How to Improve Employee Performance in 4 Steps

The performance appraisal. Love it? Hate it? Honestly, when it comes to employee performance there really isn’t any other way to improve the quality of their work. However,there are ways to botch the process if you don’t conduct these vital performance methods correctly. Whether your organization likes formal performance appraisals or prefers a casual, real-time approach, there are ways to make sure your team gets the most out of your feedback. Thorough communication and preparation lay the groundwork to improve employee performance. Here are four ways to get started:

Step #1: Communicate performance expectations

The job description may be a cryptic determinant to employee performance, but employees need to understand what is expected of them from management. Communication before performance problems occur is an indispensable method to creating an environment of development. If leadership purveys the necessary information ahead of time, employees will have a greater understanding as to how they will be evaluated in the future.

Step #2: Follow-up after the performance appraisal

The purpose of conducting a modern performance appraisal is to professionally develop employees. However, 40.1% of supervisors fail to follow-up after the performance reviews to see the progress of their team’s work [1]. Mona Berberich explains,

“If you want to permanently succeed, you need to create and instill a routine. One workout is not going to make you look like Arnold. Schedule regular appointments and follow up with your employees’ performance.” 

Step #3: Prepare yourself     

You expect your employees to come to their performance appraisal ready with questions and input and to receive feedback. The real question is: are you prepared to give it? This is where regular performance reviews or 360 degree reviews come into play. Over half (51%) of employees rank their current performance appraisal system as average [2]. If your organization joins the other 13% of companies that hold performance reviews at least every 6 months combined with good practices, you’ll likely get a better score. 

Step #4: Challenge your employees

Your team wants a break from the mind-numbing day-to-day tasks. These might be important responsibilities, but if employees are expected to do these on a regular basis the tasks can lose their intrigue. Studies show if high potential employees are proposed with challenges (accompanied with support if they need it) that 70% of them will stay with their current company [3]. Liz Wiseman suggests:

“Try giving them higher-stakes work that addresses more complex problems and a more diverse set of stakeholders. For example, it might be time for one employee to take a divisional program to the entire company. Remember to make it hard in the right ways though…. You want to productively expand on the meaningful work they’re already doing.”

Whether you love or hate performance reviews, they are necessary. They don’t, however, have to be something to revile. You can make them productive and meaningful if you follow a few simple steps. Communicate the performance you expect of your employees before it’s time for an appraisal, and neither you or they will be surprised with the results of the review. As a supervisor, you have to be prepared before the performance appraisal and follow-up after the review with consistency or you risk losing the developmental efforts of the performance appraisal.

These few tips along with a challenging project on occasion formulate the foundation for improved performance throughout your team. Take a demo of Reviewsnap to see how we can make performance management easier for you.

Sources:

[1] HR Daily Advisory - Supervisors’ Most Common PA Mistakes (2014 Performance Management Survey)

[2] CEB - High Potential Employees - 55 Percent Set to Leave

[3] HR.BLR.com - Infographic: 2014 employee performance appraisal practices 

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Should Employee Performance be Judged on a Bell Curve?

The common practice of professional “grading on the Bell Curve” does little to improve employee performance. In fact, it does quite the opposite - employee performance (and happiness) plummets. So, to answer the question, “Should employee performance be judged on a Bell Curve?” the answer is no. A performance appraisal shouldn’t be conducted on a group level with individual performance expectations… they should be performed on an individual basis for group improvement. Here’s why (with a couple of examples to drive our point home).

Reason #1: Forced Rankings and Collaboration Don’t Mesh

The workforce has changed. It’s not always a 9-5 day, and the way we work is changing. Despite the dissonance between old-school style ranking and the evolved workforce, in some cases, performance management hasn’t caught up yet. Flatter organizational structures and the growing desire for a collaborative workforce negate the effectiveness of the Bell Curve performance appraisal system. Why? Say an employee scores higher on the curve than their co-worker. That can place a superiority position in what’s supposed to be a collaborative team.

Computer Sciences Corp., for example, recently started grading performance on a Bell Curve at an astonishing 40% employee failure rate. Well over one-fourth of their employees will fall under what is considered company standards, no matter how well they performed, simply because their coworker [1] did better. 

Reason #2: Inaccurate Assessments

When your team hits all of their performance goals - not only reaches them, but knocks them out of the park - employee performance can’t effectively be judged on a Bell Curve. Charlotte A. Donaldson, Senior Learning Strategist at Booz Allen Hamilton, said:

“On those occasions when managers lead truly high-performing teams, someone still must be ranked low, despite meeting performance plan goals. To replace that person with an unknown is expensive.” [2]

So, each performance appraisal, you would then either replace the poor performers or place them on a probationary period while they fought for a place at least in the middle. Bell Curves mathematically can lead to higher turnover rates and an unnecessarily high recruitment budget.

