What is Performance Assessment Supposed to Be?
Ideally, performance assessment is a way for businesses to ensure employees are good at their jobs, trending in the right direction in terms of professional development, and committed to excellence in a way that benefits their teams and the business as a whole.
Performance management should be a core, on-going responsibility for all supervisors, managers, and leaders within an organization. Those professionals require the structure and protection of a thoughtfully designed, codified system for assessment, feedback, and reflection in order to do that work effectively and in a consistent, fair manner that holds up to outside scrutiny.
Of course, it’s crucial to add that strong performance assessment – real performance assessment – must always be rooted in data, objectivity, and quantifiable measures of employee success and cultural fit. Without a foundation in data, a performance assessment is little more than a manager’s personal opinion of someone – which may have some value but cannot be the basis for business operations.
What Can Strong Performance Assessment Achieve?
With a strong, consistent, data-driven approach to performance assessment, organizations can build the best possible understanding of their team from a human capital management, finance, or department-to-department perspective. That deep knowledge of the organizational depth chart makes key strategic planning easier for the organization as a whole.
One of the most valuable aspects of proactive performance assessment is it provides a clear picture of which individuals and teams are the organization’s true top performers. An ongoing assessment model will help that superstar talent feel valued and make it easier for their supervisors and managers to get them on track for recognition and promotion.
On the other hand, a continuous assessment model also makes it easy to identify laggards or under-achievers (at both the individual or department level), while both giving them the structure and time to improve and building an accountability mechanism that can remove low-performing talent in a fair way.
To use an analogy, if a business is a pencil that’s going to write a successful story, performance assessment is the sharpener. Performance assessment is what will help an organization get better at what it does, shed the parts of itself that are unnecessary, and continue to remain relevant, powerful, and capable of the work over time.
What Does Performance Assessment Typically Look Like in Most Businesses?
Unfortunately, very few businesses are leveraging the benefits of a truly modern, comprehensive, fair performance assessment system, even as we approach the 2020s. In fact, many assessment practices remain in common use even though they demonstrably don’t work.
For most organizations, performance assessment is a yearly or quarterly exercise. During a particular calendar sprint, team leaders, supervisors, and managers create written assessments of their employees, share that feedback with their subordinates, and pass it along to HR to be filed until the next assessment window. This traditional procedure sets absolutely everybody up for failure from top to bottom.
How the Traditional Assessment Model Fails Everybody
From the individual employee’s perspective, a once-yearly or -quarterly chat from a manager is the height of inauthenticity. When there are longer terms between structured feedback, everything tends to feel personal in the wrong ways, as feedback seems punitive rather than supportive. It can be jarring or nerve-wracking.
On the other hand, for the direct supervisor or team leader in charge of creating those periodic assessments, the weight of that seasonal work either leads to them sacrificing other aspects of their daily responsibilities to get assessments done or rushing through their performance reviews, minimizing their value for the worker or the organization. At the same time, there’s the psychological dread of fearing grandiose confrontations or disengaging a team member by delivering news they don’t want to hear.
Then, of course, there’s the organization to think of. With employees (and HR) formally unaware of worker performance for months at a time, how can a business truly know itself? How can it project success or predict at what rate it can expect to grow? Worse yet, if managers and employees don’t make performance assessment and improvement real priorities and honored values, how can an organization be confident they’re as good as they think they are?
In other words, one of the biggest problems with the prevailing assessment model is that it’s awkward for everybody, and nobody really gets the value out of the system that they’re supposed to.
Why the Performance Assessment Game Has Changed
Businesses across all industries need to be reevaluating their approach to employee performance assessment, but not just because the prevailing system isn’t good enough.
Recognizing the Evolution of the Employer-Employee Relationship
The employer-employee relationship has shifted radically in the last fifteen years. Great talent has more opportunities for mobility than ever before, and in general, workers feel less indebted to their employers than in a previous era. That means attracting, developing, and retaining top talent requires a more holistic approach that provides a transparent, two-way value between worker and employer.
An organization’s performance assessment, professional development, and employee education strategies are all crucial to fostering a great workforce, and more than ever, the best and smartest talent in the marketplace understands that they need to work for a business that’s going to help them become better. In the past, workers were nervous about assessment, but now top achievers want that valuable, data-driven feedback in order to improve their practice, and they won’t stick around with an employer that doesn’t provide them with the insights they need to grow.
Understanding the Necessity of Protecting the Organization Legally
At the same time, there’s more public awareness than ever for workplace discrimination, harassment, wrongful termination, and so on. That means organizations of all sizes must have comprehensive, well-vetted policies related to any employee interactions that could result in discipline, termination, or an adverse employee reaction.
With that said, performance assessment should never sacrifice authenticity and honesty in the name of saving anybody’s feelings or minimizing negative feedback. Providing honest assessment and coaching simply requires the support of strong policies and specific training on best practices when it comes to conversations about performance.
Seeing the Potential of Technology to Improve the Work
Of course, technology is the other main factor that has changed the way performance assessment is carried out over the last two decades. Thanks to technology, it’s much easier for managers to create quantifiable data stories about employee success in terms of goals accomplished, deadlines met, etc., and it’s much easier in terms of space and time to maintain ongoing conversations between supervisors and each individual employee about their overall performance.
