How simple performance reviews hit 78% adoption: a playbook for HR

A founder calls the people side a drag on the business, and HR is left to argue back in language the founder does not use. Candi Kramer, a fractional HR consultant who helps founders connect the people side to business outcomes, says defending HR is the wrong move. Stop running it for its own sake, and tie every people decision to how the company makes money. She carried that discipline into a performance change at Burson that reached 78% adoption across 4,000 employees.

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Is the people side a cost or a growth lever?

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Treat people spending as enablement, and expect the return to come slower than it does for tech or product. Kramer tells founders the payoff on people takes time, so it sits in the long-term column. The sharper question is what a hire enables: which client need it covers, and how those people move the business forward. In professional services, the people are the product. "We don't want to do HR for the sake of HR. We want to make sure that we're delivering for the business."

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How does HR learn to speak the language of the business?

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Drop the jargon and learn the business from the people who run the money. Kramer's first rule is blunt: "Don't use HR speak. The business doesn't understand that." The KPIs and OKRs that fill HR conversations mean little to a founder chasing a revenue number. Her path to fluency runs through finance and the revenue leaders: sit with them, shadow the client calls, and see how the money is made. Understand the business first, or HR can never truly serve it.

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Which performance reviews should die, and what replaces them?

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The once-a-year form belongs in the past; what replaces it is simple, with expectations set at the outset and feedback given all year. Kramer's warning is that companies buy complex systems to avoid the work the system cannot do: "they're actually not having the conversation. They're looking to the system to replace that conversation." Her Burson rollout skipped the competency scales and rating tools, focused on the habit of talking, and reached 78% adoption in year one across 4,000 employees. Simple beats sophisticated.

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Should your best individual contributor become a manager?

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Not by default, because the skills are different. Kramer sees companies promote their strongest individual contributor into management as the only path to growth, then wonder why it fails. "Not just because someone's great at their job, we automatically promote them to a manager role, because they're not the same skills." Her fix is two clear tracks, one for ICs and one for managers, each with its own definition of success, so a great contributor is not forced to manage to advance.

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What does developing first-time managers give a founder back?

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Time and reach. A trained first-time manager can run a team of six without pulling the founder into every issue. "You have a manager who can now independently lead a team of six without the founder having to get into the middle of it every single time." Kramer builds new managers a simple playbook for the hard part, giving difficult feedback, sometimes down to a script until it feels natural. The founder is freed to grow the business, and the effect compounds across the org.

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The thread through all of it is refusing to let a tool or a title stand in for the conversation. The HR leader who ties that conversation back to the business is the one founders stop calling a cost.

Logan (00:00): I'm here with Candi Kramer, who's a fractional HR consultant. Candi, is there anything you would like the audience to know about you?

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Candi Kramer (00:08): Thanks, Logan. So just a couple things. I've been in HR my whole career, loved HR from the get-go. I've always been fascinated about the connection between HR and business outcomes. You know, HR and business, how do they work together? And that's what I do right now in my fractional business, working with founders and helping them to understand the relationship between the people side of the business and how it can drive business outcomes.

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Logan (00:34): Awesome. Well, great. We are going to get into a handful of topics, but I wanted to start our conversation around something you had mentioned that you hear from founders, and then I'm gonna have a little story to kick it in. But is that founders are like, we're growing, but the people side is a drag on the business. And we're gonna talk about, you know, people being a cost to the business.

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But I had a conversation on this podcast with one of our guests, Nicole Logue. She happened to be with AssistRx at the time that she had told this story. And she had mentioned about think about your people as far as the business makes money and finding people that are going to be your growth lever. And one of the things that she used as the example was: let's say you need to develop a key piece of your product, and there's, like, so many people that know how to do that. And so you have to go out and hire those people in order to even develop the product the way that you want it to be. And she was using that as, like, an example for people helping you grow the business.

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So I want to start there as to when you hear that phrase, it's a drag on our business, and shifting people's mindset from people as a cost to the growth lever. Like, how do you start to think about that and then start talking to founders and business owners to shift their mindset?

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Candi Kramer (01:55): Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, you know, the ROI on people is always much harder to see, right? It's gonna take time. So, you know, you're gonna see the investment on tech or product a lot more quickly. When you do a performance management program or something like that, it's gonna take time for you to see that ROI.

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So that's the one thing I always would encourage founders or leaders to keep in mind. This is a long term goal. This is what you really need to focus on. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. So that's number one.

