How to Keep Track of Organizational Goals with Performance Management

Some people make lists, others put sticky notes on their computer screen, and many simply fly by the seat of their pants. It's not easy to keep track of work resolutions, especially when they are long term as resolutions tend to be. At work when deadlines begin to pile up and projects are coming out of your ears, finding time to work towards keeping your goals on track is near impossible. But don't worry, your team doesn't have to do it entirely alone.

What tools can help track goals?

Over the last few years, technology has exploded. Between the tablets, phablets, and smartphones… even your car talks to you now. With all of these pieces of technology, there's undoubtedly "an app for that" that also translates to your Tools like Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox, and Trello. These apps can help you and your team stay on task while making the most of available time. Trello, for example, separates responsibilities by importance to keep projects streamlined and the office organized.Microsoft Office 365 and Dropbox allow your team to use their mobile devices to access work documents without the constraints of a desktop computer.

While technology (i.e., big data, analytics, tracking) is necessary in today’s business world, disruptive technologies (i.e., social media, personal devices, email) can impede the success of goal setting and maintenance. Josh Bersin (@Josh_Bersin), Principal and Founder of Bersin by Deloitte said: 

“Agile software was the beginning of the era of greater transparency and continuous feedback. Now we have social media everywhere, which promotes even greater visibility into the everyday lives of everyone around us. The other trend driving this is a strong focus on analytics. Open discussion, regular check-ins, big data, and greater awareness are now part of every business and when you pair those activities with company-wide, quarterly goal setting processes - organizations can see 30-40 percent greater returns.” 

What can the workload handle?

Perhaps most importantly, employees have to understand their work capacity. The biggest issue with these newfound hopes of a brighter and more productive year is that all too often the goals are lofty. Take a look at the average workday breakdown:

●      44.5% of the day spent on primary job duties

●      13.8% of the day spent on reading and responding to emails

●      12% of the day spent on administrative tasks

●      9.3% of the day spent in useful meetings

●      7.7% of the day dealing with interruptions

●      6.9% of the day wasted in useless meetings.

That leaves a grand total of 5.7% of the day for special projects, working towards goals, and everything else. Adding lofty aspirations to the list of daily activities leaves your team inundated with a workload they might not be able to handle. 

This is yet another reason why accurate performance appraisals are so crucial to business development and employee growth. Two-thirds of highly rated employees are not the top performers, so inaccurate appraisals could give them disproportionate time at work for more goals than they can reasonably achieve. 

What is the manager’s role?

Productivity and engagement start with the right attitude. Employees have to do more than simply show up to work... they have to actually show up. While employees are their biggest critics, sometimes they need a little help getting motivated to accomplish their goals. Whether it's faith in their own personal brand or how that aligns with the organization, a little "Nice work! This turned out great with the limited time you had," or, "This is great, but it still needs some attention in these areas," are examples of simple continuous feedback. However, there are other more involved ways managers can motivate the team before failing to meet a goal.

●      Clearly define expectations - It’s a natural propensity for people to mentally wander. However, if you give employees direction, their goals will align with your expectations for development. Understand how your employees work and what their limits are so new goals don’t push them too far.

●      Believe in your team - Employees are more likely to perform well if they know their supervisor has faith in their performance.

●      Praise and correct appropriately - Nothing is quite as demotivating as public criticism. More often than not, employees are unaware of shortcomings, and they certainly don’t need to be altered to them in front of their team. On the same note, while private praise is appreciated, it’s not as effective as doing it publicly. 

No matter what your role in the company, it’s part of your job to help your employees and coworkers reach their work objectives. While it’s not your responsibility to micromanage their every task, you do have to help them understand how to manage their daily performance requirements and goal maintenance simultaneously. Performance appraisals, goal tracking software and apps, and clear motivation from supervisors all play a role in helping your team reach their goals this year in the office. 

Keeping goals on track is a team effort; don’t let your team do it alone.

Take a demo of our performance management software to see how you can streamline this process.

Developing Your #1 Asset…Your Employees

Developing your employees is a task that takes proper thought and understanding. As a company, you want your employees to grow in their positions and in the organization. There are many options to do this, but here a few that can truly make a difference.

