At OneAdvanced, we believe that the key to a happy, engaged, and productive workforce lies in mastering the six pillars of people experience. These pillars—performance management, talent attraction, culture & inclusion, productivity, talent management, and the modern workplace—form the foundation of our people management solutions.
Let’s take a look at why performance management is so important in an organisation.
Strong and continuous performance management has so many fantastic benefits to an organisation and its people! The idea that a years’ worth of performance management, including goal setting, development conversations, progress tracking and ensuring staff are engaged and happy can be done in one annual meeting is very outdated!
In order to keep employees productive, engaged and happy you need to focus on their performance management all year round. And so we suggest introducing the following into your organisation if you haven’t already.
1. Monthly one on one meetings
Sometimes managers get busy, and forget to check in on their teams, and people might end up struggling in silence without some dedicated time to raise concerns with their manager. By ensuring all managers are having frequent one on one conversations with their team members you can improve communication and support in your organisation.
2. Short term goal setting
Annual objectives are outdated and counterproductive. Very few people are likely to stay focussed and motivated with the same objectives for a full year, and if company objectives shift for any reason, employee objectives may become out of sync with what the organisation is trying to achieve.
By having short term agile goals employees can remain better focused, and goals can be changed to adapt with the objectives of the organisation or their wider team at that time, and tracking progress against these goals gives managers a clearer idea of how their employee is performing.
3. An engagement tracking tool
Keeping an eye on the engagement levels within your organisation means that HR and leaders can react in real time if they see an issue. By asking employees to anonymously answer a few multiple choice questions every few weeks that are designed to measure engagement levels, you can see if engagement levels increase or drop, and potentially pin point factors that might be affecting this.
4. Frequent development conversations
If an employee doesn’t see a future at your organisation they may become unmotivated and start thinking about looking for employment elsewhere. That’s why encouraging development conversations is really important. Show your employees that you don’t just care about how they are performing now, but you are also invested in their future.
5. Enable feedback
Enabling the giving and receiving of feedback between all employees in your organisation is a great way to boost engagement. Positive feedback allows a job well done to be highlighted, and constructive feedback can to be given in order to help people improve and work on their skill set moving forward.
6. A way of tracking all of these things
In order to get a full and fair look at a person’s progression, ensure all the things you are doing in your performance management space are properly recorded. This way when it comes to reviewing, rewarding or promotion readiness conversations, you have a full view of the person’s performance, from progress against goals, feedback they have given and received, and outcomes of performance and development conversations. All of this means no more recency bias and an all-round fairer process.
For more information on performance management and the other 5 pillars of people experience check out our eBook: ‘Say Yes to transforming your people experience’.