A solid performance management strategy is a powerful tool to boost employee retention. It ensures employees have clear goals and priorities, understand their impact on business outcomes, and get regular feedback.
It also helps foster a dialogue between employees and managers, increasing engagement and creating stronger connections among people working together.
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Create a Support System
A robust support system is essential for performance management success. Managers can help employees by providing regular coaching and recognition that motivates and supports them in reaching their goals. This can be through 1-on-1 meetings, peer reviews, a rewards program, and other systems.
Ensure your managers have a consistent, transparent process for giving quality feedback and are appropriately trained. This is a critical part of performance management and can make or break the impact of your process.
Encourage employees to seek feedback from others outside their direct manager, including peers, customers, project leads, and mentors. This can help your managers have a more comprehensive view of employee performance and a more accurate picture of the factors influencing it.
The most important thing to remember is that effective performance management is about the people involved, not a process or piece of software. It’s about creating an environment that maximizes their strengths, encourages them to improve where they’re struggling, and treats them as whole people, not just cogs in a machine.
Create a Mentorship Program
Participating in mentoring programs is a terrific method for staff members to advance their careers and create a more meaningful work environment. To ensure these programs are effective, it’s essential to establish clear goals and expectations for participants, provide training and support, and regularly check in with mentors and mentees to assess their progress.
In addition to these metrics, tracking and measuring program impact is essential. This data can be used to demonstrate the program’s value to senior leadership or other stakeholders. This data can also be used to identify potential improvements for the program.
Mentoring programs can be run in various ways, including self-matching and admin matching. However, it’s essential to be thoughtful when pairing mentees and mentors and consider their availability, career stage, and personality. It’s also necessary to ensure a firm commitment from both parties to participate fully in the program, attend all chapter meetings, and work towards meeting their objectives. The best way to do this is by encouraging regular feedback from both sides – which can be done through short forms, pulse surveys, or individual conversations.
Set Clear Goals
To foster an environment of accountability, expectations must be understood clearly. Managers should outline and explain employees’ goals, policies, and procedures to ensure complete understanding. This will eliminate time spent reiterating or clarifying objectives and allow employees to focus on performance improvement.
One way to set clear goals is to use a SMART goal system. This technique includes setting specific and measurable objectives, ensuring they are achievable, relevant, and time-bound. It also requires that managers connect individual goals to the organization’s overall vision and goals.
Employees who can see how their work contributes to the company’s success feel a sense of purpose and connection that increases motivation and accountability. They are more likely to take risks, innovate, and provide exceptional customer service. When they make a mistake, they are more comfortable owning it and taking steps to improve. Regular, two-way feedback, whether through surveys, ongoing project updates, or critical listening posts with customers or managers, is another effective way to set clear goals. This will help employees course-correct quickly to achieve results.
Create a Culture of Accountability
Accountability is about understanding that outcomes are your responsibility and that you are accountable for your decisions to achieve those results. When employees or executives need help understanding this concept, it can lead to a lack of accountability. This is why leadership needs to set expectations and regularly provide clear feedback about employee performance.
Rather than waiting for an annual performance appraisal, which has been shown to do more harm than good, managers can offer real-time coaching and mentoring, helping employees develop their skills and increase their job satisfaction. This approach also helps managers identify potential issues much sooner, allowing them to be addressed promptly before they become more significant problems.
The words accountable and responsible rarely evoke positive emotions in supervisors and employees alike, as they may be associated with getting blamed or in trouble. However, when a culture of accountability is developed throughout an organization, it can improve employee morale and productivity while reducing conflict and confusion. This can create a more resilient and responsive organization prepared for future challenges.
Give Feedback Regularly
The majority of managers and employees express dissatisfaction with the performance management process that their organization uses. They feel the system needs to be more labor-intensive, accurate, and subjective. They also don’t believe it provides them with what they need to succeed.
Instead of traditional annual reviews, managers should have year-round conversations with their employees about their progress and goals. This can be done in various ways, such as quarterly progress reviews, monthly one-on-ones, and weekly check-ins.
During these conversations, it’s important to emphasize the positive and not focus on the negative. Research shows that employee performance declines by 27 percent when managers focus on weaknesses. However, when managers accentuate their employees’ strengths, performance increases by 36 percent.
It’s also important to allow employees to adjust their goals as needed in light of new developments. This could be because they no longer serve the company’s main objectives or something has happened beyond their control. This allows them to stay focused on the most critical aspects of their work.
