Create a fair evaluation system
When Ubbing decided that she wanted a more collaborative culture, she quickly ran into a problem: She wanted ways to evaluate people on that without bringing out a discipline stick.
“We look to really make a change in what we’re doing so that our employees in the future will be much more focused toward employee effectiveness than toward employee discipline,” she says.
So, while it took some tweaking, FMC now uses 360-degree peer evaluations that gauge collaboration, using input from people’s immediate peers. To give a fuller perspective, the system allows departments to evaluate co-workers from other departments through in-house customer surveys. Finally, to respond to employees who complained that they didn’t get to comment on their bosses, people get to review their immediate supervisors with the next boss up the chain. It’s an honest look in the mirror, which means FMC had to realize sometimes the finger of blame was pointed back at management.
“At the management level, I’ve seen some eyes opened, and I’ve seen some people really change as a result of what they heard,” Ubbing says. “If you’re emphasizing teamwork and working collaboratively, you have to know that. That’s a message you may not want to hear, but it’s an essential message.”
The essential part of that has been a better look at external and internal things people handle daily.
“You don’t do it with the idea of terminating somebody, but, ‘OK, what do I do with this to help them,’ and in a couple of cases, we found a situation where people were simply overwhelmed,” she says. “They were stretched too thin; we were taking advantage of them.”
When you’re doing such evaluations, Ubbing warns that your default setting has to change to thinking that flawed internal systems may be more of the problem than the person.
“If they’ve been there for a while, ask what’s going on, where are the barriers,” Ubbing says. “You work together to solve the problem instead of replacing the problem and perpetuating it and bringing someone in who is set up to fail as well.”
To Ubbing, it’s also worth spending the extra time to correct small things that come back from evaluations instead of starting over with an area of your business that may have an internal flaw.
“Frankly, we spend about 52 percent of our budget on human resources,” she says. “The investment in your people and the development of your people has to be a huge priority, that’s where your money’s going. If it wasn’t a huge priority, why would you let the money go there?”
So as part of a more fair evaluation process, FMC has changed the way it deals with employee difficulties.
“The first step is to have an honest conversation,” Ubbing says. “So often a high-achieving employee will be reluctant to say, ‘Hey, I’m in over my head.’ Sometimes you have to do an intervention to get there. Usually, you become aware when things just don’t match up. You know that they’re a really good employee and yet you’ve got these indicators of deadlines missed, poor employee satisfaction. … If you look to that and say, ‘What can I do to help,’ as opposed to, ‘You need to be replaced,’ you’re in a whole different world.”
With all of this openness comes the obvious caveat that crimes against professionalism must still be handled quickly.
“You falsify a record, you steal something from us … there are still things that will lead to termination or, as the new expression is, help you park your car at home,” she says.
And, while you have to give people a chance to step out from under a stressful situation, you have to make them realize there are limits to the help you can give them.
“That’s the best thing I know to do, be available and being accessible,” Ubbing says. “When someone comes to me with a problem, a need, whatever it is, saying, ‘OK, this is what I can do,’ and it may not always be what they want me to do. But saying, ‘This is what I can do, this is approximately when I can have it done, this is how I’ll let you know when this is accomplished,’ or, ‘This is who you’re going to hear from next on this.’ And tell them like it is — don’t sugarcoat it. I’m a little bit blunt, and you build trust over time when you don’t try to sugarcoat things that don’t deserve to be sugarcoated.”