As the job market opens up and the competition for talent increases, keeping employees happy and productive is important. That’s why creating an effective performance management strategy is key to the health of your organization.
Leaders need to continuously coach, develop, and support their employees in their performance. But navigating this modern approach has proved difficult for some. To ease your struggles, here are a few productivity-boosting performance management ideas.
Performance management is the process that leaders use to maximize the performance of their workforce. An effective performance management strategy motivates, measures and develops the performance of employees to support big-picture goals.
Leaders can leverage the process to outline expectations, create goals, offer feedback, evaluate results, and establish developmental opportunities.
Performance management is the driving force behind business outcomes. With effective performance management strategies, you can support employee goals.
Without performance management, expectations are less clear and engagement decreases, making employees lose motivation. That’s why adopting the right performance management strategies is key to retaining top talent and driving success.
Setting clear, outlined expectations is the first step to effective performance management. Without clear expectations, you can’t measure whether your employees are reaching or exceeding their goals.
Be transparent and communicate the “why” behind your expectations. This helps employees understand their importance in the bigger scheme of things.
Leaders and employees should work together to set clear and aligned goals. Define key results and establish deadlines to help employees stay on track.
Check in on goal progress with continuous communication to uncover what is going well and what isn’t. With this understanding in place, leaders can help support and coach employees to achieve success.
Consider leveraging goal-setting and tracking software that boosts goal accountability and alignment. The right platform elevates goals throughout the organization to keep all employees on the same page.
Give employees the chance to learn, grow, and improve their performance with constructive feedback. Let employees see what they are doing well, and where they are falling short with a platform built to boost trust and performance.
An effective feedback tool will provide a platform for upward, downward, 180, 360, anonymous, and attributed feedback. This helps employees gain insight into next steps for improvement. As your employees grow, their productivity increases to achieve outcomes more consistently.
Employees need recognition for efforts—big or small—that contribute to team and business success. While this may seem simply like a nice-to-have, it’s imperative in increasing motivation and morale. When employees are recognized for their efforts, they are more likely to continue that behavior in the future.
Use a recognition platform that communicates your employees’ success to the entire organization. This helps maximize employee performance by highlighting their value to the organization and helping them feel more appreciated.
One-on-ones should be held at least monthly for managers and employees to stay on track. Focus your attention on what’s currently going well and what’s getting in the way of engagement and productivity.
With this information, leaders can better support their workforce to drive results. And a one-on-one tool can help increase these outcomes further. The right platform will simplify your conversations to increase trust, accountability, and feedback.
The best way to boost employee morale is by creating a positive employee experience. And the best way to create a positive employee experience is by asking your employees for their feedback.
Leverage employee surveys to uncover your employees’ thoughts and perceptions about their day-to-day. With this information, you can understand what is going well (or not) to make adjustments and keep engagement high and performance up to par.
To create a positive workplace, employees and leaders need to have a foundation of trust, respect, and inclusion. Trust and respect among team members is key to effective collaboration. Without it, employees may feel demotivated, unaligned, or burnt-out from working in unpleasant teams.
Diversity of experience and thought provides perspective, versatility, and creativity. The best teams celebrate these differences because they realize it makes them stronger. Your efforts to increase trust, respect, and inclusion should be top of mind to promote performance.
Your performance management strategy should also include development initiatives. To create a workforce of top talent, provide continuous learning and growth opportunities.
Online training and webinars, cross training, and peer coaching, for example, are great ways to help employees grow. Don’t hesitate to invest in ongoing training and increase employee success.
To understand the overall state of your talent, leverage continuous communication that highlights your employees’ talent trajectory. Employee impact, rate of growth, and retention risk should be assessed for your entire workforce.
To pave your path to success, consider implementing a talent review tool. The right platform will help you understand the state of your workforce to make better talent decisions. Uncover who is performing well, and who is a retention risk to better push future business outcomes.
When your organization implements the right performance management ideas, you can celebrate top performance to have a healthy, successful organization. Pave your path to success and implement tips that help develop and grow your talent.
Learn how to implement a modern performance management system with our ebook and maximize employee, team, and business performance.
Published November 9, 2021 | Written By Natalie Wickham
