Change Your Thinking Around Performance Management

A recent Harvard Business Review article, Reinventing Performance Management caught my attention. It is an excellent article that reviews how Deloitte is changing their performance management framework to something that they see as more “nimble, real-time and individualized” as well as being a program that focused on the future, not on the past.

At Engaged we believe whole-heartedly in creating programs that are individualized, future-focused and are designed to create high performance teams. In this article, Deloitte ran their numbers and for their 65,000 employees they were spending 2 million hours a year in the performance management process and they weren’t seeing results. I can only imagine how much that cost an organization of that size and scope! Having said that, when you run the numbers further that is approximately 2.5 hours per employee, per month focused on performance management! Not a high number and certainly not out of the realm of reasonable. The important thing to remember is that this is an important part of your job as the supervisor.

“Taking time to schedule 1-1 performance meetings will show your entire team that you are serious about their success.“

Here is where we see a lot of organizations flounder when it comes to performance management. The belief is that it is a one-time thing that you do once a year and then you don’t have to worry about it again until the same time next year. And yup, it is all about the past. This has been proven time and again not to work. It is time to change our thinking.

We believe you should be meeting weekly with each staff member and in those meetings asking questions in 3 key areas will allow you to measure performance and to provide feedback. Doing this will definitely bring a return on your investment on your performance management program and will make the 2.5 hours a month per employee very productive!

Here are 3 key areas to explore during your 1-1 meeting:

1. How do you feel about your performance since we last met? Are you enjoying your work and your team? Are we maximizing on your strengths? These questions are going to focus you how things have been and will raise any red flags quickly on how someone is performing. This is also your opportunity as a supervisor to make your comments about how you feel they are performing. You might even learn about some strength your team members have that you didn’t know about!
2. Where do you want to go from here? What skills would you like to be building to reach your goals? Being present and “in the moment” is one thing however this question focuses you both on the future.
3. How can I help? What is getting in the way of reaching your performance goals? These questions will build loyalty and strengthen the bond between you and your team members as they see that you are invested in their success.

Your Engaged Assignment: Schedule your 1-1 meetings right now with your employees. Ask them these key questions and see what responses you get. Go easy if this is the first time you have done this as they may not know how to take it but stick with it and over time you will see just how powerful these simple questions can be.