Are employees meeting their job requirements? Are there areas for improvement? What needs to be shifted to reach optimal performance? Performance management provides a structured plan for developing, managing, and improving employee performance. While regular reviews may feel like a chore, if done correctly, they can improve performance and productivity across your organization. HRDQ-U’s performance management webinars give you the tools you need to implement effective and consistent performance.

Performance Management Strategy

Your performance management strategy should be consistently applied to all employees, taken seriously, and accurately benchmarked. Follow these steps to help your managers employ performance management that sticks:

Plan You need to ensure employees understand what’s expected of them by setting clear goals. What use are performance management standards if employees don’t know what they are, why they matter, or how to reach them?

In the planning phase, managers need to ensure jobs are clearly outlined, goals are set, and expectations are clear. Managers should also be soliciting employee feedback and creating a dialogue about roles and responsibilities. Coming to an understanding early on is essential for effective performance management.

Check In Ensure employees are in a regular dialogue with their managers about the expectations and goals outlined in the planning phase. Keeping the conversation open and transparent ensures that employees aren’t blindsided when more formal reviews come around.

Regular check-ins involve providing ongoing feedback and suggestions for improvement. Make sure managers have the tools they need to understand when and how to keep these conversations going. That could mean enforcing regular check-in meetings between managers and their reports, soliciting monthly feedback up the reporting chain, or having regular HR check-ins with management.

Evaluate Evaluation is the formal review phase of performance management. Some organizations conduct annual performance reviews while others may choose to do them more often. Managers lead these formal evaluations and assess employee performance against the benchmarks set in the planning phase. If reasonable goals are set and regular check-ins are transparent, the results of employee evaluations shouldn’t come as a surprise to any employees. Instead, it may serve as a more standardized tool for comparing performance across the organization and identifying systemic areas for improvement.

With HRDQ-U performance management training webinars, you can provide your managers with the tools they need to cultivate effective conversations with their reports and ensure teams are on track with expectations.