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But also I would encourage founders to think about in a different way. What does that hiring those people, what does that enable in a similar way to Nicole was thinking about it? What does that enablement look like? What are you focusing on? What does the business need to do? And how do the people help you achieve that in that same way? So again, HR in service of the business, not HR for HR's sake. We're not doing performance management because I feel like doing it, not because I think it's a great thing to do with my time or employees' time, but how are we thinking about the people side of the business and how it's going to develop the business?

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So I'll give you another example. I worked in global communications, pretty much a huge part of my career. And when you think about the client strategy, the focus is how do we win business? How do we win clients? Well, the focus is going in and getting that client and meeting that need first, and then we'll hire after that for that client need. We'll have the basic covered, we will obviously, because the business has to exist. But if there are very specific skills that we need, we'll hire afterwards. So that client strategy is that true north, and we'll then go out and focus on the hiring strategy. And particularly in communications or professional services industries, your people are your product. So you're gonna have to invest in them.

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Logan (03:49): Yeah. I like how you talked before this example about not doing HR for HR's sake and HR being a part of the business. And it's a common thread. I chat with so many folks on the show that talk about that. And I don't know if it's common knowledge or, you know, it everybody's just trying to learn how to speak the part of the business. But what advice do you have people to start to think about your function, the HR function as a piece of the business and a strategic function that's gonna move the business forward?

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Candi Kramer (04:25): Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, don't use HR speak. The business doesn't understand that. That's step one. Understand the business that you're in. Speak to founders, speak to business leaders, speak to who are your customers, who are your clients. Understand what they're doing. Understand what their needs are. Really come back to the basics. Then think of it through a people lens. What do we need to do from a people perspective? And think about it from that way. But don't come at it from a, you know, speaking out HR jargon.

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As HR professionals, we get so caught up in that and ROI and KPIs and OKRs. The business doesn't care about that. You know, they need to make X revenue or X sales. Well, we need to deliver on that. We need to get our people to deliver that. So really think about that from a business perspective and how does it transfer into the people strategy from that.

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Logan (05:16): Yeah, if you feel like you're, if you're imagining yourself as, you feel like you're not as well versed as you think you should be in some of those terms around revenue, you know, how the product sells, like in your world, often consulting, like how do clients get paid, like what services are they gonna get? How would you go about trying to bolster up your nomenclature or your understanding of that?

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Candi Kramer (05:41): Well, first of all, now there's AI for everything, so let's not forget about that.

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Logan (05:44): Yeah, that's your expert.

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Candi Kramer (05:46): But let's not rely completely on AI. But you know, speak to people who actually know the business, your CFO, your finance directors, your revenue officers, the people who are actually in the business who know that, they are your best friends. Those are the people who can really help you understand how the source is made, right? And that's who you really need to focus on. Again, when I started working in global communications, I spent time with those account supervisors. I spent time sitting next to them, understanding. Obviously, now not always able to sit next to, but shadow the phone calls, sit in the client meetings, do what you can to understand that piece of the business and really think about it because in order to be a true partner to the business, if you don't understand the business, you'll never be able to service it. You'll never be able to be a true partner. And then HR will never be that true growth engine, right? It'll never be able to really deliver in the way that it should and the way that it can.

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Logan (06:42): Yeah. And then, like taking it back to kind of how we started this around people being a growth lever, not a cost center, like how do you take some of that knowledge to then bring it all the way back to shifting that mindset with the business now that you're able to speak a little bit better to the revenue drivers?

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Candi Kramer (06:59): Yeah, absolutely. So I think that that's a great place to start is understanding the business and then coming back to, okay, well, what does, I'll phrase it a different way, what does that underinvestment look like if you don't, you know, invest in your people? What does that show up as? Well, that's gonna be attrition, that's gonna be your founder spending time on people issues because there's nobody else to deal with it, that's gonna be, you know, reputation issues, that's gonna be longer onboarding. You know, it shows up in ways that you think are, you know, invisible costs, but really it actually shows up in these very, very specific ways. So it's really something you need to come back to and think at, you know, what does that look like?

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Logan (07:40): Yeah, it's interesting that you mention reputation issues. I've used this example before, and I'm pretty positive it's from the book Unlocking the Customer Value Chain. And they're going through, like, how distribution works, so not super HR-related stuff, but they talk about NPS scores for various companies, and they talk about the lowest ones. And there's one, Comcast. So depending on where you're at in the country, they may be your internet provider, basically being the worst NPS score of all the major companies, and they actually rated lower than the IRS. So people wanted to pay their taxes more than operate with Comcast. And you can take that as, like, if you disinvest in your people for so much, you could end up like that.

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Candi Kramer (08:27): Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And there's a reason why on employee engagement surveys they ask about the NPS score. There's a focus on that. There's a reason for it.

