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Performance Management in 2017

Companies Must Become Active and Responsive – interacting with everyone working in their company.

Today’s workers expect change. Constantly. And feedback. Specifically, they expect to have the ability to change their goals as business and their own needs change. They also expect to make changes using technology. And any technology solution should mirror the experience they have in their personal lives – it should be intuitive, responsive, relevant, and immediate.

Not only should any technology be up-to-date, it needs to provide immediate feedback.

For example, when you deposit a cheque using your banking app, it tells you immediately whether that transaction was successful. Same when you purchase something using your tablet.

The modern workforce wants that type of feedback about their performance because they have choices to make about their careers and they know it.

Regular performance feedback isn’t a Millennial thing. Every employee wants to know where they stand; what their future is; if you rate them and what for; what the niggles and opportunities and challenges are. Don’t wait until they have resigned to tell them you saw them as a future Director. It will ring hollow no matter how sincere.

Likewise any feedback does not and should not exclude contractors, consultants and other individuals working with the company.  Today’s workforce is flexible moving very between employment and self employment to suit them. Don’t miss out on interacting with everyone that is working for you.

Active Performance Management enhances the Modern Workplace

Any Active Performance Management solution should take the best of the traditional performance management process and combine it with the needs of today’s workforce. It provides a structure that managers and employees want so the process remains fair. It can also include the documentation aspect necessary to support job changes and promotions.

By making the process technology driven, it can take the traditional performance management one step further and facilitate real-time feedback conversations that employees want to move to the forefront. It can also utilise downtime.

Real-time feedback piece is so important to everyone that wants and values it. Waiting once a year (for a performance review) doesn’t work. It’s time to move to real-time system for performance, with frequent touch points between the manager/client and employee or worker.

5 Key Elements of Active Performance Management (APM)

2017 is the right time to introduce active performance management. There are four key elements to changing current performance management processes.

• Regular performance conversations. Most organisations have some mechanism in place requiring managers and employees to meet once or twice a year. With active performance management, employees and managers meet more often. The timeliness of performance feedback helps the employee perform at a higher level.

• Peer-based feedback. In addition to increased manager feedback, employees learn how to provide each other with performance feedback. This can be just as valuable – if not more so – than manager feedback. Employees collaborate with different colleagues every day and need positive working relationships with their peers.

• Focus on current and future projects. More frequent performance conversations mean less time is spent rehashing old behaviour. Workers and managers already know what happened in the past. The conversations are spent on future performance, talking about how to accomplish goals.

• Development at every level. Every worker becomes skilled in delivering performance-related feedback. This helps them take ownership of their career development.

• Looking to the future – The elephant in the room is often that both sides know that to truly realise ambitions the individual may not stay in the same place until retirement. Working in a new way means such ambitions can be captured and companies can stay in touch with their future talent even if they aren’t currently working for them.

When you implement active performance management into an organisation you may wish to phase-in different key elements.

Phased implementations can be very successful and embed ways of working firmly. Performance Management facilitated by technology will allow the flexibility to introduce the entire process or each piece separately.

Active Performance Management Leads to Talent Activation

Organisations must create processes that result in having the best talent in the right positions. Those processes need to include creating an environment where all their workers (current, future and past) feel empowered to ask for and give feedback and that any training/development they need to be available in a timely manner.

When employees are engaged with their work, their performance improves and organisations begin to set the pace rather than react to the pace of the market.

We all understand the opportunity cost of not being agile in business. Think of companies like Uber, Airbnb, and the new Amazon app-based grocery stores. These companies shouldn’t have been able to disrupt the way that they did had “legacy” brands kept up with or innovated within their respective spaces. Increased agility enables organizations to increase the speed at which they conduct business and innovate, which improves the bottom-line.