Managing Performance
How to get the most out of your performance management activities
What’s in this knowledge article?
What is Performance Management?
Why Implement Performance Management?
How to Implement Performance Management?
How to Improve Your Alotten Score?
Resources
What is Performance Management?
What have the highest performing organizations figured out that can help every organization improve its performance? They know how to align employee engagement (their workforce’s time, energy, and motivation) around their most critical organizational priorities. Performance management is a systematic approach to aligning and enabling performance. Broader than any single initiative, performance management is a constellation of activities, tools, programs, and processes designed to continually monitor and enhance individual and organizational performance. Because it’s easy to over-engineer, it’s important to keep it simple, stay focused on the basics of what you’re trying to accomplish, and iterate as needed on your design.
Why Implement Performance Management?
Organizations vitally need to be able to troubleshoot and positively influence their workforce’s output, and effective performance management can be a game changer for companies of every size and maturity level. Thoughtful performance management design and implementation can ensure your organization is focused on and executing the critical priorities, constantly building skills for performance, and motivated to perform at every level.
Focused on the right priorities: A critical component of effective performance management is driving 360-degree alignment on strategic priorities across the organization: up, down, and sideways. This is how organizations ensure that everyone at every level is on the same page about what to accomplish, by when, and why. Whatever process you use (OKRs or other goal-setting processes), it’s important that it is collaborative, iterative, and inclusive, so priorities reflect the collective, evolving intelligence and support of the organization.
Continually learning: The focus on many performance management systems has shifted from performance evaluation to employee development for good reason. Making sure your workforce has the knowledge, skills, and abilities it needs to perform is an investment that positively influences future performance, delivering measurable gains in productivity. Accomplishing this requires equipping the people leaders who engage and develop their teams in the flow of work. Target skills for people development include high impact 1x1s, feedback, coaching, and skills to help them guide their direct reports’ careers.
Motivated to perform: Performance management can provide the clarity, development, and support employees need to remove blockers and unleash their ability to fully contribute. Employees need the answer to three burning questions in order to perform: What should I focus on? How am I doing? Where am I headed? People managers are the right people to ensure that employees have the answers they need to stay motivated and productive.
How to Implement Performance Management
Regardless of where your starting point - a mature system you want to tweak, your first performance management system ever, or anywhere in between - follow the steps below:
Start with executive alignment: Performance is a vital business concern, and should be led, shaped and championed by the executive team, with strategic design and implementation support from your people team or outside HR experts. Bring your leadership team together to reflect on what’s working and not working in your organization’s performance, and align on what a more intentional approach could achieve.
Articulate clear objectives and desired outcomes: Leadership alignment needs to yield a crisply-stated handful of objectives and desired outcomes for performance management. Articulating why you’re implementing performance management is critica. Are you looking to measure performance in order to make talent decisions? Improve performance to better achieve business goals? Interestingly, a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article recommends considering measuring and improving performance as two separate objectives that require two distinct processes. Determining the major objectives and outcomes for your efforts will directly inform the design of your system, and will become your key messages to create buy-in around what’s changing.
Don’t lose sight of the basics: It may seem obvious, but performance management can accidentally make performance worse if you’re not careful. Numerous studies have cited how time-consuming processes, the perception of bias, one-way conversations, and numerical scoring can actually demotivate employees and negatively impact performance. Remember that the point of performance management is to enable, enhance, and improve performance, and it’s important to check that it does. To this end, in the design stage we recommend thinking through how each element of your design is likely to impact your managers’ and employees’ overall motivation.
Identify and integrate related talent management assets: Because performance management is an integrated approach to tracking, supporting, and enhancing performance, it will impact numerous tools, activities, processes, and programs in the talent space. You’ll want to identify these dependencies up front during the design process to capture the full picture of what you need to create or refresh for performance management to run effectively.
a. For example, if one of your objectives is to provide a clear process for addressing underperforming employees, you may need to document a performance improvement plan (PIP) template and process and educate people managers on how to utilize these tools and processes.
b. If a desired outcome is stellar career development, determine what collateral is needed to support this, like clear job descriptions for each role or leadership, technical career paths, individual development plans (IDPs), or career coaching training and guides.
Customize to your culture: Numerous kinds of performance management approaches and systems exist, making it tempting to simply do what others have done or what you’ve done before. Resist the urge to ‘lift and shift’ a performance management system from elsewhere onto your workforce. Instead, look back to your objectives and outcomes to make sure that your solution is true to your values, will resonate with your culture, and has a high likelihood of adoption. Consider your use of technology in light of your company’s lifecycle and preferences: does your workforce require a user-friendly mobile app or a customized module in your existing HRIS? Or is simple the best approach, with documents, spreadsheets, or email? You can scale your technology over time.
Equip your managers: People managers are the face of your performance management system (in fact, they’re the face of most of your talent programs!). To work well, performance management systems need people leaders who are equipped with the knowledge and skills to deliver the program to your employees in a way that’s developmental and engaging. People leaders benefit from specific training on how to set clear goals, give feedback, conduct performance check-ins, and guide careers. We recommend live sessions where managers can road test new skills in a safe environment, get feedback, and continue to hone skills.
Continually review and refine: From the outset, commit to regular evaluation and iteration on the program itself. We recommend that you review and refine your system at least annually, by collecting feedback from every level of the organization and reflecting on the outcomes you achieved. Even if you nail your design in year one, your organization and the landscape in which you work will continue to evolve, and your performance management system needs to reflect that.
How to Improve your Alotten Score
Did your Alotten Score suggest you focus on performance management? We can help you work through performance management and any related efforts like succession planning, talent reviews, promotion process, merit increases, or bonus payouts.
Contact us at support@alotten.com
Resources
1:1s:
Manager-Tools 1x1s with the 10/10/10 method:
Radical Candor How to Have Effective 1:1s
Qualtrics The Complete Guide to One-on-One Meetings with Employees
Coaching:
Mind Tools Coaching model for managers
Performance Consultants GROW coaching model
OMT Global Leadership EEC Feedback Model
Performance Improvement:
LinkedIn How Do You Document and Review a Performance Improvement Plan
Evenhour Performance Improvement Plan: An Opportunity To Develop and Succeed
MIT Sloan What we’re still getting wrong about performance management
Other
Lattice Why Job architecture matters
What matters How to roll out OKRs for the first time
Business.com Performance Management Trends
