The Global CIO Banking Conference 2019.

My key take aways from the very interesting Global CIO Banking Summit 2019 around the topics of digital, culture, transformation, emerging technologies and innovation. More right here:

Many large corporations will start preparing their yearly individual performance reviews soon. And many do so as they have already done 5 or even 10 years ago. Maybe with some minor adjustment over time, but often still with the same design principles.

The evaluation preparation and execution process usually takes place once a year occupying the entire organisation for weeks if not months. Forced rankings are still very common where teams must fulfil disclaimed but implied quotas on low, medium and high performers. In order to remember and compare what was achieved throughout the year, employees and line managers need to keep a log-book to avoid empty conversations at year-end. How could we change that?

Have you ever sat in a meeting where the presenter just repeated the slides and hence, seemed redundant? Did you ever feel a PowerPoint is abused as a text document with far too many sentences and too small fonts? And have you ever left a presentation not knowing what the key message was despite all the great formulations and jargon?

The more I have been hearing pitch decks from start-up companies and incubators, the more I realised how boring and ineffective most corporate slides are. It’s not a new enlightenment and I have to take my blame too. However, every time I see a few pitch decks again I wonder why we agonise each other in the corporate world with our slide wars. Here is how to fix it:

If you ask managers and employees on different levels many would agree that they spend too much of their time on reporting. This includes report preparation, generation, compilation, reading and presentation.

And yet, if you ask which reports could be banned you always get the same kind of advices. The own defined reports are important and required. But "the other ones” could be integrated, shortened or abandoned. This view of course makes a debate about reporting reductions very tricky. Let’s look at it a bit closer...

If you have been following expert studies and employee surveys in recent years, you might have recognized how many recommend change in performance measurement for the benefit of the whole firm.

Most global corporations start with their yearly evaluation process soon. Unfortunately, too many still focus on individual performance measurement where employees also get ranked among each other in some ways. In sales organizations or revenue driven roles, this might make sense. However, many if not most roles are not suitable for isolated performance measurement. They require team work and information sharing to succeed and yet, those roles are still evaluated on an individual basis. What’s the challenge and why we need to innovate here?

How many times were you already presented with a survey that explained an improvement through an average figure that has gone up? Such a change usually sounds positive doesn’t it?

When reading survey results many corporations immediately look at the improvements and aggravations section. They want to know where they got better and where they might have fallen behind. And often little attention is given to those average figures that have not changed (thinking everything remains as it already was). But there is a flaw.