Performance Management - To Do or Not to Do? (Spoiler: The Answer is To Do)
Do you spend your days thinking about whether conducting performance reviews and tracking goals really helps your employees? If so, the answer to the question is yes, they do! In our ever-changing business environment, one process — performance management — should remain constant. While your performance management strategy may change as new trends arise, providing feedback to employees will always remain an essential factor in ensuring employees thrive in their roles and perform at their best. According to a Performance Appraisals Survey conducted by XpertHR, 63% of employers still conduct formal performance reviews on an annual basis. Performance reviews are a great way to provide feedback to employees, whether through positive affirmations of completed goals and achievements or by guiding them through areas of advancement to focus on for the following year. But before you get to this point, you have to know what the employees’ goals are and how they progressed throughout the year, and you even should reflect upon what other factors, including job or skill competencies and values, have affected that progress along the way.
You may be wondering how your UKG Ready® solution can help organize this process. Let’s navigate several key functions that can help.
Automated performance review experience
Sandra, a supervisor overseeing 15 employees, has a lot on her plate right now. She wants to make sure that she has more time to discuss her employees’ goals and professional development. In the past, Sandra spent a lot of time printing completed reviews, tracking down signatures, and filing the reviews away. By reviewing the Performance Management user guide in the Online Documentation portal, she built a performance review process that will work to cut down the time it takes to complete it. UKG Ready houses her company’s performance reviews and uses a workflow process that includes Sandra, her employees, and the HR team. Through the Performance Review Profiles, Competencies, Values, and Goals, the review process can be seamless as she completes ratings and provides feedback for her employees. Sandra’s employees can even provide a self-review in the process, giving a rounded result. With the ability to review and sign off on the process within the system, Sandra can spend more time focusing on the vital review conversations that are crucial for employee development.
Peer feedback
Sandra has a great relationship with each of her employees and finds it extremely valuable to have a fresh perspective on how her employees work as a team to provide a well-rounded performance review. Sandra utilizes the peer feedback functionality to gather their input, and she loves the results. Sandra can request feedback from her employees or from other managers she works with, and her employees can do the same. Collecting this type of feedback provides a valuable perspective from the people she works with closely. And when she requests feedback, recipients can respond anonymously, which encourages more profound, honest input. Through the feedback, Sandra discovered how well she works with her team, understood her skills from an outside perspective, and learned about areas she can focus on for advancement.
Goal cascading and alignment
Tony, a department head, is looking to motivate his team to reach the accounting department’s overall company goals. He is unsure of the best way to track and accomplish this with 30 employees working toward various goals. Luckily, Tony reviewed the Online Documentation portal and learned that with a couple clicks of a mouse, he can cascade goals down to his employees to align their goals with the overall strategy of his company and department. His employees can align their goals with his and those of other managers as well. Through goal cascading and alignment, Tony can increase engagement between managers, employees, and the broader organization as they work toward common goals. Tony uses the easy-to-view tree through the cascading and aligning functionality to see how all the goals align with those of others who share that goal.
Succession planning
As the vice president of organizational development, Lisa wants to shift her focus to ensuring the right employees are in the right roles. She has noticed some trends relating to turnover and wondered how she could help ensure there will be people ready to move into several key positions in the event of resignations. Lisa recently connected with a peer in UKG Community™, and they told her about the succession planning functionality in UKG Ready. By taking her performance review and goal process results and aligning them with her employees’ professional development, she built a succession plan for each employee’s career growth. Determining employee career paths and who will be a good fit in a specific role can help Lisa build on skills and experiences with her employees to prepare them for succession. The results of their performance review, peer feedback, and goals help Lisa guide those conversations with her employees. Lisa also utilizes the Succession Chart dashboard widget to configure a Talent Matrix Chart to track many of the factors that will align with the professional development of her employees.
Performance management is essential to your employees and your company’s overall strategy. If you were on the fence about our question of whether to do performance management, we hope you have changed your answer to a solid yes and that these tools get you excited about your upcoming performance review season!