With the proper performance management techniques and strategies, your leaders can cultivate a high-performance culture in which employees’ efforts and rewards are aligned with business strategic objectives.
Here are our top 10 methods to improve performance management:
1. Share company goals and performance
You can’t expect your employees to meet your expectations if they don’t know what they are.
By defining your company’s goals and objectives and how they align with employee workloads, you empower them to take control of their part in your company’s success. Employees will become more motivated and invested when they understand how their performance contributes to the company’s advancement.
The Forbes Business Council have compiled their views on how managers can best communicate company goals. These include but are not limited to the following:
- Be concise, clear, and consistent
- Collaborate with leadership
- Inspire employees to take ownership of the vision
- Be transparent and accountable
- Explain top-down management decisions to the entire organisation
- Tie every role and process to the overall company vision
2. Track and adjust goals
Successful performance management relies on effective goal setting. Goal setting is one of the most critical elements in performance management— get this wrong, and the flow-on effects are massive, from poor employee performance to lowered engagement and missed business goals. Conversely, when managers set goals correctly, employee performance increases by up to 22%.
Managers should aim to provide context for goal setting, make goal setting collaborative, and encourage employees to update their performance goals. Ensuring your team has clear expectations around OKRs and KPIs means nobody is shocked when it’s time for the employee’s annual performance appraisal.
3. Define everyone’s role
As discussed above, you can’t expect people to meet their OKRs if they don’t know what they are. Until you have defined your teams’ roles and delineated the specific tasks required of them, you’re steering a rudderless ship with everybody paddling in different directions. Your employees must understand their role in guiding your organisation toward its objectives.
You can do this by:
- Gaining insights into your team member’s strengths and capabilities
- Identifying and prioritising tasks that need to be accomplished
- Conducting regular meetings to discuss and update priorities
- Empowering individuals by assigning ownership of specific areas
- Engaging employees in conversations about their long-term aspirations
- Aligning roles and responsibilities with employees’ personal goals
4. Reward top performers
Fostering a culture of recognition is one of the keys to unlocking exceptional employee performance. If top performers aren’t adequately recognised, their motivation will wane, leading to a drop in performance. Or worse still, they will leave your organisation for another opportunity. This can be destabilising and demotivating for the team at large.
Bradley Kirkman, Author of 3D Team Leadership: A New Approach for Complex Teams, suggests the entire team works together on designing recognition systems. This ensures buy-in and takes the pressure off management having to come up with all the ideas, further cultivating a collaborative approach to the performance management process.
While recognition will differ according to the company and industry, here are some ideas on how to reward your top performers:
- Provide them with new challenges
- Champion their initiatives
- Support passion projects
- Advocate for promotions
5. Help underperformers
The drain of underperforming employees can have a flow-on effect on several areas of business operations. Employees who fail to meet your expectations can negatively impact morale, damage client relationships, and cost you valuable time and money. Through empathic leadership, managers must address underperformance swiftly and guide their employees to better outcomes.
When managing underperformance, leaders should:
- Address issues promptly
- Attempt to identify the cause
- Work with the employee to create a confidential performance improvement plan (PIP)
- Establish long-term goals
- Schedule time for regular feedback
6. Invest in customised training programs
When employees are provided with targeted learning and development opportunities, they gain the skills and confidence needed to perform their roles successfully. This, in turn, leads to enhanced employee engagement and greater motivation to succeed.
Learning and Development (L&D) plays a vital role in overseeing the growth and progress of individuals while aligning with essential business objectives. Offering tailored corporate training to employees allows businesses to:
- Attract and retain top talent
- Develop their team’s capabilities through upskilling opportunities
- Create a values-based culture
- Build an employer brand
- Motivate and engage employees
7. Continous feedback
Inefficient and yearly reviews have left many companies frustrated and looking for alternative performance management tactics. Amending your processes to include continuous feedback is a proven organisational strategy for increasing employee engagement and performance.
Recent research indicates that teams who adopt continuous performance practices reported outperforming their competitors by up to 24%. Continuous feedback encourages regular dialogue between managers and employees and is designed to:
- Complement performance appraisals
- Encourage one-on-ones
- Include informal feedback
- Help employees meet their goals and OKRs
8. Adopt a peer review system
Peer-to-peer recognition systems give everyone in your team a voice. Peer reviews or peer appraisals involve employees writing a review of their co-workers. Peer performance feedback aims for colleagues to help each other grow and learn by providing specific and actionable insights. This, in turn, fosters a workplace culture of mutual respect, collaboration, and accountability.
Best practices to consider when implementing a peer performance review system include:
- Make it anonymous
- Outline expectations
- Review each document before sharing
- Leave time for feedback
- Meet with each employee one-on-one
9. Involve your employees in the decision-making process
Involving employees in decision-making demonstrates that you trust and value their input. According to research by Gallup, it has been shown to produce better outcomes, higher retention rates, and decreased burnout.
Furthermore, research shows that involving diverse stakeholders in the decision-making process leads to more successful and measurable outcomes across the board. As Scientific America notes: “Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving”.
The most effective way to involve your colleagues in decision-making is to give them the power to make certain decisions that fall within their expertise. Provide them with the resources they need to solve problems, encourage autonomy, and support them in implementing ideas and initiatives.
10. Offer advancement opportunities
No matter what industry you operate in, the progression of your organisation is linked with the development of its professionals. In designing your performance management system, building mechanisms that reward your team along the journey is essential.
Further, you can increase employee morale by ensuring employees understand their career opportunities within the company. Developing a transparent, meritocratic performance management system will ensure your team understands what is required of them to gain advancement opportunities such as promotions, salary increases, and incentives.
If you want to improve performance management in your organisation, enquire now with Plus UTS to see how we can help.