Tech-enabled work and the backend data that modern ERPs, HCMs, project management systems, and so on create finally provide managers and assessors with the qualifiable, objective data that they’ve always needed to make the best possible assessments. Now that this data is available, it’s important to rewrite official polices to ensure managers tie each piece of feedback or insight to quantifiable measures.
At first blush, it might feel like tech has made the assessment experience less personal, but in reality, it actually creates a fair, data-driven basis for employee assessment. That means better feedback for employees, an easier assessment process for supervisors, and a more valuable overall talent management experience for the organization.
What HR Needs to Do to Address the Changing Climate
Given everything we’ve outlined so far, it should be fairly clear that most businesses need to address their approach to performance assessment and embrace a more modern, ongoing, tech-enabled experience. With that said, here are a few tips for business leaders and senior HR personnel looking to refine their organization’s approach to performance assessment.
Don’t Settle for A Legacy Approach, Modernize
In well-established businesses with fairly stable workforces, it can be tempting to let HR policies and procedures stagnate. Once HR has built a great team and everybody has done good work together, it’s easy to settle into a rhythm and allow that to be the culture.
When it comes to performance assessment, however, continuing on with a legacy approach is not maintaining stability; it’s actually rotting the load-bearing beams that form the structure of success from the inside out. If a business clings to an informal system that’s based on yearly appraisals, qualifiable feedback without cited evidence, and getting assessments done for the sake of getting assessments done, they’re skating on thin ice and at risk of leaving the organization open to any one of several major threats to profit or productivity.
Create a Fair, Well-Understood, Highly Visible Framework
Any kind of assessment system has to feel authentic and be bought into by the people who are being assessed, or it’ll never work – just ask a teacher about managing students who “don’t care about school.”
For employees to value feedback, take assessments seriously, and buy into a true culture of excellence, they need a strong understanding of how their employer assesses performance, why they assess performance, and what role each individual employee has in their own performance journey. That requires a system that’s created with answers to those questions in mind and backed by employee training and education that indoctrinates each worker into the company culture, illustrates the two-way value of the assessment system, and teaches them what it really means to live excellence day to day within the organization.
Provide Explicit Assessment Training for Managers and Supervisors
One of the biggest mistakes HR departments and senior business leaders make is assuming the top-performing talent that’s risen into middle-management was prepared to supervise and lead. In fact, many of those professionals never would’ve guessed at the outset of their careers that they’d be in the position of assessing others.
In order to close that knowledge and skill gap, build comfort among managers, and create a better, more useful system for each individual employee, organizations must provide their supervisors and team leaders with professional training that explicitly models how to form assessments, how to communicate feedback, and how to lead conversations about improvement.
Only with that training in place can HR be confident that the assessment procedure they’ve created will be truly impactful and rolled out as they envisioned.
Make Performance and Excellence Core Cultural Values
Company culture is key to performance in any organization. When employees have a strong, positive understanding of organizational values, goals, and priorities and feel like they have a voice in shaping them, it’s far easier to transform a collection of individual employees into a super-star, high-performing team.
For performance assessment procedures to be their most impactful and most valuable for both the employee and the organization, high performance, strong work, and general excellence must be articulated, honored, and lived values within the company culture. When workers see excellence around them, hear excellence being recognized, and know what the standards for excellence are within the organization, there’s much greater incentive to buy in and strive for greatness.
Key Takeaways
Getting performance assessment right is every business leader’s biggest growing responsibility because…
Performance assessment provides businesses with the best possible understanding of themselves and their teams
Legacy approaches to performance assessment were largely based on qualitative manager feedback, whereas technology now allows supervisors to make quantitative, data-driven feedback
The evolving relationship between employer and employee demands that businesses provide clarity and support to employees looking to improve.
In order to be successful in the future, businesses must make sure their approaches to performance assessment…
Are built for the modern world and are forward-facing
Embrace quantifiable data as a key feature of the assessment narrative
Are backed by air-tight policies that protect the organization and employees, as appropriate
Are highly visible and well-understood across the organization
Are backed by employee education that maximize the value of the assessment experience for all
HOW TO LEARN MORE:
If you’re a business leader looking to build an impactful, forward-facing performance management strategy, be sure to join us on Wednesday, December 11th to learn about The Future of Performance Management!
This free webinar from Launchways will be packed with actionable insights about emerging best practices for performance assessment including…
How to assess the impact of your current performance management program and get started on building something even better
How to recognize the common pitfalls of performance management
How to replace an annual assessment system with a continuous feedback loop
How to deliver difficult feedback and establish a shared view of reality
How to manage both high- and low-performing talent effectively
The hour-long learning experience will feature presentations and Q&A time with an all-star panel of veteran business leaders who know what it takes to build, manage, and continuously improve a great team. Presenters will include:
Jodi Wellman, Co-Founder of Spectacular at Work, a leading executive coach who specializes in helping business leaders maximize their teams to build success and balance.
Adam Radulovic, President at XL.net, an experienced entrepreneur and small business leader with a track record of building and managing profit-driving teams.
Gary Schafer, President at Launchways, who has built multiple businesses from the ground up and specializes in scaling high-performing teams for growing organizations.
Jon Howaniec, VP & HR Director at Clark Dietz, who has over twenty years experience building high-performing HR processes at fast-growth organizations.
Any business leader, HR Director, or manager hoping to improve their skills as a coach, mentor, or accountability partner should make time to check out The Future of Performance Management: How to Modernize Your Approach and start the process continuously improving their team this December.