Picture what it's like to have someone celebrate a personal best in your office. Or cry, or raise his/her voice in anger. These are just a few of the scenarios that can happen in performance management and salary discussions -- but remember that we'll be doing most of these discussions on video this year.
I don't know about you, but I feel a chill run down my spine about the video aspect of these interactions. These are not the regular, squirmy video meetings that can be challenging to accomplish well on any workday. They are personal discussions that require insight into an employee's reactions. This kind of insight is the toughest interaction to pull off well on video, since everyone has to work much harder to process non-verbal cues on video compared to in-person conversations.
This is no year for the same old compensation communications. Managers will need extra help with these sensitive conversations, particularly because most won't recognize the special challenges of these video calls until they struggle through their first raggedy conversation.
To preempt the difficulties, plan to provide tools in addition to administrative guidelines. FAQs, tip sheets and discussion outlines will be effective because they are practical and can be read speedily. If dissatisfaction with video conferencing is widespread in your organization, it might also be worthwhile to acknowledge the challenges in organizational communications and to give both employees and managers suggestions for facilitating the conversations comfortably.
As we have found out, one of the barriers that video calls entail is emotional. We don't tend to watch facial and bodily cues as closely as we do in person. That makes it much harder work to notice, process and/or discuss emotions. Also, people tend to watch the feed of their own face more than the speaker's, so they may tend to be more self-oriented in these discussions than in face-to-face where self-monitoring is accomplished in other ways.
Here are some examples of the nuts and bolts you could cover in communications:
- Set the stage well -- To make focus on the conversation easier to achieve, eliminate distractions in the video background. Sitting too close to the camera exaggerates feelings, so be sure to set your chair back. You should be as far from your video camera as you would be from the employee if the conversation were in-person -- and the position of your camera should be at eye level, if possible. (Ask the employee to do the same.)
- Make an extra effort to understand -- Tell employees that you expect the conversation to be collaborative. When they share feelings or ideas, ask them WHY they think they feel that way. Ask for clarifications and use reflective comments to show you understand. Take breaks between calls to manage "Zoom fatigue" which could influence your attention span and tone of voice.
- Follow up -- Check in with your employees within two weeks of the conversation. Take the temperature of the relationship and answer any additional questions that have come up. This is always a good idea, but this time it's a must, since video calls are more likely to leave loose ends.
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication.
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