First things first, establish goals with each of your employees. Lay out a road map of where they want to be and what they need to do to get there. This way they have motivation to do well and they know you understand what position they want to be at someday.

Providing incentives to do well is also a big motivating factor for employees. Incentives can be anything from bonuses to recognition of their work well done. Rewards show employees that if they go above and beyond, they will be noticed. This creates a drive for employees to perform well.

By offering continued education you are also developing your employees. Provide your employees opportunities to take classes that pertain to their positions or professional development classes.

Another extremely effective development tool is providing a mentor program. With this program, you would pair an employee with someone who is in their target position. This way they can learn and gain advice from their mentor. This is also a great way to have communication amongst all tiers in the company.

Developing your employees takes time and dedication, but by taking the initiative, you are improving your #1 asset.

Employees Creating Their Own Goals

Do your employees create their own goals in your current review process or do their managers create the goals for them? Now with ReviewSNAP you have the option of creating goals either way. You can have the managers create the employee's goals and the employee will be able to view the goals, but make no additions or changes to the goals. Or, you have the option of allowing employees to create their goals, discuss them with their manager and once they agree on the goals the manager will have the ability to lock down or approve those goals. From then on the goals that have been approved can no longer be changed, but the employee will be able to create additional goals if necessary.

Managers' Self-Assessment Questionnaire

In assessing a manager's ability to manage people, we believe it is important for a manager or supervisor to step back and look introspectively at their ability to direct the efforts of others as well as think about the environment they operate within. The following brief questionnaire is for your use in carrying out this type of self-assessment. Please respond to each question as honestly and objectively as possible in order to provide yourself with an accurate reflection of your situation.

1. I believe that I am an effective manager. True or False

2. My employees would say that I am an effective manager. True or False

3. I feel comfortable in my role of managing people. True or False

4. My ego does not get in the way of making sound, logical decisions. True or False

5. I am a good leader of people. True or False

6. My people are high performers. True or False

7. I have confidence in my people to meet my expectations of them. True or False

8. I have confidence in my own abilities. True or False

9. I understand what is expected of me. True or False

10. My people understand clearly what is expected of them. True or False

11. There is a cohesive, team-oriented atmosphere in my company, department or work unit.
True or False

12. I deal with problem situations and employees in an expedient manner and don't ignore them. True or False

13. My attitude is positive. True or False

14. I am a good communicator. True or False
15. I set an appropriate example for my employees. True or False

16. I establish clear expectations for all of my people. True or False

17. My people feel good about working for me. True or False

18. My people regularly come forward with ideas, problems or suggestions. True or False

19. I would rather deal with people than numbers or things. True or False

20. I look forward to coming to work in the morning. True or False

21. I am effective in coaching my people to higher levels of performance. True or False

22. I would describe my management style in the following way:

23. My biggest day-to-day challenge is:

24. These are my concerns about my people in terms of their ability to meet my expectations:

25. My strengths and weaknesses as a manager are:

26. I feel that I need to improve in the following areas in order to become a better manager:

27. I would describe the culture in my work unit in the following way:

28. My three biggest frustrations as a manager are:

29. My people would describe me as:

30. I currently hold my people accountable for meeting expectations in the following manner:

31. If I could define my ideal job, it would be:

32. The one thing I enjoy most about my job is:

33. The one thing I enjoy least about my job is:

34. My personal goals for the next year are:

35. My personal goals for the next five years are:

The Struggle Between Efficiency and Effectiveness

Business books, magazines and newsletters are full of recommendations about becoming more efficient. They talk at length about the importance of the bottom line and incremental gains from reengineering and total quality efforts. And they talk about how technology can provide a real boost in efficiency.

But with all this talk about efficiency, are we losing something in terms of being effective? To distinguish between effectiveness and efficiency, a brief definition should help. Effectiveness is doing the right thing. Efficiency is doing things right. These simple definitions point to a clear distinction that has major implications for businesses of all sizes. The implications arise from the difficulty in balancing both efficiency and effectiveness.

