More and more organizations are aiming to enhance productivity and connect the dots between employee performance and business objectives. That’s why creating an effective performance management strategy is key to the health of your organization.
Leaders need to continuously coach, develop, and support their employees in their performance. But navigating this modern approach has proved difficult for some. To ease your struggles, here are a few productivity-boosting performance management ideas.
Strategic performance management is the process leaders use to maximize the performance of their workforce. Effective performance management strategies motivate, measure, and develop the performance of employees to support big-picture goals.
Leaders can leverage the process to outline expectations, create clear goals, offer feedback, evaluate results, and establish developmental opportunities.
A performance management framework is the driving force behind business outcomes. With effective performance management strategies, you can support employee goals.
Without performance management, expectations are unclear, and engagement and motivation decrease. Research from Lighthouse Research and Advisory shows that only 4% of companies think that their approach to performance management is effective. Adopting successful performance management strategies, and aligning employee efforts with company goals, is key to retaining talent and driving success.
"Your approach to performance management is key to organizational success. By using the right strategy, you can both inspire and engage employees and achieve the organization’s goals. "
Anne Maltese
Director of People Insights
Setting clear, outlined expectations is the first step to strategic performance management. Without clear expectations, you can’t measure whether your employees are reaching or exceeding their goals.
Be transparent and communicate the “why” behind your expectations. This helps employees understand their importance in the bigger scheme of things.
Leaders and employees should work together to set clear and aligned goals. Define key results and establish deadlines to help employees stay on track.
Check in on goal progress with continuous communication to uncover what is going well and what isn’t. With this understanding in place, leaders can help support and coach employees to achieve success.
Consider leveraging goal-setting and tracking software that boosts goal accountability and alignment. The right platform elevates goals throughout the organization to keep all employees on the same page.
Give employees the chance to learn, grow, and improve their performance with constructive feedback. Let employees see what they are doing well, and where they are falling short with a platform built to boost trust and performance.
An effective feedback tool will provide a platform for upward, downward, 180, 360, anonymous, and attributed feedback. This helps employees gain insight into next steps for improvement. As your employees grow, their productivity increases to achieve outcomes more consistently.
Employees need recognition for their efforts—big or small—that contribute to team and business success. While this may seem simply like a nice-to-have, it’s imperative in increasing motivation and morale. When employees are recognized for their efforts, they are more likely to continue that behavior in the future.
Use a recognition platform that communicates your employees’ success to the entire organization. This helps maximize employee performance by highlighting their value to the organization and helping them feel more appreciated.
Hold monthly one-on-ones for managers and employees to stay on track. Focus your attention on what’s currently going well and what’s getting in the way of engagement and productivity.
With this information, leaders can better support their workforce to drive results. And a one-on-one tool can help increase these outcomes further. The right platform will simplify your conversations to increase trust, accountability, and feedback.
The best way to boost employee morale is by creating a positive employee experience. And the best way to create a positive employee experience is by asking your employees for their feedback.
Leverage employee surveys to uncover your employees’ thoughts and perceptions about their day-to-day. With this information, you can understand what is going well (or not) to make adjustments and keep engagement high and performance up to par.
Salute, a leading professional services organization, used employee surveys to solve their challenges connected to performance management: lack of engagement, siloed mentalities, and employee understanding of how their work impacted the organization.
To create a positive workplace, employees and leaders need to have a foundation of trust, respect, and inclusion. Trust and respect among team members is key to effective collaboration. Without it, employees may feel demotivated, unaligned, or burnt-out from working in unpleasant teams.
Diversity of experience and thought provides perspective, versatility, and creativity. The best teams celebrate these differences because they realize it makes them stronger. Your efforts to create a culture of trust, respect, and inclusion should be top of mind to promote performance.
Your performance management strategy should also include development initiatives. To create a workforce of top talent, provide continuous learning and growth opportunities.
Online training and webinars, cross training, and peer coaching, for example, are great ways to help employees grow. Don’t hesitate to invest in ongoing training and increase employee success.
To understand the overall state of your talent, leverage continuous communication that highlights your employees’ talent trajectory. Employee impact, rate of growth, and retention risk should be assessed for your entire workforce.
To pave your path to success, consider implementing a talent review tool. The right platform will help you understand the state of your workforce to make better talent decisions. Uncover who is performing well, and who is a retention risk to better push future business outcomes.
When your organization implements the right performance management ideas, you can celebrate top performance to have a healthy, successful organization. Pave your path to success and implement tips that help develop and grow your talent.
Performance reviews analyze performance throughout the year. This is the time managers and employees should be reflecting on achievements and identifying growth opportunities.
