How to Develop a Performance Management System

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How to Develop a Performance Management System

Performance management involves more than simply providing an annual review for each employee. It is about working together with that employee to identify strengths and weaknesses in their performance and how to help them be a more productive and effective worker. Learn how to develop a performance management system so that you can help everyone in your organization work to their full potential.

  1. Evaluate your current performance appraisal process
  2. Identify organizational goals
  3. Set performance expectations
  4. Monitor and develop their performance throughout the year
  5. Evaluate their performance
  6. Set new performance expectations for the next year

Setting performance expectation for the next year is one of the important keys. What is your new year’s resolution? Feel free to leave us a comment or send us a message.

Using Performance Management to Motivate a Disaffected Team

Using Performance Management to Motivate a Disaffected Team

If you’re in charge of a team, you’ll appreciate that they’re rather tricky animals. At times, all appears well, but you’re achieving little. At other times, you’re reaching your targets, but there’s unhappiness and resentment. If your team has become disaffected, then it’s time to rely on performance management to set people straight again. Following a four-step program should ensure success.

Investigate

It’s vital to establish why a team is disaffected. Usually, it’s related to performance – of the entire team or of an individual. The cause may be that the wrong objectives have been set. Perhaps your team members feel their objectives are not achievable or not realistic? Performance management will help you to review these targets.

Implement Performance Management

Performance management works best when there is an atmosphere of honesty and openness. Try to encourage this in your people. Clear objectives also need to be set. Ensure they are SMARTER (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluated and re-evaluated). This useful mnemonic was developed from George T. Doran’s comments in Management Review and has been in use ever since.

Set Goals

Ensure that any targets are clearly aligned to your company’s objectives. The work that your teams carry out should be considered within the work of the company as a whole. Make this as explicit as possible. Your employees need to know that their work matters and has relevancy within the company.

Praise

As soon as objectives are met, ensure you praise, reward and promote. Your team members must see that you, too, have an eye on their targets. The promise of promotion is a real motivator.

Appreciation and motivation are one of the keys to increase performance, and to align any targets to company’s objectives. If you have any opinion about this topic, feel free to leave us a comment or send us a message.

What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?

What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?

Obviously we need a new system. And what can we say about the new system that would serve us better? Well, the specifics of the system will depend on the company, but we do know that it must have the following six characteristics, each of which follows logically from the one preceding.

First, it must be a real-time system that helps managers give “in the moment” coaching and course-correcting. The world we live in is unnervingly dynamic, where we are on one team one week and another the next, where goals that were fresh and exciting at the beginning of Q1 are irrelevant by the third week of Q1, and where the necessary skills, relationships, and even strategies have to be constantly recalibrated. In this real-time world, batched performance reviews delivered once or twice a year are obsolete before we’ve even sat down to write them.

We need much more frequent check-ins—weekly or, at most, monthly. Luckily, we now live in a world where most of us are armed with a device that knows exactly who we are, and into which we can record pretty much anything we want. This device—your mobile phone—will enable you, the employee, to input what you are doing this week and what help you need; and, because it knows you, it will be able to serve up to your manager coaching tips, insights, and prompts customized to your particular set of strengths and skills.

Second, it must be a system with a super light touch. Third, it must feel to the individual employee that it is a system “about me, designed for me. Fourth, and crucially, it must be a strengths-based system. Fifth, it must be a system focused on the future. Finally, it must be a local system.

If you have any question about performance management, or would like to have a discussion about performance management, leave us comment or send us a message.