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Logan (08:38): Yeah, okay. So the next piece that I wanted to chat with you about, and you had mentioned it earlier, doing performance reviews because you love performance reviews. And the way that we phrase this is sometimes people are like, performance reviews are dead. What replaces them? Like, how should people be thinking about performance reviews now? Or thinking about using them in order to, sorry, I'm gonna whack my mic here, use them to improve employees development.

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Candi Kramer (09:05): Sure. So I think, I'm gonna push back in a second, that the type of performance reviews that are dead are those that are, you know, the once a year float a form, check a box, and put in a file. I think those should be dead, rightly so, right?

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So the ones that should replace them are those that are simple, expectations are set at the outset, and feedback is given regularly. I really do believe in performance management and performance reviews happening because, again, coming back to investing in your people, you really need to develop your people and you need to do that by giving them feedback and growth and development and having those conversations. And having it once a year doesn't do anything. It really doesn't. You just put it away, it doesn't help anybody.

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On the flip side of that is that, you know, companies think they need to have these fancy expensive systems with, you know, very complex competency scales, rating scales, OKRs, all of these fancy bells and whistles. But the reality of it is they're actually not having the conversation. They're looking to the system to replace that conversation. And that actually is the issue. If you don't step back and look at the culture and ingrain that habit of having the conversation.

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That's the real game changer, really having that conversation and giving that feedback and understanding where your employee wants to go to and how can you develop them, how can you get them to the next level. Or the flip side of it is if they're not doing well, well, what are you gonna do about it? And that's the real game changer in my perspective.

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Logan (10:34): Yeah, I like how you said that people want fancy systems and tools because I feel like that's applicable to so much of the business. Almost to, I don't want to be cynical, but like to abdicate yourself from doing the actual work of the conversation. Cause like when I would do my performance reviews when I was a manager, I just do them on a Google Doc because I preferred it that way. I just had like three headlines and I wrote out all the different stuff. And you know, one of my mentors have basically said, like, if you're, you can't have anything in this that they haven't already heard, because nothing should be a surprise, was like his strong piece of advice, because it should just be a recap of everything you've been doing throughout the year. And I've been on the receiving end where everything was a surprise. And it was like, I don't know about that. So yeah.

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Candi Kramer (11:18): No. Yeah, that's rough.

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Logan (11:24): And so not necessarily in a bad ways, but it's like, well, like, why didn't we just talk about this stuff before? Kind of a thing. I think that's the point of it is to move into one on ones and that.

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Candi Kramer (11:36): Yeah, it needs to be the ongoing conversation, you know, and honestly, simple beats sophisticated anytime, you know, a Google Doc. However you find that it works, have that conversation. When I worked at Burson, which is a large global communications agency, we transformed performance management across 4,000 employees globally by using something very simple and making sure the conversations were regularly held and was really simple. It wasn't something fancy, it was like really focusing on changing the habit and changing that perspective and making sure it was something that the managers found that they could use, they could do it easily, and the employees found that it was valuable. And we achieved 78% adoption in year one. So it can be done.

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Logan (12:21): Yeah. And I think my opinion on the performance reviews is it actually is likely super underutilized because people aren't willing to have candid conversations or hard conversations or even good conversations regularly. And then people go, you know, I've heard stories of people go years, like two, three years, and then they're all of a sudden surprised with they're not meeting expectations or something. And it's like, and it seems like a huge miss that the person may not have been needing to go down that road. They could have been coached all the way along and done really great given the environment.

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Candi Kramer (12:56): Right, absolutely. That's exactly it. It's the lack of willingness to have those conversations. And it's, I think, a failure to coach our managers to have those conversations, to show them how to give that feedback, constructive feedback, you know, what do you do when someone's not performing? How do you manage that? How do you set expectations? How do you have that conversation? And to your point, you can have that throughout the year. It shouldn't be a surprise. When I used to coach managers, I would say, exactly as your manager said, this should not be a surprise. The employee should know exactly what feedback they're going to get in this conversation. If it's a surprise, that's on you and that's a problem.

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Logan (13:34): Yeah, and that's hard because in businesses the issues being up the chain are hard to take accountability for, I think. Not to put it on anybody individually, but...

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Candi Kramer (13:48): Sure, sure, but you know, we all need to start some way, right? We all have to have those conversations. But yeah, there are varying factors, but you know, someone needs to start some way.

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Logan (13:58): Yeah. What are some of those varying factors?

