Managing employees' performance from day to day can become a difficult task as every employee will have different needs and requirements that also need to be addressed in a certain way to best encourage them towards their goals as well as the organisations’ goals. There are three key factors that need to be considered when managing performance, those are; establishing objectives with individuals and teams in order to help them be aware of the role they
play in the business, holding individuals accountable for their performance levels and encouraging personal growth and lastly but most importantly, improving performance amongst employees and teams.
1. Reward Systems
Knowing that improving performance is the main goal of performance managing we need to find ways that drive employees to also want to up their personal performance or their team's performance. Putting simple reward systems in place are a great incentive to get employees to work at their best to achieve goals and further rewards. On top of this, rewards help employees to feel recognised for their work, when an employee is aware that their leaders are paying attention and will appreciate hard work, then they are more inclined to perform at their best. Unlike an organisation where there is little to no appreciation shown through feedback or rewards if an employee is going to receive the same reaction or no reaction for a higher standard of work, why would they bother?
2. People Before Process
It cannot be stressed enough how crucial communication with every employee is, no matter their role, how often they work or if they work remotely, especially when managing performance. An employee's performance levels can vary due to many factors, sometimes these can include out of work concerns or issues but workplace factors have plenty of impacts too. Without communication, you will not be aware of these deciding factors and then you use the ability to offer the help you may have been able to give.
3. Measure Performance
When managing performance it’s important to be able to know where your organisation excels and where it lacks. Knowing these strengths and weaknesses and what scale they are on will help you be able to manage performance more effectively.
To do this, the majority of organisations will conduct quarterly performance surveys so the employees can give their raw and real input on how they are performing, how they think other employees are performing and how well teams are performing. To measure performance you’ll want to be asking questions on a scale, but you can also collect data such as word counts, the time it takes to complete certain tasks, customer feedback, customer satisfaction or others depending on what type of organisation you own. Although the results for these may vary for different reasons, it can give a helpful idea of how your employees are performing if you ask the right questions based on the type of business you run. Ensure that some if not all questions align with the overall goal of the organisation and measure how close you are as a team to meeting the big goals as well as smaller milestones.
4. Two-Way Feedback
When looking at the modern mindset for business, we at the Modern Mind Group often mention feedback as being one of your most available and powerful tools if done correctly. Yes, performance does depend a lot on the employee themself, but leaders have plenty of influence on employee performance too. Providing encouraging feedback can help boost performance if you’re raising their self-esteem, even negative feedback can be done in a way that causes a boost rather than a drop in morale. Treat negative feedback as an opportunity for both you and your employee to grow and reach newer better goals or reinforce original goals. As well as giving feedback, you must be accepting of receiving it yourself, in order to be constantly managing your team effectively, you need to be aware of what is working for them ad what isn’t. These can come up casually or in meetings, either setting works, just be sure to listen attentively and put the feedback into action where and when possible.
5. Encourage Talent, Support Underperformers
It is inevitable when managing teams that you will find wide variations of different types of workers, the endless factors that can affect team performance mean that no organisation can have a large team that all perform at outstanding levels 365 days a year, that isn’t realistic, but we can definitely encourage great performance as often as possible and provide support if and when those performance levels take a slight drop. As discussed in the reward systems section, all leaders need to be appreciating every ounce of quality work produced by employees, never take it for granted because your employees will notice and could feel negatively. On the flip side, what happens with underperforming employees? Well, it is still possible to congratulate them on small milestones rather than end goals if they haven’t met those yet. But more importantly, you need to support these workers, has their level of performance gone down? What’s causing that? It will be in your best interest to conduct an open and private conversation where an underperforming employee can voice any concerns because likely, they are already aware their performance has dropped, especially if there is one main root cause to it. Different causes will require different solutions and some factors will be out of your control at times, just continue to show support and make any workplace adjustments necessary or even encourage some time off.
6. Coaching and Training
If you happen to come across underperformance there is a chance that the cause is a skills issue, perhaps due to a promotion or undiscussed use of software or new procedures etc. In these cases, the best fix will be providing the correct training for your employees. Training should be free and accessible to all employees and can be implemented before the lack of necessary skills becomes a problem (for example, training employees before promoting or giving extra roles) You can also use training as a good refresher to keep every team member aligned with the process and procedures your organisation prioritise. When underperformance is due to other factors such as workplace issues or home life issues, it can be best to take a coaching approach. What this means is taking time with every individual employee to discuss how goals are going to be met, what changes may need to be made in the workplace, teach strategies and coping methods for common issues and prioritise growth and wellbeing. By taking the time to focus on every individual employee you will notice a knock-on effect of better team performance, although coaching can also be done in a group setting with open and accepting discussions on specific team goals and team chemistry.
The Modern Mind Group are emotioneering human performance not engineering it.
As people operations and performance consultants, we work with your business to identify and improve performance gaps so that you can be more profitable and professionally develop your people. Over 12 years of expertise in people operations and performance with results to back it all up. Why settle for the average when there is a world of possibility when you know how to achieve it? Untapped potential - Let's go get it!