Capturing the Moment Before it Passes
- arcieron3
- Feb 10
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 9
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound?
Well, acoustics and philosophy aside, think about this: suppose the one who cut down the tree is one of your employees.
When an employee cuts down an imposing tree or slays a vicious dragon, and thereby improves the company’s bottom line, management ought to know. But if no one reports the success, the victory floats away, into Never Never Land.
And the same is true for failures large and small – if they don’t make it into the record, it’s as if they never happened.
If there’s one overarching requirement for obtaining the data on which a performance review is based, it’s this: we want it to be complete. It should be accurate, and it should be comprehensive.
And yet - it’s difficult to “re-create” the past. Problems crop up when a manager is sitting at a desk, scratching the ol’ noggin, struggling to recall what John or Jane Doe did this year. If you’ve prepared performance reviews, you’re probably familiar with these common thoughts: “I wish I could remember X,” or “I wish Y was still around, so I could ask her what she thought about Z.” Even if you do remember X, you’ve forgotten details; even if Y is still around, she may have forgotten things too. Or never knew in the first place, because another supervisor happened to be involved.
Unless events are carefully documented, they get lost in the rush of daily business life. But let’s face it, if you spend all your time documenting events, scribbling notes into a pad or trying to mentally recreate past scenarios instead of addressing immediate issues, you may not be spending enough time influencing events.
What to do?
Ease of entry is the key. To enhance performance evaluation, we need a means for multiple people to spontaneously generate contemporaneous input at the very moment that the timber in the woods is crashing to the ground - with minimal constraints, without much ado.
And in this age of the smartphone, the efficient solution is: an app that’s an easy-to-use information portal. That little computer in everyone’s pocket, masquerading as a telephone, is not just a communication tool, it’s an information marvel. And the result of multiple people using a well-designed and well-integrated app: the scope of input relevant to performance reviews expands enormously.
At Garnet River, we’ve studied the challenges. We advise a lot of companies, and provide staffing for many more, and we know that positive employee performance is an essential component of every effective organization. We’ve seen companies struggle with performance reviews, and we believe we’ve hit on the solution: Hindsight365, which incorporates a smartphone app for ease of entry. Now information can be entered verbally as well as by typing, depending on the user’s preference.
And with Hindsight365, you designate the people with the authority to enter information about employee performance as it is happening, and you designate the people who can view the information as it accumulates on an ongoing basis.
And because the smartphone app is so easy to use, even on the fly, your designated reviewers will efficiently capture those crucial and telling moments before they pass. Efficient capture: the first step to a successful performance review process.
Ashtin Givens
Client Relationship Manager for Garnet River
& Consultant for Hindsight365