How Performance Management Tech Can Prepare Your Organization for the Future

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Performance management is foundational to the success of your organization. Driving the best outcomes today and anticipating tomorrow's needs requires alignment of goals and clarity of communication.

The organizations best placed to meet shifting demands and adapt in the face of uncertainty are those that invest in their people, develop their skills, and engage them by recognizing and rewarding growth.

Effective performance management must move beyond simply measuring outputs. It must take a holistic approach to the workforce and the value of people. 

When your performance management strategy fosters continuous conversation, ongoing development, and shared goals, you unlock the full potential of your people and direct your organization toward future success.

The Need to Adapt With a Future-Ready Performance Management Strategy

Organizations need new tools and strategies to meet their evolving needs in times of uncertainty, where budgets are tighter and skills gaps are growing ever wider.

Business leaders see a growing need to transform in order to remain successful, according to the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs 2023 report. For leaders, the most common roadblocks preventing organizational transformation are a lack of skills and difficulty attracting suitable candidates. Over 80% of leaders consider investing in their current employees a priority.

Your workforce holds the key to stability, growth, and success, and meeting your organization's current and future talent needs means embracing a collaborative and personalized approach to performance management.

To unlock their full potential, your organization needs an integrated performance management solution that simultaneously engages your people with ongoing development opportunities, while providing visibility into your skills landscape.

4 Ways You Can Use a Performance Management System to Create Better Organizational Results

Powerful performance management tools can provide complete visibility into your workforce, skills, and goals to help navigate the future, anticipate change, and retain your skilled workers.

While adopting tech won't create value by itself, a solution that aligns with your organization's needs can strengthen the connection between development and performance and generate a more significant impact.

Here are four feature-based benefits of a performance management platform, including some of the ways in which they can inform talent conversations and create a culture of sustainable, future-ready outcomes.

1) Enable Performance Conversations and Feedback

At the heart of effective performance management is ongoing communication. A good platform will make it easy for employees to track their goals, collaborate on agendas, and proactively seek input from peers and managers. 

Stronger lines of communication and access to transparent data help to direct conversations and build relationships between managers and employees. A consistent one-on-one cadence isn't just good for tracking workload and output, it improves employee engagement and wellbeing too.

While frequent touchpoints between employees and managers are a must for constructive, strengths-based feedback and well-being conversations, employees should also have opportunities to connect with peers and mentors that support their growth.

Enabling peer and mentor reviews and continuous feedback gives people a more rounded view of their performance and provides an accurate picture of their progress that managers don't always see in the day-to-day. Using a performance management system, managers can comprehensively monitor important goal-related progress and support any gaps in knowledge by directing people toward training and development opportunities.

You can also empower your people in their own learning and development paths. With the freedom to request feedback from others and greater transparency into their goals, they'll be clear about how they're developing and how to improve. 

This insight can feed into performance reviews, creating a holistic view of your employee's strengths and areas for improvement.

2) Align Employee and Organizational Goals

Clear and specific performance expectations connect your people to a common purpose and give greater meaning to your organization's strategic objectives. 

When people understand how their work feeds into overall success and know what good performance looks like, they're more likely to see their advancement potential within the company. Goals keep employees closely aligned with their team and the broader organization. But for those goals to be relevant, they should also be personal to your people.

According to Gartner, when employee goals are aligned to both organizational and individual needs, employee performance increases by up to 22%. Collaborative goal setting is a must for people to see value in their work.

Finding the areas where people want to advance and connecting career development opportunities to these objectives will keep your organization competitive. 

A performance management platform that integrates with your wider ecosystem will give you a snapshot of priorities, development opportunities, and skills, allowing you to assign employees to tasks and training that results in business growth. By connecting this data to employees' skills and career objectives, you can increase strategic alignment and create roadmaps that connect goals with a specific and measurable set of objectives.

For these goals to remain relevant, they also need to be reviewed regularly to check on progress and align with any shifting organizational priorities.

3) Continuously Recognize Achievement

Performance management should be motivational, not demotivational. The way to ensure that it works as a motivational tool is with a strengths-based approach tailored to individuals in which achievement and growth are consistently monitored, recognized, and rewarded.

Real-time skills and learning data can inform your performance management processes and provide real-time measures of performance success. Whereas tick-box yearly appraisals and cookie-cutter review templates can feel negative and impersonal, an ongoing approach to performance that feeds into employee development and career advancement and builds on people's unique strengths can incentivize growth. This approach can also help people overcome any challenges as they arise.

Rewarding your talent shouldn't be a once-a-year deal—and hard work and progress should be recognized and acknowledged continuously. Your performance data can also bolster your talent review processes, giving you a picture of where your strongest performers lie, the employees who best demonstrate company values and those with high-priority skills and knowledge. 

4) Strategically Develop Skills and Close Gaps

Personalized development plans result in more effective performance outcomes. When your people have access to skills and career development opportunities that energize them, you increase engagement and drive organizational growth. 

As McKinsey findings show, realigning HR processes to match skill needs can boost employee engagement by 50% and productivity by 40%. 

Whether via stretch assignments, gigs, or even promotions, you maximize the impact of mobility initiatives by measuring the progress and impact of these initiatives. It's also a great way to offer learning in the flow of work—another way for people to upskill and reskill while they support other business efforts.

Once you know where this talent exists within the organization and what skills they possess, you can use their abilities to close gaps and improve performance within the business. A granular, up-to-date view of employee competencies leads to strategic planning, offers a deeper perspective of your workforce, and enables more effective workforce planning. 

When you can see what skills exist and how teams balance each other out, you can ensure that people are using their talents in the best way possible and developing in the right areas.

A comprehensive skills taxonomy can help to spot training opportunities that can close skills gaps—with up-to-date data and a consistent framework to measure success, you can tap into talent pools, deploy their knowledge in the most effective ways, and track L&D progress as people fill these gaps.

More Ways to Optimize Your Talent Management Strategies

Implementing adaptive and transparent performance management processes calls for closer alignment of data, ongoing communication across your organization, and shared goals that preempt and prioritize areas for skills development. 

A people-centric approach sets your organization up for long-term success and engages your workforce with meaningful growth opportunities.
 

Ryan Houmand’s background is in management, primarily in corporate and retail spaces with organizations like ADP and The Home Depot. He’s an expert in employee experience and engagement. He’s the author of A Passion for Monday and believes everyone should love Monday just like Friday. In his role at Bridge, he spends his days evangelizing the Bridge story and helping Bridge users to love it as much as he does.