When we think about Performance Management in the workplace, most of us recoil. We often think about the yearly review where the Employer comes together with the Employee and judgement ensues.
Good Performance Management is Ongoing. Here are some tips to improving your own skills in managing the performance of others.
1. Bias and Judgement
We can easily allow our own bias and judgement to interfere with our opinions on the quality of someone’s work. Our own personality abilities may be biased by experience or personal interests or Passions. We can’t expect everyone to be the same as us. Frustrations and beliefs around incompetence may be tainted by our bias.
2. Focus on the Strengths & Support the Weaknesses
You will create greater impact by focusing in someone’s strength, rather than zeroing in on their weaknesses. Focus on identifying and cultivating the innate strengths of an employee. Any weaknesses need to be viewed as learning opportunities where strengths can be utillised to support them.
3. Adapt and support others to Adapt
Goals may change throughout the year. Business conditions may also change which means that priorities need to be adjusted accordingly. Ensure you are collaborating as a team and that your employees are supported to adapt and change as needed.
4. Close the (Feedback) Gap.
Feedback needs to be consistent and timely. Feedback provided at just the right time is more useful and empowering than feedback that is months old and stale. Ensure that feedback is useful in that it provides advice on what worked (repeat and improve) or developmental (what was right, what wasn’t and what the solutions are to make it right).
5. A Culture of Support
Being coached or mentored should not be reserved for the choice few. An organisation will benefit from creating a coaching culture. This can be through Indigenous mentors, buddy systems or simply the ongoing support of a supervisor who can guide you or speak up for you.
6. Incentivise
Incentives don’t just have to be around pay increases. Flexible working conditions, fringe benefits or luxurious workplaces can all be motivators too.
7. Recognition
Recognition: Babies cry for it, men die for it. We all want to be acknowledge. Recognition doesn’t have to be a huge annual awards program, it can simply be making someone a cup of tea because you can see they’re working really hard. Find the balance between big and small. While the epic achievements are important, also don’t forget the smaller meaningful contributions you can make to recognition.
Barbara Clifford (The Time Tamer) is a Time Management Strategist & Stress Management Practitioner based in Alice Springs, Australia. She has spent over 20 years working in time precious and stressful industries such as film, hospitality and marketing. She has always had a burning passion for creating order and making sense of things. She is sought after like a beacon in a sea of chaos to provide professional development in the business environment through workshop training, coaching, mentoring, online training programs, webinars and as a guest speaker around Australia. Her professional experience has included contracts with small business, Not For Profits, Aboriginal Organisations, Media, Marketing, Aged Care, Universities, Health Services and Cruise Ships.