Reason #3: Your Employees Hate Them

Bottom line, forced rankings diminish the value of your top performers, raises middle performers, and ignores the efforts of the under performers. Josh Bersin explained the basic faults of the system [3] and the damages to employee morale in three concise and poignant phrases:

• Grading on a Bell Curve rations high performers, regardless of those who perform well. These are (typically) the top 10% of the workforce.
• Forced rankings set a “losers” group at the bottom of the employee food chain. These are (typically) the bottom 10% of your team.
• Then there’s everyone else, the middle of the herd. Because they make up 80% of the employees you just scaled, that’s where your budget for employee growth goes. 

Even the Masters Have to Change Sometimes

This isn’t the same workforce as it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Even the corporate giants like Microsoft and Adobe [4] have realized this calls for a change. Despite their mass popularity (and resume fodder), these companies realized the need to rid their organizational performance standards of the dreaded Bell Curve. It was a sharp realization when these behemoths began to change their performance management practices that grading on a Bell Curve actually discourages collaboration and damages productivity.

Forced rankings can cause more problems with performance than they actually solve. They invalidate any kind of teamwork atmosphere and greatly disrupt productivity. Grading on a Bell Curve effectively becomes an avenue for expensive employee replacement and training. Not to mention, your employees hate the practice. Replace the faulty system with a more human appraisal that ranks an employee’s performance against their own work, versus the work of their teammates. The Bell Curve may have been effective once upon a corporate era, but the inconsistencies with modern workplace characteristics have rendered the system ineffective.

Ready to change what you believed about performance appraisals yet? We thought so. Take a demo of Reviewsnap to strengthen your employee feedback.

Sources:

[1] Washington Business Journal - CSC begins rating employees on an extreme bell curve

[2] Performance Management - Forced Ranking

[3] Forbes - The Myth of the Bell Curve: Look for the Hyper-Performers

[4] Bloomberg Business - Microsoft Kills Its Hated Stacked Rankings. Does Anyone Do Employee Reviews Right?

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Photo Credit: c r i s via Compfight cc

Why Performance Management Requires Leadership

You can’t have a performance management system without someone that oversees the everyday happenings around the office. However, just because the organization’s management has a hand in the performance of their employees doesn’t mean that’s where the buck stops. Organizational leadership has to be involved in the performance management system as well, as they ultimately dictate the performance culture of the organization. Performance reviews give leaders the information they need to analyze the data and help improve their team’s performance. They promote high-performance standards through regular performance feedback and goal-setting through coaching. Organizational leadership has to set these changes in motion.

1.  Leadership needs to focus the team

There are many moving parts to performance management that need oversight including aspects like performance reviews to make sure employees stay on track. As a leader, your responsibility in any given performance appraisal is to motivate, coach, and mentor through effective means of communication and recognition. SHRM defines performance reviews and performance improvement as a standard for performance management [1]:

“The most comprehensive application of a dynamic performance management system occurs when the cause and effect connections of current performance are used to define and align future performance. In the field of human resources, the latter connection can be achieved by incorporating the concepts of goal setting and performance improvement plans into the feedback processes of a performance management system.” 

2.  The team needs leadership to create a performance strategy

Your employees need to understand where their team is headed. That means as a leader, you have to be the one that gets them to that end point. Unfortunately, however, 55% of organizations say that the business leadership is not entirely engrossed in performance management as they should be [2]. Employee alignment, goal coordination, and subsequently strategy suffer when leadership takes a step back from performance management integration. 

When leadership has an active role in performance management and creates a strategy for their system, employees are more likely to stay on track with their personal goals as well as organization goals. Not to mention, their managers take accountability for their team’s overall alignment and correct performance issues as they arise. A strategic performance plan keeps the entire team focused on one end goal. 

3.  Leaders track and analyze performance data

Even though leaders may not aggregate these numbers themselves, they are responsible for understanding what these numbers mean for the performance of their team and the overall success of the organization. With the plethora of talent management systems, 56.3% leadership has begun to recognize the need to integrate their performance management and plan to do so in the next 12 months [3].

