The last few months / years haven’t been smooth sailing, and it looks like there are more rocky times ahead. With all signs pointing to a recession looming, and cost of living rising, potentially causing distracted and stressed out staff, we’re sure you are looking to do all you can to prepare for unsure times.
By making plans now you won’t need to scramble round for a solution when things have already gotten unmanageable, so you should think of ways, big or small, to support your staff members, keep productivity up and your organisation functioning whatever happens.
One easy way you can do this is to look at how you are doing performance management. Many organisations are still doing performance management the old fashioned way, setting yearlong objectives, having appraisals meetings annually and keeping paper based or desktop document records.
Whilst these might tick the basic boxes of what you need to do for performance management, these organisations aren’t helping their employees, and they’re not helping to protect the organisation as a whole during unstable times.
Organisations who have a solid continuous performance management system in place will be in a position to:
Support stressed out staff
You will likely find many members of your workforce feeling more stressed out and distracted as the cost of living goes up, making life a little harder for everyone. Whilst continuous performance management can’t help you to pay all your staff members more, it can help to relieve some of the stress at work.
By having regular one to one conversations with their team members, managers will be better able to spot those who are unengaged and struggling, and offer them help and encouragement to get back on track. Also, setting short term goals will give your employees something clearer to work towards, helping them to stay focussed and engaged.
Reduce resignations
Not only can you take some of the work life stress away from your staff, but by showing them how they can develop within your organisation you could keep some of those employees who might be feeling they should be looking for a job elsewhere.
Building a strong development plan with employees helps them to see the bigger picture of their career at your organisation, this in turn can boost their performance, as they are now working towards something bigger, not just day to day tasks. Remember it costs a lot more to replace an employee than keep one, and that’s before you factor in the resources to train them!
Identifying top talent and under performers
Unfortunate as it may be there may come a time when some hard decisions need to be made in regards to cutting or keeping staff members. If this does arise you don’t want to be caught out not knowing who your top and bottom performers are in the organisation.
Organisations who are using a continuous performance management system are in a good position to make these decisions, as managers will have a clear idea of how their employees are performing, who is continually exceeding expectations, and who doesn’t always put the effort in. If they have been keeping track of their frequent performance meetings correctly they should be able to answer some multiple choice questions using the data stored, to give HR a good idea of who is performing the best, and who is lagging behind.
A solid continuous performance management system is not just a ‘nice to have’ but a key part of any organisation looking to survive and thrive through difficult times. We saw this throughout the pandemic, organisations turning to performance management to keep communication strong, monitor performance of remote workers, give support to those mentally struggling with the lockdown and so on.
That is why over the coming weeks we’ll be releasing more content around how your organisation can be using continuous performance management to protect productivity and support employees. If you’d like to find out more you can book a demo today with a member of our team.