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Candi Kramer (14:00): I mean, you know, if you say, well, my manager doesn't do it, so why should I? Right? Well, you gotta lead from the top, in my opinion, and you have to have the culture for it. I think that's where it comes back to, like, what culture do we want to have? We wanna have a high performing culture. We want to make sure that we're delivering for our customers, we want to make sure that we're achieving X revenue. Well, how do we do that? All comes back down to what is our people strategy? How are people going to be developed and grown and given feedback? It, you know, it's taking everybody on that journey. And I feel like it comes back full circle to investing in our people.

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Logan (14:33): Yeah, I like that example. Well, my manager doesn't do it. Why should I? And one of the things a mentor and a coach, executive coach I worked with, executive coaches said, well, what do you want your team to be as far as known about throughout the organization? And it becomes your, like, a talent attraction piece, is like what do you want them to know about you? And a mentor would always do these scorecards. And his scorecard was the team's performance that he presented to the company. And nobody else did them like he did, in the detail that he did it. And he's like, well, nobody else does it, but I do it because it keeps me going, and everybody tends to appreciate it throughout the organization, and then people start to do it.

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So, and then the result of that is that actually he had like one of the lowest turnover teams in the company, and you know, people wanted to work for him in the company because they're like, these folks do well and they get recognized before and they know how they're supposed to do well. And so it's like, well, people wanted to go over there even if they, you know, it wasn't their department or their normal skill set.

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Candi Kramer (15:40): Yeah, I love that. I absolutely love that. And that's exactly it. That's, you've seen that ROI right away.

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Logan (15:45): Yeah. So, and yeah, but back to that same point, my manager doesn't do it, so why should I, is kind of, like, leads me into, I don't know why this is a hot button for me, but I ask our folks this. And it's the turning really high performing individual contributors into managers, like, as being the track of growth in a company. And it, you know, people have changed their opinions on that, where there are IC tracks and manager tracks. Like, people are changing that. But it still seems that when you're early in your career, like, you're like, well, I need to become a manager to do well and to have influence in the organization. Like, why is that? And why do we keep doing it?

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Candi Kramer (16:29): Yeah, it's a great question. Really great question. I see it too, you know. But the reality of it is that you can be successful in either role, right? You know, as an IC or as a manager, you know, but we need to have clear development tracks for each, right? We need to make it very clear about how you can be successful in each of them. And you need to be able to identify the skills that you need to become a good manager, and then to, you know, focus on the IC track. But not just because someone's great at their job, we automatically promote them to a manager role, because they're not the same skills. We need to evaluate where should they go and what makes sense for them.

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And then also when someone is promoted into a manager, how are we developing them as a people manager, right? Not just, you're a manager, here you go, well done, and leave you to it, which often happens. But what skills are we developing? How are you coaching your team? How are you thinking about your team? You know, what are the skills you need to develop, both your team and yourself? What is the focus? It's very different as opposed to being an IC. And we're just, we're so focused on becoming a manager early in our career because they're so visible, right? Because it's, you know, you see the manager, you see the leader, and they're given, you know, kind of a platform. But the reality of it is you can go in either way, in either track. You just have to make sure as a company, you're developing those clear career tracks and what that looks like.

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Logan (17:53): Yeah, and there's two examples I think about, in the IC track potentially being even more fruitful. Like, you see it in sales often, that the individual high performing sales reps out earn their managers, and that's a common thing. Which likely should be the case, I would argue, because the individual sales reps are generating the revenue and the managers just kind of, they're making sure everybody does what they're supposed to in Salesforce. But you also see it, I think now more recently, in some of the software engineering job postings that have made headlines of being obscenely high salary because they're looking for the absolute top tier talent of individual contributors because they need, you know, the greatest innovators for particular things. So there are cases.

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Candi Kramer (18:44): Yeah, no, that's right.

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Logan (18:45): But so, when you have people, so you mentioned developing our first time managers, and that seems to be the gap. And I don't know if there are companies that you've worked with that do it well, that you have examples, and what other people could do to implement new manager training if they do in fact identify folks that should become managers. Like, what should they do to develop them so that they are really good managers, and you can tell people?

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Candi Kramer (19:11): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, at one of the agencies that I worked at, we had a cohort of new managers that, you know, fairly, well, say young in their careers, were promoted into managers. And they had, to be frank, no idea of how to manage a team because they hadn't done it before. And so I worked to develop a manager training about, you know, giving feedback, having difficult conversations, what are your goals, making sure that certain tasks were done, you know, almost developing a playbook for these new managers to make sure that they understand what the expectation was of them as new managers and how they could then develop their team.

