Performance management can be tricky; company leadership has to find the right balance between what works for the organization and what helps guide employees to improve performance. Currently, 88% of companies have a performance management strategy, but 71% agree their performance management system needs improvement. Only 17% of organizations are satisfied with their current performance management? That’s a pretty disheartening number. Here are 4 steps to drive performance management in your organization:
1. Raise Individual Performance
Even with the evolution of performance reviews, 26% of companies see heavy challenges in changing their current ideology behind the performance appraisal from purely evaluative to developmental. Allowing employees to see the input of the work they’re doing now and the value of their future work increases employee involvement during performance reviews.
Gallup estimates that at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement is due to poor management skills from their supervisors. So, if you dedicate some training to helping managers develop their leadership skills early on, your employee engagement will increase, and subsequently, so will your employee performance.
2. Link Performance To Company Goals
Helping employees see the connection between their individual responsibilities and the company’s objectives isn’t only a key driver of performance. When managers link the work of employees to company goals, they also drive organizational success. Joel Trammell (@TheAmericanCEO), CEO of Khorus, said:
“Leaders are judged on ‘performance,’ meaning their ability to promote positive results for their organization. One way to promote performance is to connect a big-picture strategy with individual tasks that employees can carry out on a regular basis. If the management team fails to do this, then the organization will become highly inefficient. Each individual or department will begin to act according to its own instincts, detached from the direction the executive is trying to establish.”
3. Train Managers To Coach Their Teams
We’ve all had the performance appraisal that told us everything we did right. Fluff employee feathers enough, however, and when they make mistakes on the job, they will question their performance as a whole. This is not how managers should monitor or regulate employee performance.
Of course, even the best performance management system can’t help a poor manager effectively guide their team. In this sense, it’s not changing or removing the performance management system that’s in place that will help the team. Unfortunately, there are occasions when there just needs to be a change in management to better the performance management system.
One of the biggest challenges in performance management is training supervisors in the art of performance management. Developing managers to become successful performance coaches proves to be a top issue for 64% of companies.
4. Ask Good Questions
You can’t expect to understand your employees enough to drive performance if you don’t ask the right questions from the beginning. Precise questions can help managers analyze cultural and employee missteps so they can solve them in the future. When you begin to change your performance management system, ask yourself these questions:
● Why do employees stay with or leave the company?
● Are there firm retention plans to keep HiPo talent?
● Is there a solid succession plan ready?
● Are managers ready to coach their employees?
If you ask questions that give you true insight into the performance workings of your organization, you’ll find ways to help managers become better performance coaches. The balance between organizational and individual goals relies on finding the link between the two, as well as the training managers to help employees see this. So, if you train your managers to be better coaches, ask the right workforce questions, link company objectives with employee goals, you’ll see a rise in individual employee performance and reinvent your performance management system.
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