Performance reviews are often a source of dread for both labor and management, and can be a paperwork nightmare for HR and administrative staff. It’s time to move to a better model.
The practice of giving performance reviews is often labor-intensive, time-consuming and stressful. To further complicate matters, traditional performance reviews often lack common terms, methods and measures. But there is a better way! Performance management can be simpler, more effective, and more beneficial to your company as a whole.
A good performance management solution is built around four basic concepts:
First – Make managing the process and monitoring organizational adoption easy
- Make it simple to initiate, manage, monitor and analyze the status of your performance management activities
- Use reminders, assigned tasks and other automation to coordinate and drive participants to a common timeline
- Turn insights into action through results dashboards, summaries and automation
Second – Use a simplified, cross organizational framework for describing performance
- Utilize universal competencies to provide a common evaluative language, and assign importance weightings to add critical, job specific emphasis
- Standardize the evaluation of performance to create a common currency, allowing you to evaluate any employee and facilitate transitions within the organization
- Simplify the language of performance down to a single basic score and track the movement of that score over time (like a credit score)
Third – Help managers and employees tell the whole story
- Make feedback and appraisal collection easy, quick and painless. An accurate, meaningful appraisal should require less than 30 minutes to complete
- Leverage web based tools to make the collection of frequent, incremental feedback from both employees and managers a breeze, helping you to construct an ongoing view of performance and reducing the need for lengthy (and risky) narrative comments or a last minute scramble to reconstruct history
- Highlight performance trends across multiple appraisal periods to provide critical, evolving views of each employee, team or department. Focusing on the direction of this score over time will enable you to more meaningfully direct employee attention to the most valuable areas for growth, as well as cultivate a sense of developmental progress and achievement
Finally – Highlight the big picture insights
- Effective dashboards and analytics can chart the overall performance health of your  organization, helping you to find and maximize the bright-spot departments, and highlight and address areas of concern
- Look beyond the employee to discover which managers are best at cultivating high performing individuals and teams. Also see which are best at addressing low performance, and dial in on those who have essential course corrections to make
- Integrate performance results with other key measurements like pre-employment assessment scores, engagement feedback, employee satisfaction and 360s in order to build the total picture
Who benefits from this approach?
Four key client organizational audiences:
- The Executive Team – organizational decision makers who need a big picture of cross organizational effectiveness in order to know whether they have the right people in the right roles to accomplish short and long term goals
- The Administrators / HR – coordinators and facilitators looking to ensure that the organization meets its process commitments in a consistent, defensible and time sensitive manner
- The Managers – supervisors and leaders who are focused on providing the right feedback at the right time to maximize their staff’s potential and to identify and address deficiencies and mismatches in their teams before they derail the organization’s momentum
- The Employees – execution staff who are looking for meaningful coaching on how to best develop their skills, address their weaknesses, apply their strengths, and be seen and recognized for their contributions
Serving these four key audiences will ensure that your organization receives the maximum value of performance management.
Is performance management more work than performance reviews?
Remember, with the right solution, effective performance management can be less work, not more. All that is required is:
- Buy-in and participation from the four key audiences
- Adoption of a uniform performance methodology across the organization
- Engaging the right automation to make the process easy, effective and efficient
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