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Creating an Effective Employee Performance Management System

If your employee performance management system is not effective, in other words, your managers are not living up to their responsibility to write, approve and submit performance reviews of your employees on time, this is the first question to ask yourself: What happens to the manager who won’t turn in all his appraisals on time?

Too often it turns out that the answer is “Nothing,” or at least nothing unpleasant enough for the manager to take action. Managers often find it easier to put up with toothless complaints from the personnel department about not doing employee performance appraisals than it is to actually appraise subordinates. As a result, appraisals are pushed aside so the “real work” can be done, and the structure of employee performance management breaks down.

Initiate Hard Ball Consequences

Make sure there are some real consequences for not getting employee performance reviews on time. For example, withholding salary increases until documentation is up to date creates a powerful incentive to make them on time. This is particularly true if the HR department has the clout to refuse to make retroactive salary increases to bail out managers who simply couldn’t submit them on time.

No manager wants to be in the position of explaining a subordinate’s delayed pay increase to you, especially if the pay increase is being delayed simply because the manager failed to submit his or her employees’ performance evaluation on time. This strategy is called “building accountability.” It’s a tough-minded approach, but all you’re doing is insisting that managers play by the rules.

Establishment of deadlines

A softer measure is to simply make sure managers know exactly what they are supposed to do and when they are supposed to do it with a checklist that provides key dates in the employee performance management cycle. And make it easy for them to do what you want: make sure the forms and procedural instructions are readily available, and that someone is available to answer the inevitable questions that arise.

Both approaches establish shared responsibilities. Not only are line managers required to obtain written performance evaluations of their employees, but HR must ensure that the employee performance management process is a model for best practice. The forms must reflect the reality of people’s jobs; managers must be able to assess all the subtle elements of both results and behaviors; training and other support must be available just in time; and what is expected should be made very clear. Without all of these elements, HR bears the brunt of the responsibility for not creating a system that fosters excellence in employee performance management.

sharing honey

But consequences aren’t the only area where HR drops the ball. We’ve talked about fixing negative consequences for managers who don’t do what’s expected. But remember: honey influences behavior better than vinegar. How often does HR provide positive consequences to managers who are doing a good job of meeting their employee performance appraisal responsibilities?

A simple email from an HR representative to a supervisor saying that in reviewing the employee performance reviews she wrote, he was impressed by how seriously she took the responsibility and the fact that they were all submitted prior to the deadline. Copy her boss in the email too.

Provide friendly reminders

It is important to have some mechanism to remind managers when key dates are approaching. That is one of the great advantages of online systems. Well-designed online systems greatly complement employee performance management efforts, giving managers at-a-glance information about tasks that need to be completed.

For example, a dashboard screen can inform them which employee performance reviews need to be written and when, which reviews written by subordinate managers have been submitted and are awaiting review and approval, and which subordinates need to submit self-reviews. evaluations or sign after an evaluation has been written and discussed.

An online system can be set up to automatically send managers (and their subordinates) periodic reminders whenever an action date approaches and send email alert notifications if a deadline is ever missed. Finally, a good online system can track the current status of employee performance reviews for different organizational units. Having this information will allow you to inform the head of the sales department that the completion percentage in your department is only 84 percent, while manufacturing and accounting are at the 100 percent level.

lighting a small fire

Though the role of human resources in creating an effective employee performance management system. Senior managers also have some responsibility to ensure that company expectations for the quality and timeliness of employee performance appraisal are met.

Each senior manager must review each evaluation written by a subordinate manager before that manager reviews it with the employee. This one-on-one review procedure will ensure a level playing field, as the senior manager can ensure that all of her reports apply similar standards and expectations to her reports. She’ll also learn who takes employee talent management responsibilities seriously as she reviews reviews and sees how honestly they’re written.

Remembering the power of shame

Shame is a powerful motivator that is often overlooked. There is nothing wrong with shaming managers into doing what they are supposed to do.

How do you do it? The easiest way to make shaming work for you is to ask a senior executive if they would like to be updated on employee performance review completion status; he will invariably say yes. (Top executives always want to know the status of everything.) That’s your license to report exactly who has their employee performance reviews on time and who isn’t performing.

Please provide a brief report beginning with “As requested, I have listed the current status of completed assessments below” followed by nothing more than two columns of names, one labeled “On Time” and the other labeled “Late”. Send copies of your report to everyone on both lists. You can probably count on an immediate reaction from those managers on the overdue list to finish their evaluations and move on to the good list.

Once again, an online system can provide executives with up-to-the-minute information on the status of all employee performance management activities without HR having to provide it. And senior managers can have a powerful influence in creating an environment where 100 percent appraisal completion is the norm.

Creating unerring accountability

At a major oil company, the CEO and his vice president of human resources developed an employee performance evaluation procedure that was a beacon of simplicity: a requirement that each manager discuss 13 open-ended questions about performance with each subordinate in March. every year.

The only writing the system required was a memo from each manager to the CEO every year no later than March 31. The memo indicates whether or not the manager had carried out all of his discussions; if the discussions had not taken place, the memorandum should explain why. And the reason had better be a good one, the VP-HR explained, because on April 1 the CEO picks up the phone and starts calling. “Why didn’t you do what I asked you to do?” he asks each manager that he did not complete the performance discussion task. As the VP-HR explained with a sly grin, “You never want to get that call from Roy.”

Employee performance management is a necessary tool to ensure that your company’s employees are doing their best. Your managers are the catalyst for this, and they need both incentives and consequences to make sure the job gets done. Having a system of checks and balances helps keep the process focused and effective.