Drew Brees and Peyton Manning meet face-to-face at the Superbowl.
Think back to early 2010. If you can imagine a time between when Justin Beiber got famous and when the iPhone 4 was released, you probably remember the hype leading up to the Super Bowl between Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints. Many experts were predicting an easy Colts victory with some of them declaring Peyton Manning, the Colts quarterback, as the greatest quarterback ever.
Arguably one of the best quarterbacks in the game, Manning though, didn’t have a good post-season record. Leading up to the Super Bowl, Manning had 9 wins and 8 losses in his playoff career. Still, his recent successes influenced the thinkers in the game to draw comparison of Manning with Joe Montana.
In the end, the Saints defeated the Colts by a score of 31-17.
Professor Michael Roberto talked about the impact of recent successes on expert’s predictions in his blog here. Psychologists call it the Recency effect – people tend to give greater importance to events or developments that have occurred recently than those that have taken place in the distant past and act on the basis of the former. Here is an example of Recency effect - “ .. if a driver sees an equal total number of red cars as blue cars during a long journey, but there happens to be a glut of red cars at the end of the journey, he or she is likely to conclude that there were more red cars than blue cars throughout the drive.”
You probably see the same thing happening in the traditional performance management process!
We all know the typical performance appraisal process consists of managers trying to recall a year’s worth of feedback as they write performance appraisals in time for the corporate deadline. Most managers also have to write multiple appraisals at the same time making it very easy for a manager to fall victim to the Recency effect bias. The manager would invariably focus too much on what an employee has done within the past few weeks or months when evaluating the employee for an annual performance review. The result? Employees feel that performance review process does not adequately reflect their accomplishments during the review period leading to dissatisfaction and lower employee engagement.
So, how do you ensure that “last” impressions do not dictate the terms of your performance reviews? One way to address this bias is to make performance management part of every day management with real time feedback and coaching from social networks on a continual basis.
Saba Impressions enables an organization to capture real time feedback from the social network throughout the review cycle. With a simple Twitter-like interface, individuals are able to submit feedback on any employee regardless of the reporting structure or participation in a performance cycle. These impressions are automatically captured in the employee’s performance appraisal as they are submitted. The real time nature of feedback process also helps to make course corrections in development planning and leads to rapid performance improvement. This results in a performance review process that is easier, relevant and more productive for both the employee and the manager.
For more information on Saba Impressions, please visit us here.
