Elevating Success: The Crucial Role of Performance Measurement and Employee Development

Performance Management has had its day.

Ahhh the good old Annual Appraisal. Meeting up with someone every 12 months to talk about their work that year, what had gone well, what hadn’t, how did they think they had done? (IS that a trick question?), how well do you think they have done?, all with the aim of giving some arbitrary score that may or may not give them a pay rise but certainly won’t change the price of eggs as far as they are concerned, or worse still, will de-motivate them entirely… well it’s time consuming, annoying and really rather pointless.

How you measure the performance of your team is not something you will find in a book or on a website nor even in this amazing blog.

That’s because how you and your business do it should be exactly that. It’s not a one size fits all kind of thing.

What I would like to talk to you about is the different elements of it that you can pick, choose, adapt, tweak, ignore, build on and use to create something that works for your business, motivates your people, and ultimately achieves your business objectives.

That’s the bottom line of Performance Measurement. It’s not about egos. It’s not about pay rises. It’s not about fitting into a scoring system. It’s about whether the business is meeting its objectives and how your people are key to making that happen.

Here’s how to do Performance Measurement.

Decide who owns the process.

By this I mean is it being driven by you, your managers or your people themselves? Do you want line managers to be in charge of the process or are you going to flip the system and make people accountable for their own performance?

If Performance Measurement is also about people development, do we want to allow people to be responsible for their own career development? Be accountable to that and to themselves?

A Team Focus?

You may have people working as individuals in your workplace, but ultimately in the vast majority of organisations, it’s a team effort overall. So what goals should be set to enable your business to meet its objectives? Can goals be set that are for individuals and teams? Some people may like a mixture of the two. Consider what will work best for your business.

What will it look like?

Is it a weekly one to one? A monthly team review and refresh? How regularly will you check in for progress? How often will you refresh goals and objectives? What mechanism will you use to structure your meetings or will they be off the cuff conversations? What do you want to record? What pre-work in advance of performance meetings do you want people to prepare for?

Whether you want an admin trail or you want to be process-lite, think about how your Performance Measurement process will operate in busy, daily work life.

Coaching or Assessment?

Are you giving people feedback? Are you having coaching conversations? Are you offering support or merely correcting when things go wrong? Are you actively creating a learning environment with psychological safety where people feel open to talk about and learn from mistakes?

Think about what your people will benefit from the most.

What is the Purpose?

Perhaps one of the most important questions - what do you want from this process? Do you want it to be a way of working out how to pay people more money? Is it to ensure company targets are being met? Is it to drive better team performance?

Think about what your end goal is, and work back from there.

Performance measurement and employee development are essential components of organisational success. Setting clear goals, providing constructive feedback, and designing effective performance systems, you can maximise the potential of your people, drive performance, and cultivate a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

There’s a lot to consider in putting a Performance Measurement approach in place but it is something that can really help to drive your business in the direction you want it to go whilst empowering your people to do their very best work.

Unsure where to start? Get in touch with us today and we can have a free, no-obligation chat.