Top 8 Performance Management Goals & Objectives
How in-depth and thorough do you need to get when setting performance management goals and objectives? How can you ensure you are serving your employees and maximizing your time with them? There’s been a lot of conversation lately about performance management and how to use performance reviews as part of your talent development program.
HR managers need to think clearly about the why. Why are you doing performance reviews? Why are you taking time out of your managers’ and employees’ days to do them? You need to clearly articulate your why to everyone in your organization to make your performance review cycles more effective. While we can’t spell out the whys for your company, we can help you think about them differently.
Here are the top 8 performance management goals and objectives that we’ve seen:
You Want to Develop A High-Performance Culture in the Workplace
Creating a high-performance culture in your workplace is one of the most important parts of reaching your business goals. When you look at individual performance and overall business goals, you can create cascade goals throughout your organization so that everyone feels like they contribute to organizational success.
Use performance management goals to help employees understand their contributions and see how their daily actions impact everyone. This should be obvious to employees, but HR is burdened with creating a performance management system and workflow that develops performance and ties it into organizational culture.
You Want To Improve Employee Engagement
Do you need help with employee engagement? It’s an essential part of employee performance management. So much so that we built it into our performance management system, Trakstar Perform (formerly Reviewsnap). You can run engagement surveys, pulse surveys, check-ins, and custom surveys between performance review cycles to keep the feedback loop going.
It’s important to note that employee engagement is part of performance reviews, but that doesn’t mean it falls solely on human resources. Every single person in your organization plays a role in employee engagement. However, when people know they are doing well or feel like they know how to get better, they are more likely to stay engaged and meet their goals.
You Want to Provide the Opportunity For Personal Development
Personal development might seem like something HR leaders don’t need to occupy themselves with, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Personal development and how your employees feel outside of work have a significant impact on how they feel inside of work as well.
Employees want to advance themselves in their jobs by learning new skills or being mentored. You can tie performance management goals to specific learning and training goals or invest in employees by sending them to conferences.
Ask your employees about their goals outside of work too! It’s a great way to build trust and camaraderie in teams. Maybe someone wants to start running more, or they want to visit their parents once a month. Other people might want to learn a new language or save for a new house. If employees don’t feel comfortable discussing their outside goals, that’s okay too. Your managers should know when to press and when not to.
Identify Underperformers (And Turn Them Into Overperformers)
Identifying underperformers in the workplace is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it helps ensure that the organization operates at its optimum level. Employees not meeting their performance targets can lead to decreased productivity, missed deadlines, and reduced overall quality of work. This can harm the company’s bottom line and reputation, which can be detrimental in the long run.
Secondly, identifying underperformers allows for interventions to be made to improve their performance. It provides an opportunity for management to address any issues or challenges that may be hindering an employee’s performance, such as lack of training, poor communication, or inadequate resources. By addressing these issues, the underperformer can receive the necessary support and guidance to improve their performance, which benefits both the employee and the organization.
Identify High Performers
Another reason could be to identify high performers. You can use this information to focus on retention efforts, build your mentoring program, or make promotions. You might think you know your highest performers, but you could be wrong. Sometimes the best employees are a bit quieter.
Plan for Succession
Once you identify your top performers, you can start to plan for succession. Succession allows you to recognize and reward high performance, build succession pathways, and plan for your organization’s future.
It’s essential to start by identifying top performers because you may want to lay the seeds for a promotion and role growth long before it can actually happen. This will encourage employees to stay with you and help them grow into the leadership you need.
To Plan Raises
Even if you can’t offer someone a promotion, you may be able to give them a raise. Performance management goals and objectives help leaders determine raises and how they spread raises throughout departments and the organization.
Using a performance management system can help eliminate the bias associated with performance reviews that can impact raises. You don’t want to get yourself in legal trouble.
Justify and Provide Documentation for HR Decisions
For everything, HR needs to have justification for the decisions they make. Without justification, there can be legal issues, controversies, or just conversations and rumors that can hurt the brand. The HR department needs to have clear lines of documentation that show employees were treated fairly and equally. Using performance management software or even just having a system in place can help in those difficult situations.
Ready to Take Your Performance Management to the Next Level?
If you are ready to take your performance management to the next level, schedule a demo of Trakstar Perform (formerly Reviewsnap) today. Our performance management system was purpose-built to make your review cycles easier and keep your organization aligned around the goals and objectives that you set. Everything within Perform is optimized for you and the way your company works, no matter your size.