What are the 3 performance elements?

As a human resources leader, it is important for you to prove your value to the organization by ensuring you choose the best team members for each department. It is no small feat especially when you must fulfill many requirements in any given day. To help you ensure that your organization is in good shape, consider using the following elements for establishing and maintaining a working performance management system.

1. Reward and Compensation

Every employee deserves to be appreciated and compensated for the time they have invested in serving your company. Rewards and benefits motivate employees to perform because it is not in vain. Note that monthly salary does not pass as reward and compensation, especially if it is the same for every employee on that level. A bonus should come special and is one of the most effective known performance management strategies after promotions.

Because the managers oversee various departments, it is crucial to understand their relationship with their employees. By allowing employees to review their managers, you can more quickly assess the performance level, leadership style, and influence of your managers. and assign someone with the right qualities to lead a team.

3. Development and Improvement

Some employees need to be motivated more for them to bring out their best. If an employee is going to complete a task ahead of schedule, for example, they have plenty of time to find if there are any improvements. An effective performance management system can be implemented to help ensure consistent development and improvement for employees and for the tasks they work on. However, this is the kind of performance management system should be implemented with much caution so that you don’t become a bully boss.

In most situations, employees do not work in the same place or position forever. This is a real situation that employers need to be prepared for. That is because some of the employees that leave the workplace, some of them hold an unbeaten record of perfect performance. Therefore, it is wise to have a succession plan to transfer skills from one employee to the other to ensure gaps are covered in the interim.

5. Performance Monitoring

It is critical to track the performance of your employees because it is likely the only way of finding out where improvements are necessary. Also, you can have your employee’s track their performance, and this will help them improve because they will know if they are too reluctant.

Any organization has a purpose and targets to meet. Most times, employees understand what is expected of them, as most of them are professionals who have learnt their skills specifically for that job position. Without an understanding of what the CEO or senior management of a company is aiming for, all the skills and knowledge of your employees could potentially be useless. The employees usually set the goals, and the managers implement to ensure that everyone keeps their word.

Always ask for feedback from your employees if you want to ensure a well-rounded and supportive HR department. That way, you will be avoiding dealing with unexpected issues. Continuous feedback also makes it easy to track your employees and know if there are any development needs necessary to enhance their performance.

It is not always guaranteed that the best team of employees will get the job done. The outcome can go both ways, and as the manager, you must be prepared to handle both. Paying employees according to their performance is one of the right ways of managing outcomes. That is because they will enhance employee performance knowing that they can earn much more when they work harder.

A sound employee management system should be comfortable for both employers and employees. For the best results, most organizations implement several employee performance management elements. It is, however, encouraged that before implementing any strategy, get to understand your CEO more and get the clear picture. That way, you will know the right skills and talents to hunt for. Additionally, it will help you understand better the kind of employees’ management system that will work correctly.

The talent management consultants at KeenAlignment know that performance management success can only be achieved if you have the following five key elements in place:

1. Planning and Expectation Setting
2. Monitoring
3. Development and Improvement
4. Periodic Rating
5. Rewards and Compensation

If you don’t have the five key elements in place in your performance management system, you are never going to have a performance management system which encourages success and nurtures a true sense of worth at work for your employees.

When we look at each of the performance management areas above in a little more detail, we understand a little more about what each stage entails and how they contribute to the overall success of your performance management system in order to create a happy and successful workforce.

1. Planning and Expectation Setting
Goals must be set, the means by which those goals will be evaluated must also be made clear and a specific time frame must be outlined and then adhered to. Performance management success requires clear goal setting.

2. Monitoring
The performance management consultants at KeenAlignment can help you in many ways with the monitoring element of your performance management system. We are aware of the best performance management tools and techniques on the market today that can help track the ongoing progress of your employees in a simple and quick fashion.

This means that your employees will also be able to keep track of their performance at work, which will give them ownership of their own development; an essential quality to cultivate in an effective employee.

3. Development and Improvement
Once you have monitored your employee for a specific period of time and through a number of ways, you will need to encourage further improvement and development.

If an employee is on target to meet his or her goals, the shrewd and effective performance manager will not stop there, but encourage ways in which to help the employee exceed and go beyond their indicated goal. Successful performance management always strives for more and we can help to show you how to find further ways of stretching the capacity and potential of your employees.

4. Periodic Rating
It is important to avoid waiting until judgement day when working on strengthening your performance management system.

You will have outlined your cut-off point for reaching the goals that you set, but in the interim period it is essential that you provide some kind of feedback or rating to help your employee realize whether or not they are on track in terms of meeting that future goal.

