Performance Management

“The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives; so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.” -Henry David Thoreau

The difficult economic times we do business in today require all hands on deck doing their job at a high level of performance. In-addition to high performance, organizations need to focus employee efforts on work that matters most. Performance management is necessary to achieve business strategies, have accountability through the whole organization and measure the return on employee efforts.

To have an effective performance management system you should:

• Align Your Business Goals With Cultural Drivers

It is always important to have employee goals aligned with business goals. The problem is research shows that fewer than 20% of employees have a clear understanding of the business strategy for the organization and rarely are organizational values taken into account when evaluating performance. The values that define your organizational culture sustain that culture and there needs to be accountability in the performance management process.

• Coach for Engagement & Performance

Managers have a huge impact on employee commitment and employee understanding of work expectations. Unfortunately managers don’t always have a good understanding of what their own expectations are and don’t always have the best approach to coaching. So those mid-year or quarterly conversations designed to keep employees on track aren’t very effective if managers aren’t good at coaching or the conversation never takes place.

• Employee Development

Bottom line is you need results from your employees. Development needs to be more than a bullet on a performance plan or a mid-year conversation that probably is abbreviated and maybe did not even take place.

• Compensation & Rewards

It is important that you provide fair and competitive compensation as a start, but how you reward your employees on going should be just as important. You have to provide both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to ensure fully engaged employees. Determining what motivates your employees can be challenging. Incentive pay can play an important part, but so can peer recognition. Getting the right mix ensures that your employees feel valued.

We Can Help

Our consultants are experienced and will assess your current performance management system to determine if it produces the end result you want. We will help design and implement initiatives to ensure the organizations priorities are aligned where your employee efforts are focused. We can facilitate conversations to ensure beneficial coaching is making your system effective and help put in place a reward system.