple was directly with this executive. I apologized and tried to understand what happened. I listened. And I discovered that I did not handle a simple copy and paste use case properly. Doh! I learned plenty of other things, too. After the call, I summarized what I’d heard and explicitly outlined follow-up action items. I emailed those to my team and the concerned party. The next day I released a fix for what seemed like a blunder in hindsight.

That insight has taught us a number of lessons:

I kept reaching out to our alpha users every day. I would set aside time every morning to reach out to all alpha users who had used our service the day before. We made sure all developers did this. We listened. We showed that we cared. We learned to move our developer egos out of the way.
• The most important lessons came when we tried to understand what went wrong. We started improving quickly. We completely revamped our architecture, front-end design, and our overall service offering in the following months. This culminated in Rypple’s launch in less than 6 months after I joined the company. It proved our product decisions were dead-on.
• We were guided by what we learned through customer service. Talk about a cheap way to perform user-centered design!

We are a young company with a novel product idea. We still have a long way to go before Rypple becomes a great and lasting success. This is why we welcome your feedback! Because, after all, …

A little feedback goes a long way.

(Don’t forget that you can connect with us using our Get Satisfaction forum, email us at support@rypple.com or call us at 1-888-iRYPPLE.)

Tags: agile learning process, AJAX, alpha product, benchmark testing, customer service, developer ego, Development, Get Satisfaction, Gmail, Google, lessons learned, quality, release cycle, UCD, Zappos

Development, author of onebookaweek.com

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Cool updates to share with you this week: You can now tag your groups and your TouchBase actions with skills.

We’ve got Skills

When you create a group, tag it with the skills you want the group to help you develop. Here’s why: When you go to ask a question to the group, Rypple will suggest questions relevant to the skills you tagged your group with. Don’t forget to add skills to your existing groups.

For premium users, TouchBase has got skills too. When you and your manager are choosing the three specific actions you’re going to complete, tag your actions with skills. Just like your groups, Rypple will suggest questions based on those skills. This will help you ask the right questions so you get the right feedback to complete your actions!

Stay tuned for next weeks notes. Same bat channel, same bat time!

Tags: agile, bottom-up, change, Development, kaizen, learning, lessons, Release Notes, User Experience

Community Marketing

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Another busy week! Three cool new features to tell you about: Share your feedback with your advisers when you take action, edit and delete plans, and the new feedback box

Take Action and Share your Feedback

When you take action, you can now share the feedback you’ve received with your advisers. This is a great way to show your advisers why you’re taking a particular action. Rypple will send your advisers an email with the shared feedback and the action you’re taking, and it will also appear in their feed. Sharing your feedback is also a great way to help your advisers learn and benefit. So the next time you respond to a feedback request and you think “that was a great question, I should ask that” you may learn the results without having to ask it yourself!

Edit Your Plans

Just last week, we launched Feedback Plans. A plan is a series of Rypple questions, curated by your fellow users and designed to guide your personal development efforts with the click of a button. Based on user feedback, we’ve iterated quickly and added the ability to edit the plans you create. This allows you to add or remove questions after you’ve created and committed to your plan.

Feedback Box

Many users have told us that it would be awesome if they could collect feedback from their website or blog. The new feedback box allows you to get feedback right on your website without needing a forum or a comment section. If you want to give it a try for yourself all you have to do is:

1. Sign up for a free Rypple account here (or login if you already have one)
2. Ask a question and select the “Create a widget to embed” option
3. Copy the widget code into your site (but don’t forget to click the “Ask Now” button before you do)

Check out Austin Tam’s post “Get Your Own Feedback Box” to learn more and see who else is using it.

Tags: agile, change, Development, Feedback, kaizen, learning, New Features, process, product, reflection, Release Notes, Rypple, usability, User Experience

Community Marketing

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The Web Designer Depot published an interesting post a few days ago called In Defense of The Jack of All Trades by Mindy Wagner. I found the post very interesting, because personally, I’ve being thinking about a generalist vs. specialist.

I think the Rypple team is a great example of perfect generalists because our skills all extend outside of our specific roles.

To really be successful, I suggest you strike a balance between generalist and specialist.

Be really great at one thing, but decently good at several other things related to it. Be a great designer with a solid background in user experience and SEO, or a fantastic front end dev who can do light backend coding and pull together a decent layout.

Your primary work will improve because of the secondary knowledge you pick up. And whether you freelance or work for a company, you will be a more valuable resource.

Go beyond “enough to be dangerous”. Know enough to talk fluently with someone who is a specialist in that area. This way you will be able to identify problems, taking care of minor ones and communicating bigger issues to the right specialists. You can be the person who sees the big picture and understands how all the parts interrelate.

Recently with the new design of Rypple, the whole team was involved in the design process. Everyone brought different skills to the table, and it ultimately made the process very smooth. Many members of the team made their own mockups of what they wanted the design to look like. We had everything from Photoshop mockups to sketches on the back of napkins. The generalist approach worked amazingly.

You can read the rest of the post on The Web Designer Depot.

