Hidden Aspect of Performance Management: Supporting Employees’ Success

Hidden Aspect of Performance Management

Long gone are the days when performance management was limited to just annual reviews as the organizations found them to be as effective as sunglasses on a rainy day. With the remote culture becoming more and more normal as we speak, organizations and leaders desperately need to be flexible, proactive, and innovative to meet the need of their employees and support them while pushing them towards success. Due to this, the leaders are now binning the organizational mindset of “what can we get out of our employees?” and shifting to “how can we support our employees’ success so that in return our organization also achieve its main goals?” The CIPD Employee Outlook Autumn report alludes that organizations can indeed improve the knowledge, development, career progression, and feedback given to their employees and guide them towards success by having an effective performance management tool at its core. This yields a win-win situation for all the parties – the leader, the employee, and the organization as a whole.  

Hidden Aspect of Performance Management

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Effective performance management program now encompasses training, development, and support for employees to expand their productivity and enhance their skills. By linking diagnosis with treatment, performance management helps your organization to recover the underperforming employees, stretch and develop rising talent protect the succession plan of your organization. When invested in employees and oriented on supporting employee success, performance management gives you the room for genuine mentorship of employees, engaged conversation around objectives, and competent support for achieving those objectives. It will facilitate you to monitor your employees’ performance and inform you if they need extra support, can abide by higher-level training, or deserve appraisal. For any leader, it is pivotal to have a well-structured performance management program and gauge progress to support their employees’ success. 

Helping employees set and attain objectives is a critical part of every leader’s job. Employees want to see how their contribution adds to the larger organizational objectives and setting the suited targets make this connection explicit for you and your employees. Goal-setting is notably significant as a mechanism for giving your employees ongoing feedback – which plays a vital role in supporting employees’ success. Through establishing and gauging targets, you can give your employees real-time inputs on their performance while uplifting them to achieve more success. Only if there was a medium that can do it all..yes we know that you know the answer. It’s the performance management approach! Read on to know more about how performance management allows you to support your employee’s success. 

Spot issues before it gets too late 

Often your employee might not perform at the desired level, decimating effectiveness, morale, and quality. Underperformance has to be addressed – the earlier the better. Perhaps your employees fail to understand their duties, cut corners, or might be employed above their abilities. Think about the options that can be used to help them up to their performance. Which are the possible remedies for the situation? Can additional training help? Can an in-department mentor offer sounder guidance? Are the established goals and objectives explicit enough? Is my employee in the need of coherent communication for us about what is expected from them? In cases where a team member holds a position beyond their abilities but is otherwise a strong cultural fit, think if you can move the employee to another role? 

Furthermore, make sure to check any systematic issues that could be the reason for undermining employee performance. Very often organizations unintentionally structure in manner that adversely impact their employees, betokening the necessity for extensive organizational changes. Performance management helps you to ascertain whether your employee is not in the right position as per their skills and points you towards the direction where that employee has the potential to thrive. By taking the time to consider issues from all perspectives, organizations expand their odds to hit the nail on the head and guide their employees towards success. 

Develop rising talent

Leaders tend to allot most of their focus and time on employees who they see struggling or underperforming. While well-intentioned, it does lead to delinquency for the moderate and high performers as they equally benefit and develop from training. Shutting your eye to stable employees while focusing on underperforming employees does a disservice to the teams and the future of the organization, leaving the door open for competition, turnover, and resentment. Performance management ensures that you focus on employees with high potential or high performance while simultaneously focusing and helping other employees – as a result, you are able to support the success of all types of employees. It sets you up to move the current workforce forward along both spectrums and towards the needed competencies for organizational goals. 

For instance, one of your employees Mary is happy in her current role and does not seek promotion. She’s flawless at her job and is performing well. As a leader, you have to ensure that you continue to invest in her and help her to develop. Even though she’s not aiming to climb the ladder, she still deserves the prospects to stretch and develop as a professional. On the other hand, there’s another employee of yours Bella who has her eyes set on the C-suite despite being a manager currently. You should be familiar with her goals and support the kind of development that will be required for her to move in that direction. This can include gaining broader experience and developing new competencies that will prepare her to take the leap of faith towards success that she desires. 

Succession Planning

As you must already be knowing, your current employees are the future of your organization. No matter if they retain or transition, they will have a say in your organization’s reputation and brand, upon which your future wholly hinges on. For healthy succession planning for employees, your organization needs a mix of reliable performers and risk-taking performers. 

Taking it back to the example given above of Mary and Bella, even if Bella has a billion-dollar idea, she will need teammates like Mary for helping her in executing and realizing that vision. Even if Mary is the most reliable employee on the face of this Earth, she will need team members like Bella to drive the organization forward beyond its boundaries. Having a wide portfolio of employees ensures that they collaboratively work towards individual and organizational success. Moreover, succession planning serves as a competent way to support the success of your employees. 

Principles to remember for supporting employee success

DO:

1) Show employees that you are a partner in attaining their objectives

2) If possible, incorporate your employee’s personal interests into their professional objectives

3) Connect employee and team objectives to the broader organization objectives

DON’T:

1) Allow your employees to establish their goals alone

2) Take a hands-off approach for high performers as they require feedback and input to meet their objectives as well

3) Overwhelm your employees with different objectives at once

Performance management spearheads you to support your employees towards success. It’s a consistent process that whether through course correction to recover underperforming employees or push an employee to the next level in their performance, makes the employee experience symbiotic. When implemented well, the performance management tool holds the organization accountable for supporting employee development, performance quality, and success. This is why performance management is the need of the hour for your organization. What are you waiting for? Contact us for proficient assistance today! 

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Gaurav Sabharwal

CEO of JOP

Gaurav is the CEO of JOP (Joy of Performing), an OKR and high-performance enabling platform. With almost two decades of experience in building businesses, he knows what it takes to enable high performance within a team and engage them in the business. He supports organizations globally by becoming their growth partner and helping them build high-performing teams by tackling issues like lack of focus, unclear goals, unaligned teams, lack of funding, no continuous improvement framework, etc. He is a Certified OKR Coach and loves to share helpful resources and address common organizational challenges to help drive team performance. Read More

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