The revamped site (www.sprigghr.com) is in keeping with our simple, accessible and unassuming brand. It welcomes visitors with elegant colours and a clean, user-friendly design. The content of the latest version of the performance management website focuses on our mission to provide our clients, HR professionals and small and medium business leaders with value, passion, and expertise.

The new site is fully responsive and fits all types of browser resolutions. It also has a touch-friendly mobile and tablet navigation menu.

Even more HR content

In addition to showing the benefits of Sprigg’s performance software, the new site offers an enhanced blog where you will find a huge resource of information and advice: blog.sprigghr.com/blog

Blog topics include helpful tips on how to get more from your Sprigg user experience including: the latest HR technology news, opinion and developments, employee development, coaching and learning opportunities, team planning and goals, employee engagement, feedback and recognition, team dynamics and much more to help you inspire your employees and get the most from your workforce.

The launch of the new website comes hot on the heels of some big changes to Sprigg’s performance management SaaS platform – offering lots of additional features and an even more intuitive user interface.

Using the Sprigg cloud-hosted platform, companies eliminate paperwork hassles, increase employee productivity, optimize compensation by promoting a pay for performance culture, and ultimately improve the bottom line.

The Sprigg online performance review software platform offers businesses simple, affordable ways to:

1) Establish clear, consistent goal setting
2) Conduct performance evaluations your way with a fully customized interface
3) Create just-in-time feedback loops and folders amongst leaders and staff
4) Book meetings with full calendar integration
5) Link development planning efforts to competencies

Sign up for a demo to learn more.

The post New Look Sprigg Website Launched! appeared first on SpriggHR.

Five basic factors in developing performance-oriented, goal-driven work culture to put your corporate ship sailing in the right direction, at maximum speed and with all hands are on deck.

1: It is no secret! Transparency is important

While respecting the confines of what you are able to reveal, it can be very motivational for employees when they feel ‘in the loop’. By sharing more KPIs and targets with employees, you can increase their sense of ownership. While administrators can choose what types of information and goals are communicated, the Sprigg performance management software was designed with open dialogue in mind.

2: Get engaged and live happily every after

We talk A LOT about engagement at Sprigg. That’s not because we’re obsessed with wedlock but because we believe the other kind of engagement is fundamental to performance. Simply put, employees who are engaged are happier and so tend to put their all into their job. Often they even have the drive to give more than is required because they feel that they work in a company which they related to and, hopeful recognizes their successes.

3: Paint a picture with words

Motivating employees and keeping them connected with values and objectives is an art form. The leaders must be able use stories to motivate their employees to achieve more than they thought possible.

4: Talk to your people and check that they heard correctly

Internal communication is fundamentally important to fostering a culture of performance. Have they heard the message? Do they believe it? Do they know what it means? Have they interpreted it for themselves, and have they internalized it? Don’t be afraid to try different types of communication (while being sensitive to the content). Lots of our happy customers mix up their communication channels to encourage ongoing social dialogue.

5: Is that an achievement ahead? Lets Party!

Celebrate milestones when they are reached. Acknowledging and rewarding an employee’s achievements can boost morale and strengthen momentum. This is an old practice within certain departments (such as Sales) and there are lots of ways to roll out a culture of recognition to all areas of the company.

First Published In:

Missed Part One? Read it here.

Want to learn more? Contact Jilaine at jparkes@sprigghr.com or call her on 888-797-5583.

About The Author: Jilaine Parkes

Jilaine Parkes is a knowledgeable and passionate HR / Organization Development Professional with nearly 25 years combined experience in large, dynamic organizations and independent HR / OD Consulting. While holding senior HR management positions in Bombardier, Kraft Foods, Canadian Tire, Lavalife and Cineplex Entertainment, including a one year stint in Prague, Czech Republic, Jilaine has designed and driven initiatives in Business Planning, Leadership Development, Employee Development, Succession Planning, Performance Management, Learning & Growth Strategy and Team Chartering.

The post 10 Steps to Creating and Developing a Corporate Culture of Excellence: Part Two appeared first on SpriggHR.

Stay Focused on Team Goals

Who would want to play a game if how to score or make points was not clear? There would be no purpose and therefore no motivation and certainly no fun in the game. In a work environment people also have to know what constitutes a score.

We often hear frustrated leaders say something like, “some of my team members complain that our direction is not clear but I talked about our goals at our meeting last month.” Goals must be kept in front of people, not just referred to sporadically. Keeping your team’s goals in front of them throughout the summer is key to ensuring that momentum and motivation are maintained.

