4 Questions You Should Be Asking About Performance Management

With the recent news around Accenture and GE replacing their traditional performance review process with more frequent, timely feedback from multiple sources, it seemed Kismet when Eric Mosley, CEO of Globoforce, had his article, Creating an Effective Peer Review System, published recently in the Harvard Business Review.

Eric shares key elements to create, maintain and support a successful real-time peer review program. Click through to the full HBR article for details on each of the below, including examples from top companies who have applied these lessons. (Quoting below):

Reflect on core values — Ensure that the metrics on which people are recognized are aligned with your company’s mission.
Embrace new technology — Pick a program that is intuitive, easy to use, fun, interactive, engaging, and fully mobile.
Explain and celebrate the launch — Position the program as a change designed to help recognize and celebrate employees, and not a new way to monitor or judge them.
Get everyone on board — Managers and leaders need to be early adopters.
Encourage frequent, timely recognition — Sooner is better when it comes to promoting desired behavior.
Empower managers to track results — Give managers access to detailed, real-time, easily actionable reports on recognition activity, correlated to key business goals.

Questions you should ask about performance management

Performance management is necessary, and even desirable. We all want to know:

Am I doing the right things?
Are my contributions helpful to others?
Should I be focusing elsewhere?
Am I adding value?

Helping employees answer those questions is the essence of performance management. Better yet is how GE frames the discussion in terms of coaching. Here’s a summary of GE’s new approach:

There’s an emphasis on coaching throughout, and the tone is unrelentingly positive. The [performance development] app forces users to categorize feedback in one of two forms: To continue doing something, or to consider changing something.”

That’s the power of positive reinforcement through coaching people towards more of what you want to see again and away from detractors.

Are you confident in your own answers to the four (4) basic performance management questions above?

You can find more from Derek Irvine on his Recognize This! blog.