With the pressure to constantly be as efficient as possible, an organization can get caught up in focusing too much on reducing process time and/or the number of employees and not enough on what makes sense for the organization. For example, suppose a distribution company decides that it is taking too long to process orders because there is an additional review step in place to ensure that the order is accurate. But often times, orders get backed up slightly for shipping because the people doing the additional accuracy check on outgoing orders fall behind. So the decision is made to eliminate this additional step and at the same time save some money by eliminating two positions. This is done in the name of efficiency because orders will go out faster which has some real merit. But the result of eliminating this additional step is a significant increase in incorrect orders being shipped. The impact of this is additional time dealing with more customer complaints, additional picking and restocking time, additional costs of returned shipments and, above all, customer ill will.

This example illustrates how doing the right thing is often overshadowed by doing things right. What employees often view as being efficient can many times impact the company negatively. This is why it is important for management to create an environment where employees are encouraged to look for ways to become more efficient, but do so without degrading the level of customer service and quality.

Bringing a balance between efficiency and effectiveness is one of the critical jobs of any owner or manager. In the above example, the company might have been realizing a competitive advantage because it was shipping orders with a higher degree of accuracy than its competitors. When it decided to save some money by streamlining a process and eliminating some positions, it lost that competitive advantage. And in terms of saving money, any savings realized from the streamlining were in all likelihood given back several times over.

It is important for businesses to constantly look for ways to do things right....to become more efficient. But it is equally important that decisions along those lines be made by asking questions about the impact on quality, customer service and employee morale. Bad decisions relative to efficiency can very often have a negative effect on all three of these variables.

With regard to technology and efficiency, does the addition of new technology to any process have a positive impact on these variables? Business processes and what's good for the customer should drive the implementation of technology. Technology should not dictate how a process gets defined. Start with the customer and work backwards. Define the process based on the best way to serve the customer and the best way to accomplish tasks. Once the business process is defined, match the technology to the process. When technology is allowed to drive the business, things tend to get forced to fit and the customer, productivity and employee morale with often suffer.

We can safely say that balancing efficiency and effectiveness is not easy. But it is important for organizations to stay focused on the long-term impact of all decisions. Yes, short-term performance is important, but if it takes precedence over long-term viability it could lead to a decline in performance over time.

Deal With Laziness

With productivity being such an important factor in profitability, it is critical that managers and supervisors deal with employees that simply don't work hard enough. Too much time spent on personal phone calls, extended breaks and lunches, slowness in work and visiting too much among co-workers are all things that should be addressed swiftly. An employee must understand the expectation of hard work. When a manager or supervisor ignores "lazy" behavior he/she is essentially endorsing it. Make it clear to all employees what level of work is expected from them and then hold them accountable for achieving that level.

Advantages of HR Technology

A large portion of companies are still using the traditional pen and paper for performance reviews. Companies need to assess the benefits of an online performance management system opposed to the traditional reviews. Below are the benefits that the ReviewSNAP Performance Management System offers.

Real time updates to goals, feedback and reviews:

• If an employees’ goals are changed or feedback is given for an employee it is updated in real time and can be viewed right away. Also, this allows you to keep track of an employees’ progress towards their goals by keeping track of their goals and adding feedback at any time during the review period.

Better and Truer Reviews Can Be Given:

• Rather than taking the chance of basing an employees review for an entire period on recent events only, you can keep better track of their progress, mistakes, etc.
  Automating Your Reviews For More Review Cycles. By automating your reviews, it makes it easier to have more review cycles. Rather, than having to wait for an annual review, because of the annual, manual reviews, which can be a hassle, you have the option to create as many review periods as you wish.

Access to review system from anywhere with Internet access:

• If something came to mind at home or you on a business trip you don’t have to wait to get back to the office to access your system or write a review. If something critical comes to mind about an employee and you want to get it in the review before you forget it, there is no better way than an web based performance management system.
  

Goes GREEN

A big initiative in today's world is to be more "green." Not only is it an initiative outside of the business world, but inside as well. Whether you are trying to use more biofuels, less plastic and paper, this can all be done inside the business world.

One way to help your green initiative is to use ReviewSNAP's Web based performance review system rather than the traditional paper performance reviews. ReviewSNAP requires no paper, only a computer with internet access.