Try these tips:

1. Within the next 30 seconds describe what success looks like for your team.  If you can’t do it chances are your team can’t either.  If you are not able to, it is critical that you immediately spend some time drawing a clear picture of success.
2. Write a one-line success statement clearly describing the goal your team is working towards. Share your success statement with the team. Before doing so you might invite team members to write a statement and then compare notes.  Either way, enlist your team members’ commitment to using the success statement as a measuring stick for every decision and action.
3. At your next team meeting invite your team members to identify three factors most critical to the team’s success. Engaging your team in these types of discussions is essential to creating team energy and commitment to the team’s goals.
4. When did you last talk about your team’s vision, values, and goals with the people you lead? The answer you are looking for is “Today”.

Got questions? Contact Nicole to learn more.

The post Nicole Bendaly: Get Ready for Higher Performance by Staying Focused on Team Goals appeared first on SpriggHR.

There are 10 common steps which most of our customers find helps grow a performance-focused culture.

Let’s consider the first five:

1. Clearly define what you consider to be success:

Define what moderate and best-case success looks like from a variety of perspectives – sales, marketing, customer service, finance, operations and so on.

2. Communicate vision and values

From the top-down, your company should communicate a vision and with the help of HR, the picture of the culture they are striving for. The cascading of visions and values in a small or medium sized business can often be a faster process than within larger, less agile companies. We recommend documenting your visions as part of a charter or mandate.
By going beyond guiding principles or values and drilling down to identify behaviors that support these values your company will be able to create the foundations of a charter to guide your path towards a performance culture.

Things to consider include:

What areas of our current culture do we think actually works? What preferred behaviors do we need to be able to produce the culture we want? What activities currently get rewarded? Which unacceptable behaviors are currently tolerated? How do we measure up against each of our preferred behaviors? How can we continue to monitor and measure performance?

3. Set big targets but be careful not to push too hard!

Our customers often find that their employees tend to rise to the standard set for them. The more you expect, the more they will achieve. There is, however, a fine line between good ‘stretch’ targets, which can energize an organization, and bad ones, which can dampen morale and have an adverse effect on productivity.

4. Help your people appreciate how they contribute to the ‘Big Picture’

Regardless of the level and role of the employee, he or she should be able to understand and express how their efforts feed into the broader company strategy.

Employees who don’t understand the roles they play in company success are more likely to become disengaged.

Most employees want to be a part of a compelling future, want to know what is most important at work and what excellence looks like in the eyes of management. For targets to be meaningful and effective in motivating employees, they should be connected to larger organizational ambitions.

5. Create and nurture a mindset of ownership

Encouraging your employees think and act like an “owner” of their projects helps them feel empowered with the freedom to decide and act. We find that not only does this support efforts to ensure accountability, it is a great approach to identify and develop your companies top performers!

 First published in:

In We have worked with various large hotels and conference centers and help our customers find easy ways to keep constantly changing conference and expo information up to date The team at digitalsignagetoday.com put it well when they explain: the signs also are highly effective as wayfinding tools to offer guidance to large groups of people in the right direction.”>10 Steps to Creating and Developing a Corporate Culture of Excellence: Part Two,  we will check out the second five tips to grow your company through developing a performance-orientated approach.

Want to learn more? Contact Jilaine at jparkes@sprigghr.com call her on 888-797-5583

About The Author: Jilaine Parkes

Jilaine Parkes is a knowledgeable and passionate HR / Organization Development Professional with nearly 25 years combined experience in large, dynamic organizations and independent HR / OD Consulting. While holding senior HR management positions in Bombardier, Kraft Foods, Canadian Tire, Lavalife and Cineplex Entertainment, including a one year stint in Prague, Czech Republic, Jilaine has designed and driven initiatives in Business Planning, Leadership Development, Employee Development, Succession Planning, Performance Management, Learning & Growth Strategy and Team Chartering.

The post 10 Steps to Creating and Developing a Corporate Culture of Excellence: Part One appeared first on SpriggHR.

Employees are leaving companies because they do not feel valued or are not aligned with the company’s vision and values. There is no connection between them and the organization.

The average worker stays in each job for 4.4 years. A recent Forbes’ article suggests that the new wave of Generation Y workers entering the workforce will cause this to drop – staying in a job for less than 3 years! 

This presents a huge problem for companies who invest heavily in developing their staff to perform only to see them jump ship.

Your performance management system is fundamental to the success of your organization. By revamping your performance management system to focus more on alignment of objectives and career development, you can benefit from:

1. Positive employee engagement
2. Higher performance from employees
3. Clearer communication within the organization regarding company’s core values and vision

Traditionally, annual performance appraisals have been a big factor in the inability of companies to retain their top performers.

Using outdated and inaccurate performance metrics and processes perpetuates the disjoint between the ambitious employee and corporate objectives. Today, companies are looking for social, agile, and collaborative ways to make performance reviews more inclusive and beneficial for all.

Using the right tools, however, can counteract the following contributing factors to losing your employees:

• Weak alignment: As companies grow, it becomes harder to make sure that every employee understands how their jobs are aligned with what the organization wants to achieve.