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I think that's really key, to have something. Again, it doesn't have to be something fancy, right? We don't have to have something super sophisticated, but you do need to have something in place because otherwise you're just leaving it to chance. And that's really, you know, to the detriment of these new managers. And then to the employees as well, because then you know you're just leaving it and they're not being set up for success as new managers, and then the team isn't either. You're then, you know, dealing with unhappy employees, potential attrition, you know, all these things that really can be avoided simply by looking at the skills and developing these programs like a playbook, which really isn't that difficult to develop, but you just have to make the time for it.

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Logan (20:33): Yeah. Out of some of those manager trainings that you've done, what have you had people come back and say, like, thank you for that? Or, like, this part of it was super, super fruitful?

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Candi Kramer (20:44): One was having difficult conversations, you know, especially as a new manager, that's the hardest part, right? I think everybody has difficulty having those candid conversations or giving feedback that may be difficult to deliver. But that was the part that I got so much feedback on. We always had new managers coming back and saying that was so helpful. I've never had to have the conversation like this, or I wouldn't know how to approach it. And I followed, you know, even giving a script, you know, because the first time they go word for word, but then they start to get more comfortable with it and understand, you know, the importance of it and how to deliver it. And you know, that's really the part that I got a lot of feedback on.

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Logan (21:23): And do you have a framework that you use for that?

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Candi Kramer (21:25): No, I mean it's really about, you know, the coaching and the upskilling and the delivery. So it's fairly simple. It's not the sandwich style, it's not that at all, but it's about the framework delivery and giving back.

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Logan (21:39): Yeah, I had, my last stop, they were not fans of the sandwich, which I'm not either.

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Candi Kramer (21:45): Yeah. No.

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Logan (21:47): And I don't know why that took off. But the reasons not to do it.

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Candi Kramer (21:49): Yeah, people think that it's better to be, yeah, better to be kind, but the reality of it is that, you know, you need to have a real conversation and simply coating it in sugar doesn't help. You need to be, you know, I'm not saying you need to be brutal by any stretch of the imagination, but you need to have a candid conversation and make sure that, you know, the employee understands what is expected.

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Logan (22:13): Yeah, it was, they were into Brene Brown, so it was, Clear is kind was the mantra, and that doesn't lend itself, I guess, to the sandwich.

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Candi Kramer (22:24): Yeah, yeah, just not.

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Logan (22:25): Which I would probably agree with at this point.

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Logan (22:32): Okay, so the last piece of this, so you've developed managers and you had mentioned something, that developing managers develops the whole org. And I was curious why that is the case and how developing your managers ends up boosting the whole organization and what your thoughts are on that.

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Candi Kramer (22:49): Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you think about, you know, a fast growing organization, right? You have a manager who can now independently lead a team of six without the founder having to get into the middle of it every single time. The manager, the, excuse me, the founder is now free to focus on business growth, on building other relationships, on developing the business. And this, you know, your manager is really focused on building that team. So you focus on that manager development, you're really building up that whole organization by the founder being freed up, the organization is growing. It's almost like a full cycle, right?

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So you're developing every step of the organization, so it's really crucial. I think the part that some of smaller organizations miss is the importance of that, that you really need to start at that level so that the founder is freed up, so the founder has time to focus on, you know, really growing that business, which is critical, particularly when you're a small growth, small business that's growing quickly, but then also, you know, to invest in those employees that have taken that leap of faith to join your organization. What are you giving back to them? How are you developing them? What is it, what is in it for them, right? At the end of the day, more than a paycheck, right? You want to make sure that they're going to stay, but how do you make sure that they're developed? So it becomes like a full circle. So it's absolutely critical that you focus on the whole organization.

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Logan (24:13): Good. Well, good, Candi. Is there anything else you would like to leave the audience with that we didn't cover yet?

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Candi Kramer (24:22): I think, you know, one of the things that we need to focus on is, you know, what is that North Star for your business and what do you really need to focus on? And when you think about that, think about it as relates to the people decisions. So does the people decision come back to that? If you're, you know, if you're investing in a performance management framework or performance management system, how does that come back to the business? How does it meet the business needs? Is it delivering for the client? I think we, you know, we don't want to do HR for the sake of HR. We want to make sure that we're delivering for the business. And I think it's really crucial to connect the people and the business outcomes.

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Logan (24:59): That is a good closing thought. Not HR for the sake of HR, but driving the business forward. Well, great, Candi. Where should everybody connect with you?

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Candi Kramer (25:08): And you can find me on LinkedIn.

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Logan (25:10): Awesome. We will direct everybody to LinkedIn in the show notes. And Candi, I wanna thank you for taking the time to join us today and chat through all of the items that we got through today.

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Candi Kramer (25:23): Thanks so, Logan, I enjoyed it.

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Logan (25:25): Thank you.