Conduct Effective Performance Reviews

There is an age old process conducted in most organizations, large and small, known as performance review or performance appraisal (the term performance review will be used primarily in this article). The importance of providing feedback to employees cannot be overstated. But doing so in the proper setting, context and manner is critical to carrying out successful performance reviews.

Having a performance review system in place is important for a number of reasons including:

-Enhances coaching and mentoring opportunities for managers and supervisors.
-Clarifies the performance criteria that are important for employees to understand as important in doing their respective jobs.
-Defines a clear basis for wage increases, promotions, disciplinary action, and other important job related issues.
-Reinforces that performance and pay are rationally tied together.
-Serves as motivation to continue to focus on improving performance.
-Brings consistency to the organization in terms of how employees' job performance is measured.
-Creates a means for clear and complete documentation of job performance.
-Helps identify training and development needs.
-Assists in associating company goals and objectives with employee goals/objectives.
-Communicates important information to the employee about how they are perceived relative to the work they do on a daily basis.

All organizations should have some sort of performance management system in place. Many “systems” in place are not well defined and/or they do not address critical performance variables (competencies) commonly associated with work.

Employers should understand that personal biases enter into the overall perceptions about employees. What many managers believe is factual about an employee is often nothing more than their own biased perception of the employee’s performance.

Assessing an employee is sometimes an unfair process. In most organizations, there are often misperceptions about various employees. And unfortunately there are a lot of managers and supervisors who are just not good mentors and coaches and, therefore, the employee does not have the benefit of correcting performance issues prior to their annual performance reviews.

Adding to the problems associated with personal bias, misperceptions, and poor coaching is the fact that many performance review sessions (the actual meetings to review performance) are poorly conducted by the manager.

It is important that reviewing performance be taken seriously because it is a critical feedback mechanism for employees and a chance for managers and employees to share valuable information. But keep in mind that formal performance reviews are not the only time that feedback to employees should be given. Appropriate and timely feedback to employees is important in order to reinforce positive "behaviors" or address negative "behaviors". In short, well managed organizations do not use the performance review as the sole feedback mechanism. There should be regular interaction between manager and employee prior to formal review sessions.

Some organizations choose to use a formal review process more often than annually and that is acceptable and may even be preferable depending on the culture of the particular organization. However, conducting formal reviews too often can dilute the effectiveness of the process so it is important to consider the impact of doing formal reviews more often than once per year.

Typically a more effective approach is to create a culture where regular feedback is provided outside of the formal performance review process. In this scenario managers conduct more informal discussions about training needs, goal achievement, a job particularly well done, performance concerns, etc. as they are needed.

Having periodic discussions about goal achievement is central to a high performance, high accountability culture. These are all important to helping employees achieve their own goals and dreams and to the overall success of the organization.

An effective performance review/appraisal system includes at a minimum:
-A well defined process for documenting performance throughout each review period. This is an important reference tool when it comes time to complete the actual review form.
-Well informed/trained managers/supervisors relative to how to complete review/appraisal forms and how to conduct performance review meetings with the employees.
-A properly prepared review form that includes appropriate and valid competencies for measuring employee performance.
-A valid and appropriate rating mechanism (scale).
-Clearly defined goals for each employee that relate back to organizational goals.
-A clearly defined review period and review process that all employees understand.
-Fairness and equity in the review process.
-Consistency in how employees are evaluated. In other words, minimal or no bias from one employee to another.

Many organizations, large and small, are using what are known as on-demand performance review systems. These are typically secure Internet based systems that allow you to manage all of your performance reviews as well as document performance. ReviewSNAP at www.reviewsnap.com and Success Factors at www.successfactors.com are two such products that are considered excellent performance review systems. One major advantage to these systems is that they do not require you to build or load software on any of your computers. Simply subscribe and login into the system from any computer with Internet access.

To help ensure that your organization has an effective performance review/appraisal system in place, the Performance Review Manual provides a complete guide to developing your performance management system. To learn more about this widely used tool, Click Here.

