The Importance of Ongoing Communication with Your Employees
If your job consisted of continuous monitoring of whether or not the managers of the company were consistently and effectively communicating with their employees, what conclusions do you think you would make? My guess is that you would find that the communication would be generally ineffective and not results-oriented. All too often managers don’t make the time to communicate with their employees about their performance and what can be done to achieve their respective goals.
If managers wait for performance review time to provide important feedback, they are missing tremendous opportunities to elevate the level and value of communication. To benefit both the company and the employee managers and supervisors need to communicate with the employee throughout the entire year. Obviously there is the possibility of over-communication and micromanagement and both should be avoid. But well placed communication about performance will help employees capitalize on their potential. Managers need to make sure employees are progressing toward achieving their goals and and they should continue to coach the employee where performance is lagging. And certainly excellent performance should be recognized along the way.
Not communicating with the employee can lead to a couple of things. One, the employee could run into some surprises when you are having your review meeting with them and they very likely won’t receive the message well. Or the employee could be stuck in a rut and they won’t have made any progress toward their goals and areas of focus leaving them “spinning their wheels”, so to speak.
Using a Web-based performance management system can significantly enhance ongoing communication and goal management to help your performance reviews. These systems are designed to not only provide the “infrastructure” for performance reviews and feedback surveys, but to provide tools that drive communication on an ongoing basis.