With the health and social crisis and the emergence of hybrid work, the work environment and the needs of employees have changed profoundly. At the same time, the economic context has become uncertain, and managers' expectations of their employees have changed. A Gartner analysis shows us that a relevant performance management will allow to cross the expectations of the employees and the needs of the company, and to avoid some pitfalls.
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Blakeley Hartfelder and Benjamin Loring, the Gartner experts, published their analysis on February 4, 2022 in the article "Gartner's Employee Performance Management Primer for 2022."
In a context of health and social crisis, employees are demanding more empathy, fairness and flexibility from their employers. This includes how their performance will be evaluated and assessed. Employees do not hesitate to quit, or simply disengage, if their call is not heard.
At the same time, with the growth of telecommuting, managers are finding it increasingly difficult to assess the work their employees are doing. As a result, 69% of HR managers say that managers have less visibility into the work of their employees in a hybrid work environment. They agree that the most successful teams are those that focus on results and team behaviors rather than hours worked or physical location.
This twofold observation implies that performance management must promote :
Until now, in traditional organizations, employees were evaluated according to clear and consistent criteria. Today, in an uncertain and ever-changing environment, organizations must be dynamic and scalable in setting and evaluating goals, allowing teams to constantly adapt their practices and objectives.
With telecommuting, managers are finding it increasingly difficult to coordinate and support teams that are spread across the country. They need to be supported with tools that allow them to set dynamic goals, give and get feedback, evaluate and reward their teams.
Growing awareness of societal issues has created a need for equity and inclusion in business, including in performance management, with fair and equitable goals and rewards.
Organizations need to combine the performance they need with the demand for employee development. Both can be encouraged at the same time through the management of objectives, feedback and evaluation.
The organization must therefore ensure that its performance management strategy is relevant, around several axes:
The performance management strategy must be customized according to the needs of managers and employees.
Setting goals once or twice a year often results in a mismatch between business and employee expectations. Likewise, essentially individual objectives make one forget how much performance depends on collaboration within teams that are increasingly dispersed due to telecommuting. It is therefore crucial that goal management be flexible and foster collaboration.
Managers and employees alike want to see a rapid increase in skills. It is not only a vertical top-down approach that can be demotivating for the employee, but above all a top-down and bottom-up sharing, in which the employee will voluntarily seek feedback, thanks to adapted tools.
Performance assessment has become more complex due to telecommuting, which results in less visibility into employee results. In addition, an inaccurate assessment will demotivate top performers, just as an undifferentiated assessment will discourage equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives.
This is essential to retain the best performing profiles, especially in a context of high turnover. However, there is still too little difference in compensation between average and high performers. It is therefore necessary to identify employees whose performance is exceptional, and to pay them more than proportionally.
To meet these new performance management challenges, managers must be aware of the key objectives of their organization, from which the business objectives of their teams will derive, while keeping in mind the new expectations of their employees: empathy, fairness, flexibility, coaching, skills development, fair and adaptable objectives and motivating rewards.
Expectations that echo the values shared by Fire Tiger, which is developing a gamified tool for steering and animating performance, according to relevant and dynamic criteria (see our article on setting SMART objectives), particularly in a hybrid environment (see our article on animating remote teams).