Tags: design, Development, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, generalist, Jack of All Trades, jordan satok, knowledge, Mindy Wager, Rypple, specialist, success, team, Web Designer Depot

Marketing

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It goes without saying that learning, in all its many forms, is the key to staying ahead. Learning what’s working, what’s not, how to fix things, and so on. In a classic HBR article from 1994 titled “Good Communication that Blocks Learning“, Chris Argyris provides some ideas on how people within organizations can learn more effectively. He shows how “double-loop learning” (where you ask follow up questions to get at what lies beneath the surface) is a better way to learn, and how “good” communication (not being entirely honest in the interests of being polite or not rocking the boat) gets in the way (despite it generally being well-meaning)! In addition to getting into the habit of asking followup questions, and encouraging honest responses, you can also use Rypple to help you ask followup questions, and help your team provide you with honest responses.

Chris first wrote about double-loop learning in the mid-seventies. He’d observed how people within companies typically engage in single-loop learning, where they’d ask one dimensional questions to uncover one dimensional answers. Rarely did people probe beneath the surface with followup questions to uncover the reasons, motives, and so on. His favourite example is that of a thermostat which simply asks, “Are we at the preset temperature?” (single loop learning), and never asks the followup questions, “What is the appropriate temperature?” “Are we using the right source?”, “Are we adjusting in the right way?” and so on.

An example of single v. double loop learning in a software development process. Let’s say that your team decides to “clean up” your app, does some extensive testing, discovers a series of bugs, comes up with fixes, and implements the fixes. If you stop here, satisfied with the newly fixed code, then you’ve demonstrated single-loop learning. If you then dig deeper and ask, “Why did these bugs occur?” “Are the tests the right tests?” “Are we setting out to test in the right way?” and so on, then you’ve demonstrated double-loop learning. The former is good enough, but the latter is what helps you leap-frog the competition. If you’re only ever asking the former question, then problems may fester for far too long, and be more expensive or difficult to fix down the road.

However, double-loop learning does not always occur within teams. Why? Chris says there’s a social and a psychological reason for this. Socially, most of us hate to be the one that opens Pandora’s Box, rocks the boat, or comes across as negative. Instead, we’re encouraged to think positively, motivate others, be considerate of others’ feelings, etc. While being positive is great, in some situations, it can dramatically hurt your team. The psychological reason that blocks double-loop learning is that whenever a problem involves a threat or embarrassment, we take of our objective/rigorous reasoning hat, and instead engage in defensive reasoning – essentially justifying our actions or blaming others, rather than objectively looking at problems and solutions.

So next time you face a problem, don’t be afraid to dig deeper. The problem you face may just be a symptom of deeper problems. Ask followup questions.

And encourage those around you to be honest. Let them know that you’re not going to hold it against them for being honest. If your team is hesitant to be entirely honest for fear of not being polite/considerate/rocking the boat/you name it, try using Rypple to gather anonymous responses from your team (and of course, once you get feedback, ask follow up questions). People tend to be honest when they use Rypple since the anonymity helps people avoid being seen as too negative or as rocking the boat. And since the feedback can only be seen by the person asking the question, there is less embarrassment involved. We’ve also seen another benefit in several companies. Teams that start using Rypple find that people feel more comfortable giving honest face-to-face feedback! And when that happens, then you can be sure that you and your team will be learning a lot more effectively than before.

Tags: Chris Argyris, constructive feedback, decision support, Development, feedback is fundamental, habits, learning, lessons, office environment, People, professional development, Questions, reflection

George Babu is responsible for Corporate Development and IP at Rypple. Prior to joining Rypple, George spent the last several years working on a variety of technology and intellectual property-related projects with both Research in Motion (RIM) and Bereskin & Parr, one of Canada's leading IP law firms. George holds B.A.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering and is currently completing his JD and MBA degrees, all at the University of Toronto. Given all that's on his plate, George doesn't sleep all that much!

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Yesterday, our co-CEOs Daniel and David demoed the new version of Rypple at HR Tech. It was a great success! Thank you to everyone who was at the demo or gave great shout outs over Twitter. Stay tuned for the full details about our trip to HR Tech in upcoming posts.

Over the past week we made some big changes to get the new version of  Rypple ready for the big demo. All the features that make Rypple great can now be found on three simple pages: Feedback, Plans and Questions, and My Advisers.

Rypple’s New Look

We’ve changed the design of Rypple, and we think it looks great. It’s crisp, clean, and much easier to navigate!

Feedback

Rypple is all about getting actionable feedback from groups of people who you know. So, we re-thought Rypple to make these groups central to your experience. Your Feedback page is where you create new groups, manage existing ones, see the plans you’re doing with each group, and review the feedback you’ve received.

Plans and Questions

A Feedback Plan provides helpful structure and guidance as you strive to improve. A plan is a series of Rypple questions, curated by your fellow users and designed to get you on the right track with the click of a button. Think of plans as feedback workouts assembled by the world’s best personal trainers. We’re building communities around these plans, and we’re looking for community leaders who’d like to share their insights and help create more plans. If you’d like to get involved, leave a comment below.

My Advisers

Your My Advisers page is, well, a list of your advisers (we told you that we were making Rypple simple!). The new design of this page makes it’s much easier to sort through your contacts and find who you’re looking for. You can import all your contacts at once from Gmail, Yahoo, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Vcard or you can pick specific people by adding there email address manually.

my

BIG changes this week, and BIG plans for the future. We are constantly trying to improve by learning from what we’ve already done. So, what do you think of the new look and functionality of Rypple? Stay tuned for next weeks notes! Same bat channel, same bat time.

Tags: agile, bottom-up, Development, Features, lessons, process, product, Release Notes, usability

Community Marketing

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