Making Performance Management Part of the Daily Routine

— by taylor (2 min read)

We’ve all done it — once a year, we set goals we don’t revisit until the next year rolls around. It’s why performance management doesn’t seem to work. It also makes it really easy for people to skate along, doing well but perhaps not going above and beyond.

Measuring great performance requires understanding where the baseline is and enforcing that every day. Daily performance management not only encourages the right behaviors, but it also helps address any concerns early on before they become problems. Employees can stick to the right goals, and management can align performance with the business’s needs.

Here are tips on how to make performance management part of the daily interactions you have with employees:

  • Break goals into actionable items: Large goals that require a year to accomplish can be daunting. But if you break the goal into smaller items, you can include how someone could work daily toward accomplishing that goal. Then when you do regular check-ins, it’s much easier to talk about progress.
  • Find ways to recognize good performance: Whether your company has an official recognition program or not, take time to say, “Good job,” when an employee is performing well. Make the recognition as specific as possible, especially if it relates to one of their goals. For example, if an employee built an internal enablement guide that also included engaging messaging and creative design (just like an ad campaign), say, “Good job applying marketing practices to internal training to help us increase adoption.
  • Adjust as you go: Goals set at the beginning of the year might have to change over time. Making performance management part of a daily routine means it’s much easier to see when a goal might need to be modified or corrected. Check to make sure that adjusting the goal still fits into the company’s strategy. By updating the goal, it’s more likely the employee will succeed than if the goal and the daily work are no longer aligned.

Performance management can be effective if it’s part of daily management practices. It might require managers to be more proactive about goals and define action items with employees if internal performance software or processes aren’t set up for that level of detail. But the results will be worth it if you make the extra effort.