Yesterday, talking to a seasoned senior HR professional, I asked it again. My favourite question.
What are your asks from a performance management system?
As she answered, I realised it's not the asks that are complicated — it's the sheer labour of delivering them that wears HR professionals down. The Excel sheet she described, the one she had to assemble, update and analyse, would tire out any expert.
So what are these three asks?
Performance ratings. As CEO or HR leader, at any point I should know who my high performers are and who needs a nudge to do better. Both data points must come in real time, or frequently enough that I can act through the year instead of wasting all of it. That means a simple way to set goals, run reviews, collate ratings and analyse results. The hard part is scope — HR, employees and managers all have to do their bit correctly and on time.
Employee feedback. As CEO, HR leader and team manager, I should get feedback at every performance run — not generic feedback, but specific to the goals each person was chasing, what went well and what needs to improve. This is the most valuable outcome of the whole exercise. Taking feedback is one thing; collating, analysing and actioning it is quite another. It's also a double-edged sword: not taking feedback is better than taking it and then ghosting. For all the leaders who preach agile to the world — capturing feedback at short intervals and closing the loop is agile. Your 10x transformation comes from actioning feedback.
Training needs. As HR leader, at any time I should know the most profound skill gaps in my workforce — an ordered list of the competencies I'd spend on first if I had the budget. Without skill-gap data drawn from real performance records, training spends drift into the wrong pursuits. Upskilling can do wonders, but only with data in hand.
The reason well-intended HR teams don't deliver these three simple asks is that most HR tools were never built for performance management. And in the AI era, the cost of that gap has gone up sharply — when your edge depends on a small team performing at its peak, you cannot afford to fly blind on who's performing and who needs help.
Get the three asks delivered to you in real time, all the time. So you spend your hours making decisions, not chasing papers and sheets. You might get 10x performance from the same team.
If these are the asks that matter to you, talk to plugHR.
Originally published on the plugHR blog.