As you may remember from Douglas Adams’ masterpiece “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the book of that name was a best-seller largely because it had the words “Don’t Panic” inscribed on the front cover in large, friendly letters. Those two words are indeed very useful, especially if you just woke up in 2014 with the annual review season looming right there in front of you. And here’s the reason you really don’t need to panic about the reviews this year – for the very first time, there is a humdinger of an idea that you can use to make your life as a manager easier – and make the annual review better than ever before.
WeThrive uses a clever adaptive questionnaire to look inside the heads of your people and dig out the reasons why they can’t or don’t want to do the things they should be doing in the company. Much of this information is normally hidden – or at least it will be stuff you haven’t dealt with satisfactorily in previous reviews – but if you use WeThrive to bring it out into the open, you can then turn all these obstacles into opportunities for improvement. This doesn’t just make the annual review better, it turns it into a genuine tool to improve workplace culture, atmosphere and productivity.
Everyone gains from this – managers can see what they need to do to help staff work better, staff get attention paid to the real issues in their working life so they can have a better time and get more done. Communication improves because everyone feels they’re talking about the things that really matter at work, and if there’s normally a tendency to blame people for things that go wrong, that can be replaced by a culture where you talk about things and make them better.
This is a genuinely new idea, available to managers at review time for the very first time ever. It has been tested extensively over the last year, and you can read some of the testimonials here in the WeThrive website – but this is the first time that you as a manager can buy it and use it to make your own life and your team’s work better.
We sincerely hope you have a good year in 2014 – with us on your side it could go even better than you hoped…