Your employees are your most valuable assets. You want to keep them motivated, passionate about their jobs and productive enough to help you achieve your organization’s goals. The direct way to accomplish this is by ensuring an effective performance management process is in place.
You might be thinking now: “This article is not for me. At our company, we have a solid performance management process that is strictly implemented. We have set employees’ performance measures. We conduct performance reviews, issue performance reports and conduct annual appraisals.”
If you answer most of the above questions by “Yes”, then it is worth it to give your performance process a second thought.
Don’t be desperate though, since many organizations are recently struggling with the same issues when it comes to their employees’ performance.
In a fast-paced era, where everything around us changes very quickly, so does performance management. Traditional annual reviews and quarterly performance reports have become obsolete, and don’t provide satisfactory outcomes for employers or employees. Employees need to be more informed, more engaged and require more continuous and constructive feedback. They should be part of the goal setting process, and they want to have a say about their tasks and responsibilities.
Sounds challenging? Not really. You can easily achieve this by applying continuous performance management. Following a simple formula with certain basic building blocks, you should be able to witness positive results the soonest.
Below are the five main building blocks for your continuous performance management process:
Those building blocks should work together in an agile approach that allows continuous revision and refinement of the process.
Your process will consist of 3 phases: Planning, Execution and Feedback. Those phases are considered the life cycle of your continuous performance management process. They should stay seamlessly rotating as long as you are, and want to stay in business.
To start with, you should first ensure that the distinction between results and efforts is very clear; for you as well as for your employees. I have explained this in a previous article: Results Vs Efforts and the Communication Gap. It will help you creating (or revising) your current performance measures, to ensure that you are “Measuring What Matters”, and that your performance evaluation is “based” on results and “supported” by efforts.
In this step, target measures (results) and actions (efforts) should be defined.
Create a table of two columns: Column 1 listing the expected results. Column 2 listing the required efforts to achieve them.
Make sure to reach an agreement with your employee about the expected results and efforts. Consider that as an “Employment Contract” that must be mutually agreed by both parties. Your employee has the right to revise, negotiate and maybe change some points in those lists, especially when it comes to their responsibilities. Encourage this conversation and discuss with your employee the best approaches that will help achieving the set results.
Without recurrence, commitment and accountability are lost. The purpose of frequent review meetings is to ensure progress is monitored and that a proper plan is in place and is always up to date. If you just define the results and efforts, without setting frequent review meetings to ensure proper execution, then, it is yet another document that will never leave the shelf.
Two type of meetings must be set and adhered to by all team members, including yourself:
Monthly Performance Review Meetings
Weekly Commitments Meetings
Until now, you’ve been working on setting up the game. You’ve chosen the team players, defined the game rules and assigned responsibilities to players. Getting the team into the game is where the execution begins. While each one of them knows their measures and responsibilities, they need to keep an eye on their score to know at any point of time if they are winning or losing.
Without instant updated scores, the employee will lose track and accountability, and engagement will gradually diminish.
Make sure that you and your team always have access to view and update scores instantly. This step is important to ensure the employee stays focused, informed and engaged, and is also the basis for successful productive review meetings.
Monthly and weekly review meetings are the core of your performance management system. Without them, focus slowly fades away and accountability gradually dissolves. To ensure those meetings happen, make sure they are booked in advance on your calendar and your team’s as well. Unless there is an unavoidable exceptional circumstance, those meetings should never be cancelled or rescheduled.
Continuous feedback and input are very important factors of successful execution. Without them, employees work in isolation and processes continue to be executed regardless if they are working or not.
Always encourage feedback during execution. Feedback can come from any stakeholder in the process, including the employee, peers, managers, customers, partners or yourself. It might not be practical to alter your plans once feedback is received. Just make sure you have a safe place (a collaboration board) accessible by all members to record this feedback. Visit this board frequently to ensure you are taking the necessary actions before it is too late.
Those three stages of planning, execution and feedback should revolve indefinitely as long as you own a business and want to keep it successful. Just be determined and patient, and set an example of commitment to the process, and you will start to witness results very soon.
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