To put a greater emphasis on personal development of our employees, we decided to take a novel approach. With Dialog, our managers have become coaching leaders, and our employees' attention has shifted more toward their personal growth.
We developed a solution to streamline our HR processes and reduce manual processing of paperwork, by separating complicated HR activities such as performance management, evaluations, or the creation of personal development plans.
Dialog is not a goal, but the means through which the entire process is supported.
You never know if you are ready as an organization to take this major step, but looking back, this was the transition we needed to support our colleagues even better in their personal and professional growth
We evaluated a variety of tools before choosing Dialog. They all had one thing in common: a strict hierarchical structure, which was unsuitable for our organization. Within our organization, there are several coaches: career coaches, job coaches, team coaches and unit coaches. Several types of managers may aid at diverse levels of growth, so it is essential to engage all of them in the personal development process and end-of-year review. In the end, we selected Dialog, the only tool that provides freedom in coaching and openness.
As the name implies, it involves encouraging employees to have an open dialog between each other. Feel free to compliment a coworker or point out flaws that irritate you. When people can express both their dislikes or frustrations but also, when something went well and they were pleased with work of others, it has the potential to promote greater interpersonal openness…. We feel it is crucial to achieve this culture of feedback inside our organization.
Dialog has a variety of features, such as personal development process, year-end-evaluation, and peer feedback.
The year-end-evaluation includes both a self and a peer evaluation. First, people evaluate themselves using the Dialog template. Then they request an evaluation from at least two colleagues with whom they worked closely over the course of the year. Following that, the team coach compiles all this feedback in Dialog, to be added to the evaluation.
At the same time, feedback should be a more casual and continuous process. It is more helpful to ask for advice from coworkers daily rather than scheduling regular meetings to discuss progress.