7 Tips to Improve your Performance Management Process

The performance management process is a collaborative process between the top management and the employees of the company to make a roadmap of achieving the objectives or goals of the organization. It is a continual communication process where both management and employee have the chance and opportunity to give and receive feedback and reviews.

In the Performance Management process, one has to keep a few things in mind. First, review the job description of the employee and check whether the previous work of the employee is in line with the job description or not. Review the work done by employees and ensure that it helps the organization to achieve its long-term goals. Develop clear objectives and goals that are to be achieved by employees and then set the right KPIs for evaluating their performance. Identify the required training sessions needed by employees by conducting a skill gap analysis. And thereafter provide the right training on the basis of results derived from skill gap analysis to improve the work quality for the overall growth of the company.

And in the end, plan long-term career goals for employees and make them aware of the perks awarded for improved outcomes.

According to a Deloitte survey, 58% of the managers were not happy with the traditional approach of the performance management process and stated that the process failed to serve its purpose. This survey didn’t come as a shock as everyone in the industry knew about the inefficiency of the traditional approach of this process. The process certainly needs some improvement keeping the new generation in mind that is a part of the workforce now. Managers have to know what type of people their workforce consists of, what motivates them, what is a correct incentive for them, and much more.

Below are the 7 tips to Improve your Performance Management Process:

  1. Initiate regular one-on-one meetings: It is a well-known fact that any management process is a waste if more communication is not initiated amongst managers and employees. One-on-One meetings will push a more friendly environment in the organization for sharing and receiving feedback. This feedback can again be put in the performance management pipeline to improve the quality of the process.
  2. Simplify the process: In research, it is a tested and proven method that the human psyche adopts simpler methods more quickly than the tedious methods. Adopting a simpler method in the performance management process would involve more employees taking part in the process and better results can be expected. So if you think more tedious and fancy processes can help you improve the process then please switch to the simpler processes.
  3. Set clear objectives: Set and formulate clear goals for the employees. Clear goals and objectives help employees to set their workflows and work towards achieving those goals. The clear objectives also promote a healthy work environment and improve the overall work quality by setting a sense of purpose and transparency.
  4. Stimulate peer coaching: Show everyone how they contribute to the company’s success and make sure that everyone in the organization knows what it takes to reach a higher level. Make growth in your organization a transparent process, this will motivate others to push their limits. Help everyone in providing coaching and training to support and enhance peer-to-peer activities.
  5. Offer growth opportunities: Stop promoting money as an incentive for any good work, rather glorify promotions and growth in the organization as an incentive. Try to include metrics that measure how a person is helping their peers in learning and development. Try to incentivize employees on the basis of ranks in these metrics.
  6. Use Customized Performance Management: Every company has to build its own performance management plan according to what is important for them. If a company rates their employees on the basis of how employee helps their peers in the overall performance, then for that company performance review plan should be based on communication and should be engagement centric but if for some other company clients dealing is a metric to measure performance then its performance management should be client-centric.
  7. Fuel the Future and dump the past:  Promote a work culture that helps employees to get out of their past and look towards the future for an opportunity. Many companies like Deloitte, Adobe, and Accenture adopted this approach of fueling the future. Don’t incentivize employees for their past performance but give them a vision of growth and push them to follow the path by incentivizing and valuing the future.

I hope we have a clear picture of why the performance management process is important and why remaining stagnant with the old process is harmful and should be changed. Keeping all of this in mind, an organisation must go with a modern approach to measure performance by integrating all the modern concepts and techniques in its performance management system to monitor employee performance.

Author Bio –

Vaibhav Gautam is an avid reader and a data science enthusiast. Currently, he is working as a content Writer at Zimyo – a HR  & Payroll software company.


Interesting Related Article: “Employee Performance Management: Why It Is Important?