Some employees see their development clearer than others. Some employees don’t realize until the last minute that they are not going to achieve what they have been asked to achieve. They over estimate their capabilities and do not plan ahead. This is why the successful performance manager learns to provide periodic ratings in between the setting of the goal and the evaluation of that target.

5. Rewards and Compensation
In some ways, the rewards and compensation stage is the most important element of all when looking for performance management success.

Why?

Because if you want a good employee to continue to achieve and develop, they need to feel recognized and appreciated; there needs to be some kind of end to encourage the next round of triumphs.

The performance management consultants who work for KeenAlignment have an endless list of ways in which to reward and offer compensation to your employees when targets are met or even when targets weren’t met, but your employee did everything possible to try to get things done.

We spend our time showing you how to reward your employees; how to put the final cherry on the performance management success cake and take your happy workforce on to the next level.

For more information on performance management techniques, systems and advice, contact us today and explain to us a little about what your current needs actually are.

28th April 2021

It’s easy to overcomplicate Performance Management. But you don’t have to. We believe that there are four elements that need to be used as the foundation of a performance culture: Purpose, Outcomes, Accountability and Teamwork.

In earlier posts we pointed out that Douglas Macgregor identified issues with the practice of performance appraisal in a HBR article nearly sixty years ago. Issues scarily similar to the same ones prompting organisations to make change today. What’s more, Macgregor made suggestions for what could be done about these issues.

Now, we would have to hand in our consultant cards if we didn’t weigh in with our thoughts on the elements of performance management.

We believe there are four essential elements that need to be present for any performance management framework to work effectively.

They are:

Element 1 – Purpose is well defined.
Element 2 – Outcomes are well designed.
Element 3 – Accountability is nurtured.
Element 4 – Teams are your leverage point.

Element 1 – Purpose is well defined.

The first element is that leaders at every level of the hierarchy can describe why we are here. They can create a clear and explicit context for the work that needs to get done. The Oxford English Dictionary defines Purpose as “the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists”. Purpose is at the very heart of why the organisation exists.

Now, it’s probably an urban myth but to illustrate the point, there’s the story from the late 1960’s about a NASA employee who was sweeping the floor and was asked what his job was. He answered it was to put a man on the moon; a purpose articulated by John F. Kennedy in 1961.

In the new world of performance, the difference between organisations that sustain performance and those that don’t will be the clarity of purpose which is shared among employees. It’s important that leaders at all levels embody, interpret and cascade that clarity of purpose through the organisation.

Element 2 – Outcomes are well designed.

Performance management is all about outcomes. It always has been.

Outcomes are the embodiment of our commitments. Outcomes prove you are making a difference. In simple terms outcomes sit within the shadow of our purpose and you know outcomes are well designed when you can respond with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question ‘did you do it?’

Effective performance management requires leaders at all levels to put real effort into designing outcomes, being clear on what needs to happen.

Element 3 – Accountability is nurtured.

Being accountable means being responsible for something and ultimately answerable for your actions.

Accountability is tough and needs to be nurtured from the earliest stages of careers. The first level of accountability is for yourself and the outcomes you must deliver. The next level comes when you have responsibility for the work of others. In organisations without a performance culture, the concept and construct of accountability stops right there; at the point where people exert direct control.

In organisations with an effective performance framework, people are nurtured to move to a higher plain, where they are willing to hold themselves accountable for things and people they don’t control. In these organisations people are comfortable with horizontal relationships, with paradox and ambiguity, and they spot opportunities outside their direct control and set about aligning with peers to respond.

Element 4 – Teams are your leverage point.

One of the key ‘pain points’ clients cite with performance management is that managers don’t have, can’t or aren’t willing to find the time required to set up performance agreements, do quarterly or half yearly ‘check ins’, and develop quality end of year reviews. Not to mention the skill required to do it well.

It’s high time to challenge the premise that performance management systems must be focused on setting of objectives and assessment and feedback between managers and individual employees.

Now, we’ve said it before, ‘teams are the windows to organisation culture’.   Almost all work is done in teams, therefore it follows that teams are the key point of leverage for effective performance management.

Here’s the new alternative. Every 100 days or so every manager spends four hours with their team in a structured team performance meeting.

If they have used our team performance meeting formula, they will have an engaged team aligned to purpose, clear on outcomes and ready to take accountability not just for their respective jobs, but for things and people they can’t control. Magic.

In Summary

Are these the only four elements needed for effective performance management? No. Different organisations and their different circumstances will determine what other elements need to be present.

The four elements of Purpose, Outcomes, Accountability and Teamwork need to be used as the foundation of a performance culture.

What other elements does your organisation leverage? Join the conversation. Your input is welcome.

We are happy to share the team performance meeting formula if you would like to engage in a serious conversation about performance management.