How you can avoid the summer holiday season upsetting your performance management
culture
Managing others' performance effectively is always a challenge for busy managers, particularly for companies going through transition or rapid growth. With multiple demands on their time and never enough hours in the day, many managers struggle to ensure their performance management activities stay on track, especially during the summer season when many teams are operating below full capacity.
For business leaders, ensuring all employees are working to their full potential and their performance is aligned to strategic goals is a main concern and the following six suggestions will help you keep performance management at the top of your managers' agendas, despite competing operational issues.
1. Be crystal clear about the performance required at an organisational level.
Make it clear to everyone what levels of performance are required in terms of inputs, outputs and deliverables. Define qualitative and quantitative goals and support your managers in cascading these down and translating them into team and individual targets.
If, for example, an organisational goal is to increase sales by 10% during the year, what does this mean in terms of individual and team targets? Ideally all employees should have a clear line of sight from their individual goals through to the strategic business plan.
If asked, they should be able to answer the following questions:
"What am I here for?"
"How will I know if my performance has been good, average or below average?"
2. Ensure your managers see performance management as a top priority by including it in their goals and reward systems.
Don't just pay lip service to performance management, use it as a measure of your managers' effectiveness and recognise those who develop their team members through regular coaching and feedback.
Managers who have competing priorities need to be clear about where performance management activities sit in terms of importance, otherwise appraisals will get postponed and 1:1s cancelled, resulting in de-motivated employees who are not being developed.
3. Provide effective, user-friendly and flexible performance management tools.
Performance management tools such as appraisal processes should support your managers activities rather than work against them. Processes and procedures that are too constricting will impair your performance management culture leading to a 'tick-box exercise' rather than an environment where people are developed and encouraged to perform to their true potential.
Systems need to be flexible and allow your managers to manage so that goals that have become obsolete can be changed. Nothing is more de-motivating than being assessed against objectives that are no longer achievable because of external market forces.
4. Link performance management to developmental processes which are aligned to your business priorities.
Provide your managers with the tools to show them how their teams need to develop to achieve longer-term business goals. They should be clear about where their teams are now, where they need to be and what skills, knowledge and behaviours can be developed to get there.
Excellent performance management systems are focussed and include an element of career and personal development, not just to meet current needs, but also future challenges.
5. Continually communicate the importance of an ongoing performance management culture.
Demonstrate the required behaviours by acting as a role model. Encourage open, 2-way dialogue, where everyone is able to give and receive regular and balanced feedback on their performance. Ensure performance management is an ongoing everyday process rather than a one-off, end of year occurrence.
6. Recognise that managing others performance takes time and build it into the managerial job specification.
Performance management processes such as appraisals, regular feedback, 1:1s and coaching are not 'nice to haves' but a business necessity and to do them well managers need to spend time with their teams.
When drafting a job specification be clear about the percentage of time you expect your managers to spend on performance management activities. Too often managers complain about not having enough time to spend with their people due to other operational pressures.
For more articles on performance management on the CIPD's website click here
