When looking into performance consultancy the most commonly asked questions start along the lines of "but what do performance consultants actually do?" and we hear you! So here we have compiled a list of 6 tips performance consultants would recommend to give you insights into what knowledge they have and which sectors they can help your business in. Know Your People
Relationships have to come first before coaching or recommendations for improvements can take place. It's recommended that the relationship-building process starts at the very beginning, the onboarding process. You need to ensure you are not only hiring employees with the required skills, but also the core beliefs and similar values to you and your organisation. Building relationships at work has never been easier, there are no excuses for a lack of communication and effort towards an employee. Relationships nurture great trust between leader and employee which is crucial to having a hardworking employee who isn't afraid to ask for help when needed. The relationships you build will also impact what workplace culture is created within your organisation and will bring a more personal connection between the employees and their work. Team building should be a standard practice in every organisation to help encourage better relationships between all employees. Having remote employees does not limit the ability to conduct team building sessions no matter how far they are although staying connected through texts, emails and calls do need far more emphasis to keep a good relationship.
Understand Performance Management
Performance management is NOT a stick to beat people with formal discipline. It is about helping your employees engage with their work and foster a mindset of continuous improvement. Analysing the data against the knowledge, skills, attitudes and habits of your team can help you understand where to start. Performance is about relationships and the results. Be sure to have open conversations with your team about performance, appreciate the met deadlines or exceeded expectations. As well as this, it is always useful to conduct quarterly performance and engagement surveys where employees can express their own concerns anonymously about the current performance levels, this allows a safe space to then give suggestions on what improvements they might find useful in the organisation that would help them to take their performance to the next step up. These surveys are a useful tool to measure performance, making it easier to manage everyone's individual performance levels.
Know Where You Want The Business To Go
Setting objectives and goals for the business. The vision and then communicating it to your team. Setting a strategy to work backwards from the vision or goal and aim to close performance gaps to reach this. If your business goals aren't set clearly, employees may not share the same core values you built your organisation upon. Sharing those core values helps bring leaders and employees together. When everyone is working towards the same major long term goal, communication can improve which promotes far more relevant ideas and suggestions from employees.
Define Best Practice
Often people don't know what great looks like. If you can demonstrate this with visual examples, videos and standard operating procedures (SOPs) it removes the element of doubt and makes everything a lot clearer.
Set Expectations
What we want, what we think, what we communicate and what is understood are very different things. It is important to set expectations with each employee so that they know what to do to ensure they perform at their best. This is easily done if you have the time available to give every employee a monthly goal-setting session in a 1 to 1 session with a manager or leader. These sessions are the perfect time to review what has been done well already and what expectations have been met or exceeded. Alongside this, you'll be able to find the next steps to better performance to meet the expectations of the role, or you may find gaps in performance which can then be discussed in the session calmly and thoughtfully. When finding these gaps in performance it's important you reinforce the expectations you set early on and discuss why those gaps are occurring, from there you'll be able to find solutions or compromises that set your employee on the best track for success by the next goal-setting session. Unless it is a larger change that will take time, then it is best to review those issues quarterly to ensure it isn't forgotten but still has the appropriate timeframe to unfold. Remember these expectations should be clear to the employees from the get-go. Ensure the job description contains a list of the top expectations and priorities of the role as well as the general organisational expectations. You can never go too in-depth when writing up a job description, the right people will take the time to read it.
Promote A Learning Culture
The ability to learn and be coached is vitally important. It helps to increase a person's level of fulfilment as well as to create a workforce of highly skilled and experienced people. Make flexibility and curiosity part of your core competencies. We understand it is not as easy to get everyone together since many employees are remote. We recommend looking at short zoom workshops or implementing learning technology. At the Modern Mind Group, we partner with TalentLMS and you can get your free e-learning solution here.
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!