Doing performance management on a continuous level is a great way to support staff, give HR and managers a fuller and fairer view of performance, and all round increase engagement and wellbeing. In a recent survey conducted by Advanced we found that 42% of businesses said that employee engagement was a top priority for the next year, but what steps are these organisations taking to make this a reality.
Many of us now know that continuous performance management is a great way to boost engagement. By having regular check-in conversations with managers, having short term agile goals, giving and receiving feedback and so on, employees are more likely to stay focussed and motivated with their work as opposed to those who have an appraisal meeting once a year and then are just left to deal with work on their own. Engaged staff also perform better and are less likely to resign than disengaged staff.
Which is why organisations can no longer afford to view continuous performance management as a ‘nice to have’, or something they only focus on when everything is smooth sailing. Supporting your staff and monitoring their performance is vital to keeping an organisation running smoothly. Performance management shouldn’t be a once a year meeting in which everything from objectives to pay increases to development is covered all at once just to tick a box until next year.
That being said we understand that taking on a new way of working can be daunting even during the best of times, and can seem nearly impossible when you already have challenges to deal with. So, we’ve got some helpful tips to help you take on a continuous performance management model even during hard times.
Start with the basics
You don’t need to go from 1 to 100 all at once! Start with the basics of continuous performance management and go from there. Introduce frequent one to one conversations with managers and their teams to start with, this is an excellent opportunity for employees to voice their concerns and managers to offer help, these meetings don’t need to be an hour long, even just having 15 – 20 minutes every few weeks set aside can be helpful. Next you can look at scrapping annual objectives and replacing them with short term goals, or enabling feedback to be given in real time. Even just a few small changes can change the way your people work for the better.
Follow the 3 stages of transformation
Transforming your workplace culture can be done in three easy steps, the first is normalising. This consists of making behaviours included in continuous performance management, such as check-ins, feedback etc. normal behaviour for your staff. You can do this by explaining why you have introduced these actions, talking about them frequently to employees and encouraging higher up members of your workforce to set an example by carrying out these actions.
Next there is habitualising, which is getting to a place where everyone in your organisation is doing continuous performance management without needing to think about it, just like checking emails in the morning, it comes as second nature. This may take a while, but if actions are easy to carry out and employees are able to see a positive impact on their work lives these actions will become part of the work culture at your organisation.
Finally comes optimising; once everyone is using continuous performance management as part of their day to day lives you can begin to look at how you can optimise performance management in your organisation to get the best result possible. We’ll be talking more about transformation over the coming weeks so keep an eye out for more content on this!
Install an easy to use platform
Having a continuous performance management platform in place takes the pain out of actions like setting goals, giving feedback and so on. Making these actions simple means employees are more likely to carry them out, making life easier for your people and reducing the time and resources needed to train staff around continuous performance management. Here at Advanced Clear Review we pride ourselves on the ease of use of our platform, it’s one of the main things our customers love about the system.
“My first thoughts were that this is exactly how I would design a performance management system given the chance, it takes away everything that I’ve always hated about performance management solutions, and makes processes quick and simple.” Richard Taylor, Leigh Academies Trust.
To find out more about continuous performance management and Advanced Clear Review you can book a free demo with a member of our team today, and start saying yes to engaged and productive employees.