Coaching Employees Is Your Job

Every manager has to deal with performance, attitude, behavior or other employee problems. There are too many managers and supervisors that seem to want to ignore or minimize the problems, however. For the sake of other employees, managers should deal with problems as they arise. Ignoring the problem can lead to disgruntled co-workers and it sends a message to employees that they can underperform or act inappropriately.

One of the key roles of a manager is to help employees learn how to become better employees. When a problem arises with an employee that requires a manager to have a discussion with the employee, the manager must become a coach and a counselor. Keep in mind that the role of a manager is to assist the employee in understanding the issue at hand, listen to the employee's feedback and provide input to the employee that will help the employee deal with the issue.

Also, it is critical that the manager follow the appropriate disciplinary process. If an employee is not made well aware of performance, attitude, behavior or other problems, it will become more difficult to terminate the employee should that become necessary.

To effectively coach and counsel an employee, keep these things in mind:
-Make the feedback constructive and do it in a caring manner.
-Talk about what you perceive, what you feel and what you need. Be extremely clear.
-Restate the employee's remarks by paraphrasing to be sure you fully understand what has been said as they provide input to the process.
-Talk about what the employee does. Stay away from personality traits. Address behavior and don't become a psychologist.
-Zero in on observed or known behavior. Be very careful about how you approach an employee about heresay. In fact, try to avoid dealing with heresay unless you have a strong reason to suspect it is true.
-Be specific and discuss only one issue at a time.
-Provide some positive feedback in addition to the negative feedback. In fact, try to start the conversation in a positive manner.
-Allow the employee to give feedback freely. But be careful to not get caught in a repetitive conversation that goes nowhere.
-And finally and, perhaps most importantly, listen, listen, listen!

Good managers are good coaches. They can effectively communicate to an employee that a problem exists and they know how to listen effectively. How a manager handles problems as they arise can have a significant impact on employee morale.

Are Your Goals Really Goals?

Appropriate goals are the driving force behind successful organizations. Successful organizations have taken the time to diligently develop realistic, attainable goals that provide legitimate focus for the organization. The goals are not just words on paper.

Goals should be a part of a formalized, written strategic plan. The strategic plan is your road map...the strategic planning process determines what you market, where you market it, how you market it, and, more simply, how you are going to allocate precious money and people
resources.

Goals should have the following characteristics:
-They are attainable.
-They require hard work to achieve.
-They are easily understood.
-They reflect critical aspects of the organization.
-They support the overall mission or purpose of the organization.
-They are consistent with the organization's capabilities and resources.

Goals are the jumping off point, so to speak, for developing specific objectives, strategies and tactics. The combination of goals, objectives, strategies and tactics form the strategic plan.

Your people should be well aware of and focused on the organization's goals. Without this focus, your people are never sure where the company is headed and, therefore, cannot fully embrace the importance of the various decisions being made.

Ask yourself and your employees these questions when you sense that impending decisions might be drifting away from the direction provided by your goals; What are our goals? Does this decision help us achieve one or more of those goals?
Make sure that your goals are not really strategies in disguise. This example illustrates the difference between goals, objectives and strategies for a company looking to grow through diversification:
-Goal: Achieve profitable diversification of the company.
-Objective: Have in place one new division by 12/31/99.
-Strategy: Diversify through acquisition as opposed to product development.

This example clearly shows one of the key areas of focus for the company; diversification. And it shows how they intend to achieve this goal; by acquiring another company. This goal and its supporting objective(s) and strategy(s) clearly communicates to interested parties that at least part of the company's growth will come through diversification by acquisition.

Look at your comany's goals. Are they clear, concise and meaningful? Do they provide real focus? If you achieve each of your goals, will your company be successful or more successful than it is today? Do your people know what the goals are and are the goals ingrained into the culture? Have you limited the number of goals to somewhere between 3 and 7 since too many goals will confuse and muddy the focus and too few might not provide enough focus.

If your company doesn't have a sound strategic plan in place, you are living dangerously. Without one your organization is like a rudderless ship. Today's business climate is much too competitive to not have a well constructed strategic plan.

Successful, high performing companies, large and small, have a long-range plan and they live it and breath it. Their focus is on that plan and on their goals.