It is standard practice in organisations to follow up on the performance of the employees. This assessment determines the areas that require improvement. However, this usually happens only once a year, usually at the end of the business year. This is where continuous performance management comes into play.
The problem with performance reviews happening at the end of the year is that you don’t get to know who is underperforming throughout the year. This, therefore, undermines the productivity potential of several teams and individuals.
In other words, an employee will be underperforming for a whole year before you get to know.
And if you offer some advice on how to improve, you’ll have to wait another full year before you can gauge their performance. This makes the process of building up said employee’s skills quite lengthy and almost counterproductive if you want your business to grow quickly.
The solution lies in maintaining a running assessment of your employees. This helps you get a clearer picture of your staff’s capabilities, take action quickly and also foster a closer bond with them.
In this piece, we take a look at how you can implement and use continuous performance management with your team.
How to implement continuous performance management
In many organisations, this form of performance review and assessment has supplanted the annual appraisal at the end of the year. Not only is the yearly appraisal time-consuming, but it is also vastly ineffective.
With this continuous assessment, there’s constant feedback between colleagues, team leaders and upper management. This does a good job of improving effectiveness at the team level as well as productivity on the individual level.
Here are a few ways you can use to implement continuous performance management.
Start immediately
If you want to assess your employees’ abilities and build them up, there’s no better time than the present. Starting immediately means that you can ditch the ineffective assessment. Most of the employees aren’t enthusiastic to go through it because they believe it takes longer to address their problems.
To experience and reap the benefits of the favourable method of assessment, you need to start as soon as possible.
Seek the opinion of your team leaders and middle management
Although the company human resource personnel still utilise the annual performance appraisal as their method of performance review, team leaders and middle management might be evaluating their understudies on a regular, informal basis.
You should, therefore, seek their opinion on making the use of continuous assessment an official form of reviewing performance. They already know how to go about it and chances are that they will welcome it.
On the off chance that they don’t buy into the idea, they can offer similar solutions that they believe can work just as efficiently and effectively as a form of continuous performance management.
Proceed to ring in the top management as well
If you and the team leaders agree that a continuous assessment is more effective than the current system, you need to sell this to the top management. Lay out all the benefits of continuous performance management.
They’ll be pleased with the improved productivity it promises from a more engaged and inspired workforce.
Test the system before company-wide rollout
Don’t jump in with both feet. Before you can roll out a full-fledged continuous performance management system, you need to test it out on a small number of employees or teams. The advantage of using this pilot system is that it allows you to see just how it will work out.
Additionally, you can tweak some features of the system so that you have little to no glitches in the implementation and day-to-day use. Furthermore, the pilot enables you to see how the employees will react to the new appraisal method.
You should, therefore, request some feedback from this assorted collection of test subjects so that you know what the managers, team leaders and other employees feel about it.
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Bring everyone up to speed and train them
Not everyone in the company will know how to use the new system. If you are undertaking continuous performance management through an app, you need to train everyone in the ways to use it.
They need to know when to use it and how to interact with the interface.
Build on employees’ prevailing skills
In many forms of performance review or appraisal, managers and HR personnel are focused on analysing the skills of the staff and just stating what the deficiencies are.
With this form of management, you need to ensure that you have productive conversations with your team members. Discover where they have deficiencies and find out why they have. The next logical step should be building these skills so that the employees can be more productive.
This kind of interaction, on an ongoing basis, fosters closer relationships between team members and their superiors. In other words, team members won’t shy away from their leaders. Additionally, managers also learn new ways to lead as suggested by their subordinates.
Incorporate the company core values with the staff features you’re looking for
Continuous performance management should link the traits and practices you want to develop in your employees with the core values of the company. This is because you want the positive results of the continuous assessment to benefit the company and what it stands for.
For instance, let’s say the company values teamwork. The continuous performance assessment should include ways of recognising teamwork. This will eventually lead to the breaking down of silos in the workplace, fostering more growth and productivity.
In Summary
Many successful business entities have shifted away from stack rankings and annual appraisals to track the performance of their employees. Instead, they have adopted a more reliable, efficient and effective way of assessing the staff.
They use continuous performance management to not only assess the performance of their employees but to also build up their skills and make them more productive.
To use this style of assessment in your business, you need to start immediately. So, seek the opinion of your managers and team leaders before proceeding to reel in the top management. With their approval, start testing the system and then educate and guide everyone on how to use it once you roll it out.