Aspects of the performance management system like employee performance reviews can shed light onto practices that need to be altered or areas where employees need training across the board. Unfortunately, the performance appraisal process isn’t approved by everyone; 58% of employees said it wasn’t an effective use of anyone’s time [4]. With communication and collaboration as a part of the company culture however, you can ensure this data and the changes that are made thereafter stick and actually improve the performance standards throughout your organization. 

Leadership needs a heavy hand in performance management. Organizational leadership sets the standards for employee performance standards and company culture quality. Your employees look to you to set examples and to keep them focused on achieving company goals. You can’t do this without an effective performance management strategy and the information to track from that performance management system. Through a strategic performance management system, leaders can identify developmental and training needs throughout the organization and adjust their programs accordingly.

Sources:

[1] SHRM - Performance Management: American National Standard

[2] Training Magazine - Performance Management: Large Divide Between Perceived Importance and Effectiveness

[3] Brandon Hall - Executive Summary : State of L&D 2014

[4] Deloitte University Press - Performance management is broken

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How Should I Prepare My Team for a 360 Degree Feedback Session?

Effective performance reviews include everyone, especially the evaluated employee. A 360 degree feedback looks at an employee from all angles (as the name would suggest), from managers, coworkers, and even the employee. The up-and-coming trend isn’t familiar to many people, considering 69% of companies still assess their team’s performance with outdated tools. That means they will need a little bit of preparation to gear up for their 360 degree feedback. So, take these 5 steps to get your team ready for their performance appraisal.

Photo Credit: Death to Stock Photo

1. Define the goals of the 360 degree feedback

All too often organizations view their performance reviews as routine documentation of their team’s performance at work. 360 degree feedback sessions can have honest results, but only if you take the time to think about what you actually want as an outcome. Defining objectives is crucial to measuring and tracking performance thereafter. Decide:

• What is important to organizational success and how does my team work towards those accomplishments?
• How will I measure my employees’ performance?
• Who will be involved in the 360 degree feedback?

Share this information with your team. The more they know about the performance appraisal ahead of time, the less apprehensive they will be during the review. Because it is a 360 degree feedback, you want employees to be involved in the assessment of their performance. We said in a previous post:

"Performance reviews are not one-sided, or at least they shouldn’t be. The dialogue between a supervisor and their employee is invaluable to the successful outcome of a performance appraisal.” 

That is the very essence of a 360 degree feedback. The point is to include the employee so the process becomes more qualitative than quantitative.  

2. Communicate what the feedback will cover

Whether you conduct performance appraisals annually or bi-monthly, it is important to tell your employee exactly what it will cover. The success of the last project? Overall performance? All of the above? Employees don’t want ambiguity in their review, they want real constructive feedback. Over 90% of people would rather have properly delivered negative feedback during their review. Employees need to know if their performance matches company standards, and they want to live up to those expectations. While it can be stressful to give employees this news, it will also turnout better results after the 360 degree feedback. 

3. State expectations for those who’ve never participated in a 360 degree feedback

If you’ve never conducted a 360 degree feedback, it will be a learning curve for everyone. Establish how the process works and what it will look like when the time comes. In the United States and Canada alone, 47% of companies use this form of review to garner and deliver information about employee performance. What’s left is a surprisingly large number of organizations that don’t participate in 360 degree feedback sessions for performance evaluation purposes. It stands to reason then that a majority of your team won’t know what the process entails from the outset.

4. Disclose Anonymity

Some companies disclose which co-workers participate in the 360 degree feedback, others allow for anonymity. Reviewsnap gives users the ability to use as many anonymous participants as they please. The use of nameless input allows employees to feel they can participate without being chastised for their opinion and it eliminates unneeded bias.

5. Leave room for open discussion and questions

Before, during, and after the review, employees may still have questions regarding their 360 degree feedback. It is important to be open and responsive to the queries as to eliminate any anxiety towards the review. During the performance appraisal, your team may bring up questions or points you might have overlooked. When you establish an open environment for discussion, you give participants a voice, which in turn makes them more receptive to the feedback they receive. 

These 5 steps will help you to prepare your team for their next performance appraisal. 360 degree feedback sessions give managers a well-rounded and full-perspective evaluation of their employees’ performance. Performance reviews can be nerve wracking for some employees, but when you create an open environment for discussion, your team will be more receptive to feedback. 

Prepare your team for 360 degree feedback sessions by getting employees involved and engaged in the performance appraisal process. Take a demo of Reviewsnap to get started.

Sources:

[1] Harvard Business Review - Your Employees Want the Negative Feedback You Hate to Give

[2] HR.BLR.com - Future of 360 Degree Feedback: New Study Finds Increased HR Influence

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