performance management Archives - Axiom Communications Ltd

Performance management is broken and employee engagement is suffering as a result

I’ve been in some sort of performance management system since I started in corporate life straight out of university. I have seen the world around me changing rapidly, and yet the performance review has atrophied.

My goals have moved, strategies have evolved and I have regularly found myself working across teams and on multiple projects. I have needed to build my skills continuously and I have wanted much more frequent, real-time feedback on how I’m progressing and what more I need to be doing. The traditional PM system that has creaked into action twice a year (at best) just hasn’t done the job.

Even when I left the corporate world to become a consultant, my husband joked that he should take over the job of setting my objectives. After all, how could I possibly do my best work without them? I won’t repeat what I said in reply!

As it turned out, despite not working towards pre-agreed objectives or metrics, I carried on developing well enough, I think – and my performance reflected that. As well as developing new technical skills, I learned how to be a consultant, how to help my customers succeed and how to manage myself in delivering on multiple projects. And I got great and regular feedback from the people I worked with, too.

How we work is changing and yet most of the current performance systems in use today date from a time of command-and-control management when business priorities were set according to a predictable annual cycle. As a result, they don’t deliver in the modern world.

[Read more…]

Research by Deloitte shows that performance management is broken: “Only eight percent of companies report that their performance management process drives high levels of value, while 58 percent said it is not an effective use of time.”

The Engage for Success (E4S) movement has set up a special interest group, which Axiom’s Chris Carey is helping to lead. The group’s aim is to better understand the relationship between employee engagement and performance management. Ultimately, the group is seeking to create a framework of best-practice tools, case studies and behaviours to help organisations harness performance management more effectively.

The first step is some initial research via an online questionnaire. You can help by investing no more than 10 minutes of your time to provide basic information about your organisation’s performance management process and its effectiveness.

All responses will be treated in strict confidence and will not be attributed to your organisation.

To start the survey, just enter the password e4spm.

What’s gone wrong with performance management?

Performance management is broken and employee engagement is suffering as a result

So is performance management broken?

Research by Deloitte shows that performance management is broken: “Only eight percent of companies report that their performance management process drives high levels of value, while 58 percent said it is not an effective use of time.”