IFEDA Conference & Safety Management UK

Safety Management UK will be at the IFEDA national conference on 4th October, will you?

They have developed a tablet and web-based fire risk assessment tool which can be used by extinguisher and alarm engineers as well as those with general fire safety knowledge. The software is an easy to use portable software solution which provides the user with hints and tips to each question, helping them complete the assessments. The system can provide management reports and allows the user to manage the significant findings and residual works from the fire risk assessments as well as allowing management monitoring of reports for properties around the country.

All welcome to this free event.

IFEDA quoted on line

Good to see IFEDA's efforts to raise quality standards are paying off - but it is a long slow road. Please click here 

IFEDA National Conference

Further to the flyer below I am delighted to announce that the latest speaker to sign up for the National Conference on 4th October in Telford is Wilf Butcher. Wilf is the

Chief Executive Officer for the Association for Specialist Fire Protection and will be giving a talk on elements of passive fire protection e.g. fire doors, retro fitting of passive fire products etc.

Being a not for profit organization IFEDA's afternoon talks are free to both members and non members alike. However there is a nominal charge of £20 should a non-member wish to join us for the buffet lunch at 12:30 -  a great net-working opportunity and a chance to see the products and information from our associated members and (where applicable) speakers.

Please contact the IFEDA national Office for details.

The IFEDA National Conference

Following the morning's agm there will be afternoon talks/workshops which are open to non IFEDA members: There is no charge to attend the talks. However, should you wish to join us for a buffet lunch, and take advantage of a great networking opportunity, there will be  a small charge of £20 + vat for non members. 

Non members should contact the National Office to make a booking*

*credit card payments accepted.

Marathon Success

Congratulations to Steve Baxter, IFEDA's National Vice Chairman, who as part of the Shelton Striders recently completed a European Marathon of 26 miles in 9 countries and within just 24 hours on behalf of the Motor Neurone Disease charity. Any donations towards this very worthy cause can be made on line via  www.justgiving.com/2014in2014

Fire Safety Signs Workshop from IFEDA

Fire Safety Signs (half day course) 
Date 22nd July Venue Southampton Cost to member £45 Cost to non-member £90
To book please send us an email the full diary of all of IFEDA's courses can be found at www.ifeda.org/training

Performance Appraisals Don't Improve Performance

For those of you with staff and still tied to the wheel of annual performance reviews here is a thought provoking article from Ray Williams

Web: http://raywilliams.ca 

The traditional performance appraisal as practiced in the majority of organizations today is fundamentally flawed and in-congruent with our values-based, vision-driven and collaborative work environments. There is compelling new research that shows performance reviews actually don’t improve performance, and may actually cause a decline in performance. Also, performance reviews are tied to the Bell or Normal Curve, which is now being seriously questioned.

Performance reviews have been around for ages, apparently as far back as third-century China, but were popularized during the Industrial Revolution. Certainly by the l980’s performance appraisals in the form of GE’s CEO Jack Welsh’s “rank-and-yank” system were widely used in organizations.

New research by psychologists at Kansas State University, Eastern Kentucky University and Texas A&M University examined how people respond to negative feedback they receive in performance reviews. Conventional wisdom is people who are really motivated to improve their performance would respond well to getting critical feedback in a performance review. The research demonstrated this wisdom is wrong. Those employees who have a desire to learn and grow—presumably the best employees—were significantly bothered by the negative feedback they received. One of the authors of the study argues that if negative feedback has the potential to discourage even the best performers, then managers need to be aware that what was meant as praise doesn’t get misconstrued as criticism.

These conclusions are echoed by Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton comments that doing performance evaluations well is like doing “blood-letting well—it is a bad practice that does more harm than good in all or nearly all cases.” Sutton argues in his book, with co-author, psychologist Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense, “performance rankings can lead to destructive internal competition , which can make it tough to build a culture of knowledge sharing….In addition, there seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy at work, in which a person who receives a poor evaluation does even worse in the subsequent rating period.”

In an article published in The Psychological Bulletin, psychologists A. Kluger and A. Denisi report completion of a meta-analysis of 607 studies of performance evaluations and concluded that at least 30% of the performance reviews ended up in decreased employee performance. Many specialists in the field have written about ineffective performance reviews. Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins, in Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What To Do Instead, cite studies that clearly show performance appraisals do not work and suggest a replacement; and Aubrey Daniels, author of Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money, argues that performance appraisals are actually counter-productive. Daniels cites a study by the Society for Human Resource Management that found 90% of performance appraisals are painful and don’t work; and they produce an extremely low percentage of top performers.

Brain research shows that when a person’s status is threatened—which often happens in performance reviews that contain “constructive feedback”—activity diminishes in certain regions of the brain. David Rock, author of Your Brain At Work, and director of the Neuroleadership Institute, says that when that occurs, “people’s fields of view actually constrict, they can take in a narrow stream of data, and there’s a restriction in creativity.

Performance reviews are tied to our belief in the Bell Curve, or “normal curve” a system first developed by Abraham de Moivre in 1733. Its use moved from the observation of planets to the use in population statistics in the 19th century and finally used in an evaluation of the performance and intelligence of individuals.

Josh Bersin in his article in Forbes on the myth of the Bell Curve says the curve “does not accurately reflect the way people perform. As a result, HR departments and business leaders inadvertently create agonizing problems with employee performance and happiness." Bersin cites how Microsoft has decided to disband its performance management process, --“after decades of use the company realized it was encouraging many of its top people to leave.” Bersin cites the research by Ernest O’Boyle Jr. and Herman Aguinis who found that 94% of researchers, entertainers, politicians and athletes did not follow a normal distribution but rather a “Power Law” or “long tail” distribution, in which there are a small number of “hyper high performers,” a large number of “good performers,” and a smaller number of “low performers.”

So what is the alternative to performance appraisal systems? If you want to develop the good performers and hyper high performers, companies need to focus very heavily on “collaboration, professional development,coaching and empowering people to do great things,” says Bersin.

Clearly, the annual performance review was designed for a work environment where control of individual employee performance was a key function. In today’s collaborative environment, that perspective no longer makes sense. Some key questions that need to be answered are: Why are we perpetuating a system that research (including recent brain research) shows is not only ineffective, but counterproductive; and what are better processes to replace the performance review?