If you want a soccer team to perform better, would you send all the individual players to a separate training? No, of course not, you would let them train together.
As obvious as this is, it's not what we do in most organizations. If we want people to perform better we have a performance management program in place. We give people individual goals, we send them to separate individual trainings outside of the work environment, we measure their success against their individual goals and we reward them individually.
Clearly this process of performance management is not working. Of course, we have been trying to 'fix' the program by constantly tweaking the system, but these changes didn't make it more effective. Performance Management as we know it is flawed. It doesn’t deliver on it’s promises and is very time and resources consuming and on top of that, nobody likes it.
But now, forced by many external changes (gig economy, technology, distributed workforce, increased competition, on-demand products and services) and some good examples of organizations that have already taken the step, more organizations begin to change the system.
Why do YOU have a performance management process in place?
Have you ever asked this question? What's the purpose of the performance management process in my organization? When I asked this question in the past I always received many different answers, like "it is to reward high performers", "to keep people under the thumb (!)", "to allocate my salary budget", "to improve performance" etc.
And does it deliver on it's promises? No one has ever been able to give a positive and clear answer to this question.
What can you do?
There is no such thing as a 'one-size-fits-all'. You will have to think of a process that fits your purpose best.
Start with the why!
Think of the best design that serves the purpose
Keep it simple
Check how you're doing
Adjust where needed
We offer 'design thinking' workshops to help you rethink and redefine your performance management processes workshop@techcandy.nl