Top Four Trends in Employee Performance Management

The performance management process has been experiencing a significant shift in view and effectiveness over the past few years. The introduction of new generation employees has driven a lot of change in workplace behaviors. Annual rating-based performance appraisals are slowly fading away to continuous performance monitoring. While the annual approach is still used in most companies, an increasing number of organizations have concluded that their performance management approach and methods are both outdated and ineffective.

In this blog, we present some of the key trends in performance management the growing businesses need to adopt.

Regular Feedback and Training

Today, companies are adopting the practice of providing assistance on how to solve problems rather than solving the problem for the employees. Whether or not businesses have a proper performance management process, training offers significant benefits by maximizing the potential of the employee’s talent.

When you enable managers as trainers, the employees not only improve their performance, but managers also benefit from a better understanding of their current team and support them for better results. An advanced performance management system empowers coaching and enables managers and peers to provide observational, quantifiable feedback that can provide indicators to employees to enhance their and team performance.

360-degree feedback is another performance management approach. It requires everyone in a team to provide feedback for each other, instead of only managers giving feedback to employees.

Continuous Performance Management

The once a year performance review has been getting out of the HR process for quite some time now. Performance management methods are going through a significant change. Ongoing feedback, training, and 360-degree feedback have become key players in employee performance management. Instead of regular competency-based discussions and complex rating systems, managers can now review all the feedback and training notes, and the goals the employee had during the review period, to summarize the performance. Insights from these discussions and feedback help HR and managers understand where they need to invest their core resources.

Your HR team should not just roll out a performance management process and chase down employees, but to make the workforce more productive and effective in their role. Technology can significantly assist in ongoing performance management and provide effective automation to improve productivity. It transforms the HR team into strategic partners instead of transactional employee chasers.

Real-Time Goal Management

The conventional approach to goal management relied on managers setting their employees’ goals at the beginning of the year but not really being able to regularly track progress of those goals. Employees would repeatedly be pulled into various tasks, and their original goals would end up declining.

Active-goal based performance management using software to automate is a trend that helps managers and employees to focus on goals enthusiastically. Moreover, as goals change, employees can replicate those changes in the goals and set new goals. An automated system enables managers and employees to stay focused on team goals and have real-time discussions on accomplishments.

Rather than creating annual goals, setting goals in an agile manner address various problems with goal configuration and employees spending time on unproductive activities.

By setting goals using an automated system, you can ensure that your workforce is aligned with business goals and managed in real-time. This regular approach to goals ensures that employees do not lose track of their goals. It also enables managers to act as trainers by being able to monitor their employees’ goal progress.

Incorporated Workforce Insights

As systems become more advanced, a lot more insights within these systems can be harnessed. The process of running fundamental reporting misses many insights and predictive behaviors that exist within the automated system. However, as companies move from traditional approaches for performance management towards more interactive approaches to performance, more insights are available.

Employee insights help for talent mobility by job-skill matching based not only on their skills but also on their priorities and experience. But, some of these insights are not always in a system, so it must be solicited using employee surveys. Integrating this with system-generated insights can be a powerful tool for businesses to optimize their talent pool.

Insights help decide what makes an employee succeed and what can prevent an employee from underperforming.

Conclusion

As the business develops and generational changes take place within organizations with the introduction of the modern workforce, performance management should continue to advance and take a real-time approach enabled by technology. Businesses that take advantage of these developments can provide a better environment for their employees where they can perform well.