Getting the best performance out of your employees is an ever important step in maintaining your business and your workplace. Managing the performance of your workforce is a way to do this. By observing how your workforce has performed over the year, you can give advice to your employees on how to not only improve their efficiency, but also to give your employees a better idea of the organisational goals you have set for your company.
Ultimately, analysing performance allows you to show how they have worked towards achieving these goals, and what they can do to improve their output towards your goals. One way of understanding performance growth is through performance appraisal. This involves those at the management level making top-down assessments on teams and then rating their overall individual performance at an annual performance appraisal meeting.
This method is highly focused on quantifing your organisational objectives. Often, it is also linked to wage increases or bonus payments to employees. This allows employees to see their objectives in a scale which can be easily understood, while providing excvellent incentives in the form of bonuses or pay rises to improve their performance.
While performance appraisal gives your employees a basic idea of how they have progressed over the year, it does little in the way of actually improving your employees' performance over that year, and is more targetted towards whether your employee is liked, rather than their performance. Part of this issue is caused by the fact that appraisal only takes place at the end of the year. This may improve your employees' for the next year, but offers no sense of growth for the entire year. It becomes more of a chore for your workers to endure.
This isn't helped by the overly top-down approach, nor by the ratings which are recommended for giving a numerical value to your employees. Reducing your employees to numbers may lead them to believe they are not valued as people within your company, and the inflexibility of the appraisal system leads to an overly bureaucratic process. But, there are alternatives.
Defining performance management
One alternative to performance appraisal systems is performance management. Performance management still holds the same basic objective as performance appraisal: to evaluate your workforce and to provide them with an insight into how they are doing and how they can improve. However, it goes about the process in a very different way. It provides your employees with specific objectives for the year, and what should be achieved for the next performance review. While using a bonus system much like the appraisal system, if provides insight to what objectives need to be met in order to obtain remuneration. It also includes personal development objectives for your employees, which gives employees the scope for growth within the organisation.
Performance management is performed at intervals throughout the year, either quarterly, or half yearly. However, because of the nature of the personal development objectives which are documented throughout the year as well, it provides input all year round, allowing for a greater amount of flexibility. This information is also availiable throughout the entire year for all participants.
The change in scale is the most prominent difference, as well as the focus on dialogue between management and the workforce as opposed to a strictly top-down system. At the beginning of the year, the yearly organisational goals are set. Employees provide a performance diary where they state what they have achieved throughout the year. Mid-way into the year, there is an interim report, which is much like the end of year assessment. However, by providing the half-year assessment, you can give your employees a better idea of how they are progressing, and what they can do to achieve better results in the second half of the year.
This is a marked improvement against the appraisal system, as it allows management to stress the importance of the organisational goals of your business, while also allowing for flexible changes to happen in the overall strategy of sticking to these goals. While a strict rating system is easy to implement, it lets your managers state more clearly and freely how they actually feel about the progress of employees, and allows for better focus on values and behaviours as well as objectives. Overall, Performance Management can be used to increase the engagement of your staff, by recognising their efforts and encouraging meaningful development.