Performance Management Doesn’t Vanish In Trying Times

Integrating dispersed teams while renewing a focus on diversity is the new calling for performance management

Take in any given news segment these days and you’d be right to think our world itself is moments away from completely coming apart. 

Sensational reporting aside, the everyday responsibility of professional leadership is compounded by unforeseen challenges stemming from COVID-19, social unrest brought on by economic and racial divides, and a pervasive sense that stability is frustratingly out of reach. 

It’s all building up so quickly. 
 

But here’s what we can’t let ourselves forget: businesses like yours still have work to do, products to make, customers to serve, and employees to manage. And to that point, you have performances to manage. After all, your employees are on the payroll to perform, and your responsibility is to ensure those performances are reliably optimal. Yet even in the modern moment, leaders continue to struggle with this aspect of the job, as while nearly every company engages in performance management, under one-third of them believe these yield measurable productivity improvements¹. Similarly, while companies continue to adopt necessary diversity hiring goals, most such goals remain broadly unrealized in the aggregate².  

Put simply: Performance and data management are as important now as ever, and arguably far more so. Change is underway, complexity is increasing with every passing year, the need for diversity is apparent, and companies are struggling to keep up with all of it, especially where developing talent is concerned. 

The irony of it all is that most of those companies - probably yours, too - have all the information they need to begin improving lagging performances, diversifying the workforce, and fortifying team cohesion. Unfortunately, most of that information is hidden, siloed, or otherwise inaccessible. 

In a few words, most of that information is useless in its “dark matter” form. Unless you know where to find it and how to leverage it. And that all begins with integration, your direct road to improved performance management. 

Remote Work, Integration, & Key Diversity Measures

Pandemic-driven circumstances, both globally and within the United States, have created logistical and managerial challenges for tens of thousands of employers. These also find themselves running concurrently with company diversity initiatives manifesting across countless industries. Leverage your data channels through cutting-edge integration technology to engage with remote work challenges and essential diversity initiatives alike. Doing so will help you a) accurately evaluate professional output, b) identify improvement opportunities, and c) build a diverse workforce.

Remote Work 

Recent findings by Gartner in their “Future of Work” report indicate that pandemic-driven circumstances will now see approximately 48% of employees working remotely to one degree or another, a percentage contrasted with their “Pre-Pandemic” figure of 30%. There is also a worker morale component in play. A PWC survey determined that nearly three out of four (72%) of individuals who work in an office “...would like to work remotely at least two days a week.” Now that employees have a taste for it, the phenomenon will likely stick around. 

Integration 

For a remote workforce to thrive, employers will increasingly need reliable and comprehensive aggregates of data. Tighten the connections between your communication, CRM, and project management software tools to create for you and your leadership team(s) detailed assessments of each employee from development, performance, and peer-to-peer review perspectives, whether they are fully or partially remote.

Diversity Measures - Applying the Metrics

Eliminate subjectivity and misleading estimates from the process by precisely evaluating your workforce against a metric-based platform capable of breaking down your employment composition by core categories, including age, gender, ethnicity, and disability status. Ratio/distribution-oriented reporting will help you create an accurate reflection of your workforce diversity status. 

Keep After Those Conversations

With all that’s happening in the world this year, it’s safe to presume that managers, and business leaders more broadly, will be modifying their respective employment structures in various ways. It’ll be equally important as those modifications take shape to ensure we don’t forego routine engagements with our employees. Such engagements are also, as we know, the manager’s opportunity to share their ideas, strategies, and even personal insights. If those things become siloed with management, employees are right to regard themselves as being detached from the company mission. There’s rarely a good reason to keep employees confined solely to what falls within their professional scope – it makes no sense for managers to be limited in such a way, nor employees.

If the opportunities to interface with colleagues and direct reports are limited within your organization, go about the process of multiplying them. You have every reason to pursue a policy of thorough and consistent engagement with those you manage, and with those who manage you, as well. Don’t overlook the important conversations, not when they are most needed.

The Need for Stronger Technology in the Performance Management Space

As matters stabilize and companies continue navigating how the latter half of 2020 is going to look from a sales, employment, and growth standpoint, consider ways you can apply new practices to better understand team dynamics, increase retention, and drive productivity. Our take is that the moment to implement new employee performance practices/tools is this moment. Most everyone in the business world finds themselves committed to real-time stability and long-term prosperity; keep attending to the first and the second will follow.

Yes, confounding episodes see people interacting with and aiding one another to a much greater degree than would be the case (or would be necessary) in calmer times. But it is also possible that these past months have helped everyone, at every business level, to realize some of the positive interaction and support structures that we’re already at least partially in place.

To further clarify that necessary realization as things begin (slowly) returning to something like their pre-COVID-19 state, ensure you are establishing and fortifying your current employee performance tools/practices and communicating with your teams in ways that engender further confidence in the company’s direction and the role they’ll be playing in moving it forward. If your workforce is more spread out than usual, maybe you have already had good reason to systematically retool your feedback processes. Consider what you’ve learned in doing so and what lessons might be perpetually relevant from a functional standpoint and consistently well-received by (and beneficial to) your employees.

Your performance management solution should be driving insights. For example, through leveraging collaboration tools like Slack or Teams, a performance management platform could recognize a project as ongoing, proactively migrate it to a goals category, record its progress, and even populate an employee’s feedback channel with a “Good Job”. If the transaction took place early in the year, you might find yourself struggling to remember details later on. A performance management platform fortified with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can be a powerful tool in that respect, and through neutralizing other such problems, all while also eliminating cumbersome aspects of traditional performance management.

If you are serious about implementing a strong performance management process, partnering with a strong technology solution like renaizant will catapult your organization's success in all of these areas.  

¹ The state of performance management 
² https://www.wired.com/story/five-years-tech-diversity-reports-little-progress/
 

Will Emmons is the Chief Revenue Officer at renaizant. He has over 20 years of experience in the HCM space with 15+ years in leading sales throughout North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.  In his current position, he leads all aspects of renaizant's go to market strategy, customer acquisition, and success. Visit https://renaizant.com/ Connect Will Emmons