• Low performing employees: Managers are having a hard time identifying who needs support in order to help low performing employees achieve their potential. Low performing employees do not know who to turn to in order to receive feedback on how to improve.

• Presenteeism: If the right tools are not in place, employees do not know what they need to focus on. This can create a culture of presenteeism; whereby employees are almost blindly performing duties without proper focus and at much lower than expected levels of productivity.

Contact Sprigg to learn more about better ways to to inspire, retain and engage with your team and help grow your bottom line.

The post Higher Employee Engagement Through Fresh Performance Management Practices appeared first on SpriggHR.

With the Sprigg performance management software HR departments, managers and employees can easily:

* Create goals, evaluate performance and build development plans (and more)
* Save time – at least 50 hours per year for each manager with 10 employees
* Identity top performers, high potential and retention risks
* Monitor progress and alignment of goals with real metrics
* Create better collaboration through social tools
* Keep it simple – it really does not need to be a headache!

We will show you how easy this can be AND if you commit by December 31st, 2014 (you don’t have to implement by then, we will work with you on your timelines) we will waive the site set up fee plus provide up to two FREE online training sessions.*

Sign up for a demonstration today – it takes 20 minutes.

Book a personal demo of Sprigg today and see how easily you can produce the strategic reports and metrics your organization needs to effectively manage talent and drive profits.

The post PERFORMANCE REVIEWS.. ARE YOU STILL USING PAPER, OR WORSE, NOTHING AT ALL? appeared first on SpriggHR.

Okay, so that probably sounds a little predictable from a company which offers talent management training and software but we believe that the facts speak for themselves.

Here are just a few recent studies that highlight the importance for CEOs and Senior management to embrace the benefits of better talent management:

1. Stanford professors O’Reilly and Pfeffer suggested that a change of one standard deviation in an index of human resource management practices could produce increases of $20 000 to $40 000 in stock market value per employee.
2. According to McKinsey’s War for Talent studies, companies with strong talent practices generally outperform their peer group, earning 22 percent higher shareholder returns.
3. Watson Wyatt, using its human capital index, found that optimized performance management and employee development can grow a company’s value by as much as 30 percent.

The post Talent Management: Giving Business Leaders a Competitive Advantage appeared first on SpriggHR.

The short tutorials include: Conducting a performance review, Employee Home Page Tour, Manager Homepage Tour, Goal Setting and How to Conduct a 360 Feedback Review.

Check out the full list of new videos here.

Here’s just one of more than 15 new videos to help you use the easy features in Sprigg:

The post Sprigg Launches Series of New Video Tutorials appeared first on SpriggHR.

Sprigg Talent Management Solutions – Simple, Intuitive, Mobile Friendly & Cloud-Based Talent Management Software

One of the core functions within human resources is performance management.  The idea is relatively simple.  HR possesses the expertise to support the organization; people managers, executives and employees to improve individual and collective performance.  This is not a new concept at all.  The big questions is, “have we as an HR profession figured out how to do this well”?  As an HR practitioner with more than 13 years of direct HR experience working with a variety of small to large organizations I would say, “no”.

For many HR practitioners a typical performance management system is loaded with processes, documents, guidelines, rules, forms and anything else you can think of.  This exists because of our desire to be fair and equitable, be legislatively compliant and reports.  Ask yourself this question.  Have these traditional systems and processes successfully boosted employee performance?  The answer is clear, “N. O.”  These systems are typically complex and focused on promoting the wrong behaviour, all misaligned with improving performance.  Ideally they may make sense but practically they don’t.

Enter Sprigg Talent Management Systems

I have been following Sprigg Talent Management Solutions for a couple of years now and have been impressed with their platform, simply because it has a fantastic and easy-to-use interface, its set of core features are ones that HR actually needs (unlike other platforms that are laden with too many features that are not needed), is mobile friendly and incorporates social principles (including gaming).

When it comes to HR technology, the key things that make for good HR software are user experience (particularly onboarding and customization), mobile, integration and analytics.  Sprigg Talent Management Solutions hits each one with flying colours.

Flexibility

The biggest observation of the Sprigg platform is its flexibility from a user experience perspective.  The technology is well thought-out from the administration panel to goal setting to people manager tools.  A fantastic feature is the social platform that enables employees to share status updated with one another.  This one-stop-shop platform that can be used from a smartphone, tablet and laptop computer allows for huge flexibility in when, where and how the tool is used.  Simply put the more user friendly it is the more it will be adopted and used on an ongoing basis.

At the End of the Day…

Software that meets the criteria mentioned above will always beat out its competition.  More importantly, if the tool truly helps solves a REAL business challenge/problem then you know it’s a winner.  Sprigg Talent Management Solutions does this.  It’s a great piece of software that I believe really does help organizations improve employee performance.

The post HR technology guru offers fantastic review of Sprigg Talent Management Solutions! appeared first on SpriggHR.