How can you be sure that your performance review process is effective? Shift to a forward-looking, development-oriented approach. Employees say they find tremendous value in receiving actionable advice and career growth discussions during their performance reviews. This also boosts engagement and improves performance, as opposed to critiquing past performance.
Your performance review tool should help you automate and streamline this process. Managers need tools to have effective and meaningful conversations with employees.
Organizations need to be proactive about planning for the future. An effective succession planning strategy is flexible and ever evolving with an ever-changing organization.
HR should work with leaders to not only identify the next in line for critical roles. But the succession plan should connect with growth and development opportunities.
Succession planning tools can help you make data-informed decisions with performance metrics. Identify tools that can help you pinpoint talent gaps, score potential successors for readiness, and have a board-ready plan at the click of a button.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to strategic performance management. It’s important to understand what your organization is doing and where you want to go with performance management. Then you can begin to make incremental changes over time towards that goal.
Quantum Workplace experts have identified five strategic performance management pathways. These pathways are meant to meet organizations where they are and guide their performance management journey. With small changes over time, you can use these examples to improve your approach.
Does your organization experience very little change or is it slow to adopt changes? Do you want structured feedback and ratings to inform talent decisions and hold employees accountable? Do you need a starting point to evaluate and guide performance?
The Performance Evaluation strategy helps standardize your approach by using:
Do you invest in employee engagement? Maybe you experience turnover because employees perceive a lack of growth and development. Is the organization growing quickly and increasing development, promotion, or project opportunities?
This strategy incorporates a structured framework for fostering employee growth and skill enhancement. This empowers managers to support employees throughout their career. And connects employees with targeted development opportunities.
An innovator in the watch industry, Fossil Group wanted to stay ahead in a competitive market. That meant it had to reinvent its approach to performance management. Their old-school paper process was used to measure and track the performance of 15,000 global employees. This was time consuming and inconsistent.
Through strategic planning, Fossil Group:
Read more about Fossil Group’s approach
Is your organization growing quickly? Or experiencing rapid change as a startup or due to M&A activity? Do you have remote or hybrid employees and people-centered cultures? Do you empower managers to influence engagement and performance? Do you also hold them accountable?
This strategy empowers managers as agents of employee success. It uses frequent, meaningful conversations that extend beyond performance reviews. And fosters a high-trust environment with robust feedback, development opportunities, and recognition.
Benesch, a leading firm in the AEC industry, wanted to ensure employees understood how their performance was measured. They wanted an effective hiring and retention strategy. They needed to implement succession planning and skill development initiatives, including having career development discussions with employees. Clear communication would be key to organizational success. They also needed to focus on robust development programs and data-driven decision-making processes.
So, they implemented a multifaceted employee success strategy:
Read more about Benesch’s approach
Are you a matrixed organization and rely on mentors or coaches to handle performance, development, and career coaching? Do you use data for workforce management? Do you have hierarchies with structured role levels that sometimes create obstacles for talent growth? Does business performance influence your talent decisions?
This systematic approach to employee feedback and aligned performance and business outcomes uses:
You use:
A top accounting and consulting firm, FORVIS is in an ever-changing industry where retention is a competitive advantage. The organization used traditional and time-consuming performance management approaches. The firm spent over $22 million in coaching/managerial time per year. In 2018, 70% of this time was spent on the appraisal process, while only 30% was spent on regular coaching discussions throughout the year. To improve their performance management process, FORVIS used performance management software to streamline the review process. They implemented a strategic approach that focused on continuous feedback and coaching. With the help of software, they updated their strategy to better use the data gathered.
FORVIS used its employee engagement survey data to inform its performance management strategies by:
Read more about FORVIS’ approach
Does your fast-paced organization focus on innovation? Are you rapidly growing and have dynamic, agile roles? Is your organization prepared for a continuous performance management approach?
This strategy drives high-performing teams through alignment, frequent goal updates, and ongoing performance conversations with:
The challenge for Scooter’s Coffee was to open 1,000 new store locations. And they needed to do with while maintaining trust, communication, and growth potential for existing employees. Annual employee engagement survey results showed that employees wanted to advance their careers within the organization. But didn’t have the tools, insight, or opportunity to do so. Now, Scooter’s Coffee empowers their employees to take the company to new heights.
As a result, Scooter’s Coffee implemented a comprehensive employee success strategy:
Read more about Scooter’s Coffee’s approach
Ready to move from chaos to clarity? Start simplifying your performance management today with our Performance Pathways. If you’re looking for a platform to level up your performance management strategy, schedule a custom demo of Quantum Workplace today!
Published November 9, 2021 | Written By Jessica McBride
