5 Steps to make your performance management more effective

As a manager, you are responsible to keep your employees engaged and motivated. This is important for ensuring that they deliver 100% productivity and complete all assigned tasks with high efficiency. But how do you find out whether your efforts are yielding the desired results? How do you keep a check on the levels of employee productivity and efficiency? The answer is – by doing comprehensive performance management.

Performance Management can be understood as a managerial tool that assists managers in monitoring and evaluating the performance of their employees. The objective of this process is to create an atmosphere where people can perform to their full potential and accomplish goals in the most effective and efficient manner. It involves a wide range of activities like goal setting, monitoring and evaluating employee performance, encouraging improvement, periodic ratings, rewarding high-performing employees, etc. This means that key individual career decisions like appraisals, promotions, raise in compensation, etc are also directly linked to the outcomes of this process. Thus, ensuring the efficiency of your performance management process is very crucial. However, in research conducted by Deloitte, around 58% of companies accepted that they consider their performance management processes a waste of time.

So, today, we have decided to share with you 5 steps to improve the effectiveness of your performance management process.

1.     Automate the process for speed and efficiency

Traditional performance management methods require your team to conduct reviews manually, feed data on multiple spreadsheets and then use complex formulae to create necessary reports and scorecards. This not only eats up a lot of time but also increases the possibility of errors. The simplest way to get rid of these issues is to automate the entire process. By eliminating the need for manual recordkeeping, organizations will also be able to maintain a seamless workflow. 

Currently, many businesses are opting for LMS like performance pro, which can also integrate performance management and other HR processes. This allows managers to take care of the processes by logging into a single system. 

2.     Set clear goals

Setting clear goals and performance expectations is the primary requirement of effective performance management. They provide your employees with a sense of direction and encouragement. Knowing what is expected from them allows them to better understand their responsibilities as well as facilitates self-evaluation. Employees can keep a check on their performance and take voluntary actions to accomplish their goals effectively. Unclear goals on the other hand will drain a lot of their energy and encourage non-productivity.

In addition to this, clear goals will also help managers while conducting performance appraisals and evaluations. They can easily compare the expected result with the achieved result to identify the highest performing employee.  This infuses ease and transparency in the process.

3.     Provide feedback

Many organizations do not achieve desired results as they fail to integrate frequent feedback into their performance management processes. Managers should not wait for year-round reviews to hand out feedback to the employees. Instead, they should encourage open communication and aim at providing feedback in real-time. This will not only help your employees in identifying the areas of improvement but also offer sufficient time to work on them.

4.     Recognize and reward

Regardless of our age, we all deserve to be appreciated. Thus, managers should always commend and appreciate their employees’ efforts. Bonuses, promotions, or simply saying thank you in public are some of the ways you can express your gratitude. When you do this, you are not only rewarding one person for their hard work, but you are also encouraging others to work hard.

5.     Ensure transparency

Another important step to ensure the effectiveness of your performance management process is maintaining transparency. The touchpoints you consider during evaluations, the method that you follow to grade employees, the periodic cycle of performance appraisals, and all other related details should be clearly communicated to your employees. This reduces the risk of employees questioning your reviews and decisions.

Conclusion

While the aforementioned steps are by no means hard and fast rules that every organization needs to follow, adopting them will surely boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your performance management process.