5 Best Practices in Performance Management That Will Help Employees Thrive
Economic uncertainty means performance management is more important than ever before. Economists predict hiring slowdowns, human resources experts are doubling down on upskilling, internal talent mobility, and other quiet hiring tactics to help drive growth.
By following performance management best practices, you can help your organization build an empowered and skilled workforce. Common performance management issues include:
- Poor prioritizing and time management
- Lack of efficiency
- Slow response times to incoming requests
- Submitting late assignments
- Difficulty staying on task
Although these issues may seem small, they can add up to have a major impact on your company culture and your organization's overall success.
Instead of avoiding tough conversations or waiting for an annual review, it's time to level up your organization's performance management techniques. Read on to discover five best practices—and three common mistakes that might be holding your organization back.
BambooHR’s award-winning software empowers HR professionals to level up performance management with smart automation, research-backed templates, and the ability to customize the process. Learn more today!
*Editor's Note: Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
5 Performance Management Best Practices
1. Provide Frequent Checkpoints
Across the board, experts agree that frequency is vital to improving performance management techniques.
From Karyln Borysenko, Principal at Zen Workplace: “Forget the annual review or even quarterly reviews … to really improve, employees need to see frequent, consistent, ongoing progress. That’s momentum. The more momentum they build, the better they’re able to achieve their goals.”
Brad Stultz, Human Resources Coordinator at Totally Promotional, offers his experience: “We discuss employee performance on a daily basis. As we see an employee stepping up to the plate, we look toward raises, promotions, and bonuses. This also encourages supervisors to deal with performance-related issues more quickly.”
Ongoing performance reviews can be hard, as they require more of managers and supervisors. As As Randy Pennington, President of Pennington Performance Group, points out, “The focus on more frequent or ongoing feedback, coaching, and development is not new.”
It’s an incredibly simple concept that has only been overlooked because it can be a challenge. But it’s important to remember that it is worth it. When employees are happy and receive consistent feedback, it can be felt throughout the company, down to the customer level. Managers can use employee management software to consistently follow up and improve performance feedback.
2. Leverage Performance Management Software
Employee performance management software brings about performance automation, which paves the way for improvement in almost every area.
Thomas Grobicki, CEO of Avilar Technologies, breaks down the best performance management tools new technologies have to offer like this: “Automation to handle the mundane aspects of reviews is a given. Employers are using activities like performance journals, performance planning, performance coaching, peer reviews, as well as competency management to expand the picture they have of the employee.”
With automation, business leaders can do more to improve performance in less time than they used to. Performance management software is available to almost all company sizes and can work to any company’s advantage.
3. Strive for Balance
To avoid an unbalanced review processes—and related negative ramifications—Timothy G. Wiedman, former Associate Professor of Management & Human Resources at Doane University, recommends 360-degree assessments. These kinds of assessments ensure a balanced review: “A strong performance in one area might offset a marginal performance in another. This gives a much more balanced view of an employee’s contribution to the success of the organization.”
When employers identify those areas where the employee is successful, it builds employee morale. At the same time, performance reviews can be used to improve weak areas by implementing strategic plans for each employee’s further success.
4. Focus on Relationships
If you have relationships with the people you work with, positive growth in performance will happen. As Borysenko puts it, “Really smart companies are going to understand it’s about managers developing real relationships with their team and empowering them every single week to see the progress they’re making and what’s possible in the future.”
“The goal of performance management,” according to Pennington, “is to build superior performance for the individual and organization. That happens best when leaders take an active interest in people.”
Frequent, ongoing review processes don’t just help with performance. They also play a role in your relationship building (which also improves performance).
3 Common Performance Management Challenges
1. Using Outdated Performance Management Techniques
HR experts agree: annual reviews are too infrequent to really impact performance in a positive way. Borysenko notes, “The annual review has very little to do with performance management best practice—it’s simply paperwork. Since no one buys into it, it does nothing to actually manage performance.”
In addition to frequency, it’s also important that reviews be development-focused and geared toward helping employees actually improve. “Data-driven analytics aren’t everything, employers should be focusing on the wellbeing of employees. Ongoing performance reviews can provide necessary feedback at crucial times.”
2. Pleasing the Boss Instead of Helping the Employee
Performance reviews aren’t just a time for employees to listen to what they’ve done well and need to improve on; they’re also a critical opportunity for employees to provide feedback.
“A boss-centered appraisal system runs the risk of focusing employees’ attention on pleasing the boss—possibly at the expense of achieving some other important goal," Wiedman says. "Employee behavior that may ultimately harm the organization might actually be rewarded by an appraisal system that does not capture vital information.”
3. Investing in the Wrong Technology
Technology is revitalizing and reinventing performance management for good, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. “Technology is both a benefit and a curse to effective performance management solutions," Pennington points out. "The curse is that technology can become a crutch or something managers and supervisors hide behind to avoid meaningful interaction. We see that today.”
Relying exclusively on messaging platforms, email, or surveys instead of chatting face-to-face in regular one-on-ones doesn’t just hinder relationship building; it can also mean important information gets lost.
Next Steps: Make Managing Employee Performance a Strategic Priority
Despite recent advances in software and strategy, performance management is still a huge stumbling block for many organizations, and it can be an anxiety-inducing process for both managers and employees alike.
You should adopt a test-and-learn approach to measure the success of your policies and performance culture throughout the year. It’s important to consider the following:
- Are you getting the returns you expect from the money and time you invest?
- Are your policies and processes delivering better capabilities and performance?
- Do your performance management techniques reflect the needs of your business and its workforce accurately?
- Are the performance meetings, cadences, and other interactions getting the uptake they need to succeed, and are the results clear and actionable?
The good news: innovative performance management solutions can make the challenges of performance management much easier.
With BambooHR's user-friendly HR software, you'll gain access to research-backed performance management questions, time-saving automation for gathering feedback, and the ability to easily surface data-driven insights. Help your employees thrive with us.