You’ve undoubtedly heard of the concept of performance management, especially as the working world has shifted significantly over the past few years. Performance management is the process of planning, monitoring, and evaluating employee work performance throughout an employee’s career. It helps to ensure that employees are meeting the organization’s standards and objectives, while also performing to a certain established standard. A good performance management process can help improve employee productivity, morale, and satisfaction. A bad one can make things worse. In this article, we’ll provide a short guide to performance management at your organization.
What Goes into a Performance Management Process?
There are a few key steps in effective performance management: setting goals, providing feedback, and tracking progress. Organizations should also consider using tools like performance appraisals to help measure employee performance.
Performance management also hinges on a few core concepts. These are coaching, the process where employers provide regular feedback, corrective action, where employers create action plans for correcting issues, rewarding, and termination. A good performance management process is easy to use, future-proof, and accessible to the entire company. When used properly, it can help employees thrive. But it has to be done right to work. There should be some effort put forth into the process and it shouldn’t be relegated to just one of the three concepts. You don’t just leave straight determination without implementing a corrective action plan for instance.
Goal Setting
Goals are the bread and butter of performance management. Setting goals, monitoring them, and getting feedback on them are all parts of the overall process. The key to making great goals for your performance management system is to use smart goals. The smart process is a specialized acronym that means your goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
By setting and managing your goals this way, you’re creating a way to track your progress, implement any possible feedback, and achieve your goals instead of just leaving them on the back burner. This approach is quite useful for employees and gives them a solid direction for being the best they can be at your organization.
Rewards
There are many reasons to use rewards and continuous performance management in the workplace. First, rewards motivate employees to do their best work. Secondly, continuous performance management helps identify issues and potential problems early on so that they can be corrected before they become bigger problems. Finally, different types of rewards can be given to employees depending on the job they have done and how well they have performed. Some common types of rewards include cash bonuses, PTO, gift cards, extra time off, or a raise in pay. What you choose to offer for rewards will ultimately depend on the company, your performance standards, and how you manage things. But rest assured that if you reward your employees for a good job, they will appreciate you even more and be more likely to stick around for a long time.
Accuracy
The performance management process is an important part of any organization, and it’s crucial that your records are completely accurate. Performance appraisals should be pillars of accuracy and it’s vital to strive to obtain accurate info as much as possible. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to ensure accuracy when using traditional methods like paper and pen. Digital tools can make the process easier and more accurate, allowing you to quickly and easily document key outcomes throughout the performance management cycle. With digital tools, there’s no need to worry about mistakes or wrongly inferred information. Because everything gets recorded accurately, the data remains sound and unspoiled. This makes it much easier to track progress over time and ensure that your organization is performing at its best. When using a continuous performance management system, it is absolutely vital to ensure the accuracy of your data 100% of the time. If you don’t keep an eye on the accuracy, you’re not going to make any kind of progress with managing employee performance and might even cause further problems down the line.
Consistency
A performance management process that is consistent and fair is important for both employees and employers. That’s why companies need a more consistent performance management process at their organizations. Employees need to know what is expected of them, and they need to be able to trust that the expectations will not change arbitrarily. Employers need a system in place that helps them identify problems early on so that they can be corrected before they become bigger issues. A consistent performance management process also enables employers to identify high-performing employees and reward them accordingly.
