Performance management engages employees in their work, boosts their everyday productivity and drives them to achieve their goals.
When implemented correctly, performance management is the perfect tool for motivating and empowering employees. The first step to effective performance management is to understand what it is and how it works.
In his Handbook of Performance Management, Michael Armstrong notes that effective performance management is a continuous process. This means that companies should be lessening the focus on their quarterly or even annual performance reviews and looking to ensure that performance management is taking place all of the time.
Follow these four principles to improve performance management in your workplace:
1. Plan to succeed
Planning should be the first priority for performance management. Without a plan, your employees will lack the direction they need to make improvements.
The best way to improve performance is to set both individual and team goals, and these should be aligned with the long-term goals and overall vision of your business.
Using SMART objectives that are specific to each individual within your business and creating a personal development plan for employees which factors in what each employee needs to learn or develop in order to achieve their goals are two steps which cannot be skipped.
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2. Act to achieve
For performance plans to come to fruition, managers need to continuously track employee progress, encouraging them to take actions which move them closer to their goals.
The most effective way to ensure employees act in order to achieve is to encourage them to schedule regular time to work on their work goals and their personal development plans.
Managers should also take the initiative to give individuals in their team regular feedback and to use their coaching skills to assist their team in tackling new challenges and finding alternative ways of working to improve performance. This feedback and coaching should be ongoing.
Read more tips on page two…
3. Develop knowledge and skills
As part of the ongoing coaching that managers are providing, they should also be able to identify any gaps in their teams knowledge or skills that need honing. Employees are more likely to produce good results if they feel valued.
According to Dr. Nelson, author of Make More Money by Making Your Employees Happy: “When employees feel that the company takes their interest to heart, then the employees will take company interests to heart.
Investing in your employees is an investment in the future of your business. Provide employees with all the tools and knowledge they need in order to achieve. This might mean holding in-house training sessions, investing in online e-learning programs and new software to simplify tasks, or allowing employees to shadow another team member.
4. Review and assess progress
While informal performance tracking and reviews are a key activity, it’s still important for most companies to hold formal progress reviews or appraisals.
These are much more effective if they are run as a summary of discussions that wrap up the work so far, rather than a big review of work over the past year.
Formal performance reviews should look at what worked and what didnt work and what can be learned in order to make new plans moving forward. The focus should be on future rather than fixating on the past. What can be done to improve from now on What career goals need discussing What actions will be taken
All four principles should be followed in order for businesses to achieve effective performance management.
These principles shouldnt be viewed as targets to be hit one after another, but as an ongoing cycle of performance management where planning, tracking, taking actions and development take places constantly, while formal reviews are needed only as a summary point.
Having this performance management cycle in place sets the foundations for a team that delivers at its best, but success will also be determined by the specific goals set and dedication to the process shown by the management.
Stuart Hearn is CEO of Clear Review.
