Why Performance Management Matters
Companies sometimes think that performance management is stifling and that performance reviews are outdated. As I’ve shared in previous blog posts, it’s not uncommon for organizational best practices to be written off as such, which becomes a challenge when no other reference points for clarity and accountability are put in their place.
What’s an alternative approach to performance management and reviews?
I think it’s less about an alternative as it is an evolution of our thinking about their purpose and how we use the information we get from them. What we know is that we want people to perform but what we don’t often assess is what information we want to measure to support their ability to perform. Consider the points below and see if they spark ideas about work, management, and feedback.
Determine the purpose and the process before exploring the tools to help you carry it out. Moreover, we often default to tools to help us become good at a process without having any insight into why we’re not good at the process to begin with. Don’t spend money on any platforms until you know what the platform is intended to accomplish for you and your unique process purpose. This may sound like a no-brainer, but an example I’ll use from my experience is that companies will buy task management support before addressing first how well their team collaborates on their own. They look to software to solve a problem they have yet to define and therefore don’t know what solutions they need the tool to offer. This gets expensive and convoluted and the tool may end up collecting dust… very, very expensive dust. The same goes for performance management software: understand what matters to you about performance and what cadence and practices your team will most easily adopt before determining what tools will help you achieve your goals.
Discouple reviews from compensation. Performance management must be a 365-day-a-year experience, not a couple-of-days worth of surveys and meetings that are executed simply to receive more money. While it’s advisable to maintain a process for performance metrics justifying a merit increase or promotion, you’ll want the substance of performance reviews to be based on work deliverables, quality of teamwork, and demonstrated alignment with company values. This drastically improves your ability to vet and cultivate team members who are committed to your company and who enjoy working there. It also lends itself to professional development for the employee and raises the stakes for managers to actually lead their teams and not just manage their work, increasing employee engagement and retention.
Treat performance management as a year-round high-priority initiative of your talent strategy. Everyone at the company has a role to play and it’s part of their job to play it, complete with repercussions for not doing so. Have a performance management philosophy, a playbook, training, a clear connection to your company values, and make sure that executives are also reviewing and meeting with their direct reports like every other manager.
This approach can be a significant value-add to employee experience, company culture, and leaders’ confidence in the people they employ. Inevitable outcomes are a stronger culture of ongoing feedback, more transparency and accountability, and significantly better collaboration on and across teams.
While I understand that performance reviews that focus on generic ratings are neither exciting nor impactful, I don't think that the answer is throwing out the concept altogether. It’s just a matter of determining what performance you value and how you intend to measure it to hold people accountable and build a stronger culture of feedback, accountability, and collaboration.
BuildRise can help you put this concept to work at your company. Set up a time to meet with us HERE.