Why do our managers and employees hate it so much?

Performance Management is that topic that makes managers and employees go “aargh that again…”

But the truth is, there are only a few organisations, if any, that can say “we have nailed our performance management process and all our staff members look forward to it.”

Why do we hate it so much?

The reasons are endless. But the biggest issue is the corporate culture, established in the mid 1950s, has made the annual performance appraisal (established by WD Scott as far back as World War 1) the bedrock of performance management.

Performance Management as a practice.

The first aspect we need to do is to disassociate performance management from annual performance appraisals. Performance management is part of the day-to-day role of a manager and their team members. This is done to ensure that they deliver value to stakeholders on time, at the right quality and, therefore, deliver the best service. It is a management practice in which we track ourselves on the goals which have set. This allows us to solicit help and feedback from other stakeholders when required. The new age “ways of work”  include agile, some teams are having daily 5 minute check-ins to track their performance on a daily basis. This subsequently, shows you that you probably practice performance management on a daily basis.

Consistency in Performance Management

The second and most important aspect is consistency. Therefore, whatever methodology you chose as your performance management process, you need to make sure that there is consistency in the organisation and consistency in how often you do it.

How to create consistency in Performance Management?

To create consistency in the organisation you need to create:

1. A performance management policy – this is a guideline which defines how performance management is conducted in the organisation. How do we:
   • Manage performance on a day to day?
   • Provide training, coaching and other interventions to equip our employees with the right skills to perform at a high level?
   • Measure performance?
   • Incentivise and reward performance?
   • Deal with non-performance?
2. To create consistency in terms of incorporating performance in our day to day work lives we need;
   • An automated way to manage our performance and obtain data. Because the biggest reason why organisations fail to have consistency in performance management, is that it is conducted using manual processes. Manual processes just waste people’s time, they are difficult to track and get meaningful data from.
   • What is required is an integration of various systems. These help manage the performance management process. Examples of Performance Management Systems include:
     • Day-to-day management: use Timesheets, project management systems like JIRA, iStratgo and Harvest.
     • Performance tracking: use performance appraisal, 360° Feedback systems like iStratgo.
     • Training and coaching: use LMS and training systems like Academy Ocean.
     • Incentives and rewards: use Reward (gamified systems) like iStratgo.
     • Communication and collaboration: use chat systems like slack and MS Teams.

What you can take away from this?

In conclusion, your 3 take aways from this blog should be to run some sort of change program to:

1. Disassociate performance management from annual appraisals,

2. Create a performance management policy that defines how performance management is conducted in your organisation, and

3. As such, automate the all performance management and related processes via integration of existing system and or procuring the ones you don’t have.

Learn more about how to push the potential of Performance Management even further by linking your remuneration to Performance Management by clicking here.

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