Here's how fitness will improve performance management

I have been thinking and contemplating how performance reviews are done in companies annually or monthly. Some companies are even getting rid of it completely. Then it occurred to me that performance management should really move to "just-in-time performance management."

The purpose of the Fit for Work concept is to explore the idea of just-in-time performance management. It's a concept that we're developing about how to use human capital management, data metrics as well as sales data metrics, and create business intelligence to help people improve their performance, their talent.

This isn't about saying you're unfit, from a physical standpoint or a mental standpoint. This is a concept which is about enhancing employees on an optimum basis which can improve their performance -- much like a work athlete.

So, for example, imagine a call from HR service centre that goes: "Hi, John. We noticed today that you have an elevated heart rate of 160 beats per minute, and you've skipped your breakfast, and you've got a sales meeting in an hour worth about US$12 million. We'd like to put a nutritionist on the line who'd like to share with you a high nutri-food that you can eat now. And a psychologist will have a chat with you and discuss some visualisation techniques on how to calm your heart rate down prior to your meeting. And then we will put a sales coach on the line to discuss with you in broad strokes how to position your sales deal."

If you're a work athlete, your performance data would be captured and correlated to your sales data. And typically you would have to wait for the HR shared service centre to monitor those analytics, and then advise you on how you can optimise your performance.

So that would potentially be one end of a work athlete. Or you can imagine a call from HR shared service centre where it goes, "Hi, John. We noticed that the retail team in your retail store are on their feet for eight hours a day, we tracked it through Fitbit. We have noticed they're not taking any breaks, and the sales dashboard we're looking at in real time tells us that we've decreased sales by 20% in the store over the last couple of days. So we'd like to put an efficiency coach on the telephone to have a chat with you about how we can increase break times, or how we can help you rotate your staff. We will also put the fitness coach on the line to discuss with you and the team about stretching techniques so that they'll be fitter and more agile. We think we'll be able to see an increase in sales because of it."

So really the idea of Fit for Work is about a crossover between well-being and fitness as a correlation to sales activity, and how you can drive real-time performance just in time by having some sort of shared service centre.

We are trying to create a concept or initiative that we will then share with our customers so they can look at how technology can enable them to have HR performance management data dashboard all in one screen, with customer-relationship management with sales data. And they can draw reports to create some analysis, and figure out how to use your team to their full potential, how to help an individual perform at their best, and improve the organisation's overall performance.

Ultimately, businesses are in the business to make money, right? Businesses are about revenue, costs, and talent. So if you know how to improve your revenue because you have high-performing individuals, if you know how to reduce your costs because you're not off work from being sick or back pains or what have you, and if you know how to look after your people, you're going to retain your talent. It is those three things will make you interested in something like this as an initiative.