Performance Management

The Key to Achievement: Performance Management

What do successful organizations frequently have in common?

In addition to a robust talent management strategy, they also have a firm and comprehensive performance management system in place.

In its simplest form, performance management means you’re not just measuring, but also rewarding the performance of employees, in the context of a set of predetermined goals and metrics.

When a performance management system is effective, the value to an organization is tremendous and includes employees that are more productive and engaged, as well as boosted morale overall.

Creating a strategy to manage the performance of employees is the best way you can improve the performance of your workforce, from the bottom to the top.

The Components of Performance Management

While every strategy for managing and measuring the performance of employees is going to vary based on the industry, some of the primary components you frequently see across the board include:

  • A coming together of individual goals within the environment of larger and more overarching corporate goals.
  • The goals of the company should be broadly communicated to the entire organization.
  • Monitoring progress is a necessity, and through this monitoring of this progress, it’s then possible to identify gaps and weaknesses, which can then be addressed through training and development, or coaching from company leaders.
  • There should be a system of defined and well-documented feedback in place.

Many organizations also opt to utilize performance management as part of their compensation management strategy—utilizing the monitoring of progress and achievement as a way to determine a pay-for-performance system.

Keys to Creating Goals for Performance Management

While a good or even great performance management system can increase a company’s profitability, improve engagement and lead to more talent retention, a poorly-run management system can have the opposite impact.

Some of the top performance measuring and appraisal systems are based on the science of human psychology, and share common characteristics, including:

  • The creation of defined and challenging goals. Typically, the more difficult a goal is to attain, the better the performance of employees.
  • When a company is able to create goals that are also self-serving in some way, or are easily translated to personal feelings, the result is more achievement.
  • Communication is key. There has to be constant and consistent communication to accompany measurement and appraisals of employee achievement.

The Intersection of Training and Development with Performance Management

There’s an increasing amount of intersection between the efforts of companies in terms of training and development and their performance management strategy.

Learning management systems are being used as a valuable part of the process to identify potential gaps and weaknesses, and then once it’s possible to immediately identifying these issues, it becomes easier to resolve them.

With the modern and extensive capabilities of today’s learning management systems, it provides just another layer in the ability to more precisely track and monitor employees—an indispensable tool in a successful performance management strategy or system.

Category : Performance Management

Retention Secret #1: Better Onboarding

October 3, 2014   

Employee disengagement is a serious issue facing workplaces today, with 70% of employees feeling disengaged from their work (source). That lowers productivity, and businesses are losing as much as $550 billion a year because of it. That percentage of employees who are disengaged hasn’t budged much in recent years – in 2011 it was 71% […]

read more

Transparency Can Equate to Happier Employers

October 2, 2014   

Here’s another one of those buzz words in the workplace – transparency. It’s not just the work environment where we’re hearing it thrown around – we also hear it frequently from our elected officials, from the media, and from just about anyone in a position of power. There’s a reason it’s a good word to […]

read more

Big Data and One Page Talent Management

September 30, 2014   

Big Data and analytics have arrived to HR, and companies that embrace them dramatically outperform the 86% that still focus on reactive and operational reporting (Bersin by Deloitte). Achieving and sustaining competitive advantage requires graduating from HR metrics to strategic workforce analytics and planning. These trends are both exciting and overwhelming to many talent management […]

read more

A New Approach to Performance Management

September 25, 2014   

In this current series of articles on performance management (PM), we’ve presented what we think is a very convincing case that far too many PM systems in organizations today are broken and fail to deliver the kind of bottom-line business impact that they should provide. The dreaded ritual of the annual performance review or appraisal […]

read more

Diagnosing Your Ailing Performance Management System

September 23, 2014   

In my last article, What’s Wrong with Performance Management and Annual Reviews? I highlighted the extent to which many performance management (PM) systems are surprisingly dysfunctional in today’s organizations. Now it’s time to go a bit deeper into what’s really happening with your PM system in order to figure out what you can do about […]

read more