How To Create A Meaningful Performance Management Process

The most effective performance management programs are approached as a two-way street. However, in many organizations, it is viewed as top-down policy, driven solely by management. To increase the effectiveness of your performance management program, you should consider integrating more of your employees’ input into their review process.

The reasons are pretty straight forward as employees are insightful about their performance and can often provide the best coaching to themselves. Moreover, you can’t rely only on your managers to perform a complete assessment of their team members. There will always be something they miss, and this can lead to your upper-management not uncovering or recognizing your company’s top performers.

Additionally, you should have job-specific reviews or evaluations. This allows managers to rate employees based on their successes or failures in their specific job. This also allows management to have more precise comparisons among team members who hold the same position, and helps separate the best performing employees from the ones who might need help.

Employees Are The Best (And Worst) Critics Of Themselves

It is critical for employees to have input into their performance management review so they can highlight their successes and adequately explain any deficiencies. Often, employees complete remarkable tasks that go unnoticed. Encourage them to tell you about those occasions as they can be very revealing about the employee’s performance and their work ethic.

The downside to this strategy is that sometimes employees can over analyze their performance. They can be too critical of their output or quality of work, especially if they are in the habit of comparing themselves to team members holding different positions or working on different types of projects.

Give Your Managers A Break

You can’t rely on your managers to observe everything. The scope of control and observation in many companies is often too broad for managers. There is just not enough time to know what each of their team members is doing every day, what tasks they complete or what results they created.

Employee input can help managers have a more complete view of how the employee contributed to a project. You can obtain this insight by asking very pointed and specific questions. Moreover, if the employee had significant input to the company, their answers will reflect their contributions.

Generic, Non-specific Performance Reviews Are Inadequate And Don’t Reflect The Actual Value Of Your Employees

Your performance management system also needs to be focused on each job. Without a scale or measurement of contribution to the company, an employee never knows how much impact their work has on the organization as a whole.

Tailored evaluations give the employee a chance to explain their work and achievements clearly. It also strengthens employee engagement and improves motivation. The employee will know their assessment isn’t a “cookie-cutter” process.

Equal Parts understands that establishing a fair and effective performance evaluation process is difficult. We have years of experience helping clients develop evaluation systems that add value not only to the development of the employee but also to the growth of the company.

We invite you to contact us to see how we can help your company set up a performance management system that will benefit both leadership and employees.