Performance Management

 Performance Management

What is Performance Management...?

                                                                        (You Tube)

Performance management is a corporate management tool that helps managers monitor and evaluate employees' work. Performance management's goal is to create an environment where people can perform to the best of their abilities and produce the highest-quality work most efficiently and effectively (Tradi, C. 2021).

                                                                               Figure 01

What com­pris­es an effec­tive per­for­mance man­age­ment sys­tem?

Per­for­mance man­age­ment isn’t an easy field to nav­i­gate. It’s con­stant­ly evolv­ing, hence the need for an effective performance management system. New performance management trends emerge every year and, unfor­tu­nate­ly, all too often, human resource depart­ments get it com­plete­ly wrong.

This leads to employ­ees left feel­ing deflat­ed, unmo­ti­vat­ed and unen­gaged. Man­agers are frus­trat­ed at the poor lev­els of team and indi­vid­ual employ­ee per­for­mance. Thank­ful­ly, more and more com­pa­nies are now wak­ing up to the impor­tance (and result­ing ben­e­fits) of effec­tive per­for­mance man­age­ment sys­tems. The first step towards revitalizing and improv­ing your exist­ing per­for­mance process­es is to under­stand what an effec­tive performance management system (Armstrong, M. 2019).

Understanding Performance Management...

A formal performance-management program helps managers and employees see eye-to-eye about expectations, goals, and career progress, including how an individual's work aligns with the company's overall vision. Generally speaking, performance management views individuals in the context of the broader workplace system. In theory, you seek the absolute performance standard, though that is considered unattainable. Managers can use performance management tools to adjust workflow, recommend new courses of action, and make other decisions that will help employees achieve their objectives. In turn, this helps the company reach its goals and perform optimally. For example, the manager of a sales department gives staff target revenue volumes that they must reach within a set period. In a performance management system, along with the numbers, the manager would offer guidance gauged to help the salespeople succeed (Tradi, C. 2021).

Why is performance management important...?

In any organization, no matter the size, it is important to understand what your employees are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are doing it.

Performance management is an important part of every organization. Three of the main problems that organizations face are:

• keeping employees engaged
• retaining talent
• developing leaders from within

These are the issues that performance management very effectively targets.

Keeping employees engaged

Engagement of employees is a focus of any management team. In a yearly appraisal system, goals would be given at the beginning of the year and then revisited 12 months later to see if they had been met. This long stretch of time without feedback or check-in is an almost certain engagement killer.

Figure 02

Retaining talent

Employees who have frequent meetings with management to discuss performance, solve problems and receive training are more likely to stay with the company.

If employees see that their management team is putting in the work to develop them professionally, help them succeed with their goals, and reward performance on a consistent basis, then they are more incentivized to both stay with the company and work harder.

Developing leaders from within

This consistent development and partnership between managers and employees allow for the development of leaders from within the company.

Recruiting costs can be extremely high, as are costs for onboarding and training new employees. To be able to groom leaders from within the company means that there is already a proven culture fit with this individual and that training costs and resources spent developing this person into an asset are not lost.

References...

Armstrong, M. (2019), handbook of performance management.

Tradi, C. (2021), performance management definition.