A company’s success is influenced to a large extent by the health of the relationship between management and employees. For a company to be successful, it needs to remain dynamic and develop its targets and methods continuously. This is essentially what effective performance management is about.
The goal of effective performance management is to align a company’s goals with individual employee abilities. This occurs in 3 major phases:
- Planning
- Checking-in
- Review
The objective of those phases are:
- Clarifying what the company expects from its employees.
- Setting objectives.
- Identifying company goals.
- Providing feedback.
- Reviewing results.
Effective performance management strategies
Linking individual employee work efforts with the organizations’ mission.
It is a management’s responsibility to make sure an employee understands their contribution to the organization’s success. Every employee is important. Therefore, regardless of their job description feel valued and appreciated, they are more motivated to work towards the organization’s goal.
Setting clear performance expectations
The management of a company in collaboration with individual employees should set clear targets and expectations for them. Employees should be rewarded for meeting these targets with regular employee appraisal. Performance appraisal reviews can be done quarterly, annually etc.
Use of performance dimensions in performance management
Performance dimensions use employees behaviours, patterns and actions in its categorization. Performance assessment uses information obtained from performance dimensions. An example is networking ability which is an important performance dimension for marketing and sales personnel.
With performance dimensions laid out, they provide an easy blueprint to assess and measure performance. This will in turn help to eliminate useless and redundant work.
Check-in discussions for performance improvement
These are continuous one-on-ne conversations between managers and employees regarding the status of an ongoing task. They are three:
- Status update
Managers use performance dimensions in conducting employee performance reviews. With this, they are in a position to give feedback. Equally important is the responsibility to recognize and reinforce strong performance by an employee. As well as identifying and encouraging improvement where it is needed.
- Coaching
This focuses on one or two aspects of performance which are; developing and creating a conducive environment for employees to work and guiding them in the best way to perform their roles. A supervisor should take time to observe and study an employee. A key reason for conducting a performance review is done to track progress and offer guidance. Good coaching promotes flexibility as it helps identify problems early and helps in resolving them thereby re-aligning employee contributions with the company’s goals.
- Feedback
This occurs in various phases where managers describe the performance of an employee and express their views on the employee’s behavior. Observation coupled with detailed feedback are used as parameters to shape performance and can also be used to offer motivation. An example of feedback is built-in feedback, which comes from an activity itself and is immediate.
Annual performance review
The essence of this is to ensure that performance is an on-going process. It enables a company to give good performance appraisals for all employees and monitor staff performance. This event provides an opportunity to set-out new operational goals for the coming year.
Observations of strategies and behaviors employed in achieving prior objectives are used in setting these new goals.
Merits of Effective performance management
There are a lot of merits to effective performance management. Some of which are; strengthening of communication between employees and managers, providing support in the company and ultimately attaining performance objectives and standards for the company’s success etc.
Conclusion
Effective performance management contributes greatly to a company’s success. In addition, good communication, frequent check-ins and reviews are all factors that are necessary for peak performance. The three combined are essentially what constitute effective performance management.