Performance Management in Turbulent Times

- April 19, 2011 by Beth Wammack, COO

A lot of companies use performance management as their once-a-year opportunity to tell employees what they’re doing wrong and how they can correct their behaviors. Basically, it becomes a tool to weed out underperformers while providing annual financial incentives to those who are on track. That’s fine in good times, but with cutbacks and limited budgets for incentives, raises and bonuses, how do you keep employees committed and engaged to continue raising the bar? Now more than ever, performance management is not only important to keep your company on track but should be used as an opportunity to truly connect and motivate employees.

By positioning performance management within your company as an ongoing two-way dialogue for goal setting, benchmarking and feedback, you can create a valuable connection with new and long-term employees, ultimately creating a productive and results-driven staff.

An approach we’ve found successful is to begin with an understanding of employees’ personalities and strengths prior to evaluating performance, so the supervisor can gain insight and direction on what motivates the employee to want to excel. Tools that we use to accomplish this include:

1. True Colors – The True Colors test is a great self-awareness tool that categorizes individuals into one of four colors that epitomizes their core personality. We use the awareness that the test brings to enhance communication between individuals in different “color” groups to encourage more effective communication, stronger collaboration and less personality conflict.
    
2. StrengthsFinder – This Gallup-based test identifies five key talents (a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving) for each individual. The talent, once it is focused, practiced and developed, can become a strength for the individual. Rather than trying to force a behavior that is outside of the individual’s strengths, this allows a manager to focus on the natural talents of the employee, which results in a more motivated and driven individual who is set up to succeed.

Identifying strengths and personalities also allows a manager or supervisor to look at how teams are built and deploy the proper skill set to a task or project, which can create an effective and innovative group dynamic.

So instead of that once-a-year chat with the boss that becomes a list of things to improve on, we’ve turned performance management into a goal setting session based on motivating employees through means other than raises and bonuses that can be difficult to come by in tough times. Together, we chart a course for raising the bar for both the individual and the company.

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