People are connected to different kinds of technology all the time. Yet, often when it comes to work, employees experience a disconnect between the technologies available to them in their personal lives and those at work. Social media allowss people to respond immediately, in real time.Traditional performance management is the exact opposite. Traditional performance management is mostly backwards-looking – written or oral reviews with occasional ad-hoc conversations. Remediation takes place months after a particular behaviour occurs. Training interventions take so long to schedule, they end up being irrelevant. Traditional performance management approaches cannot keep up because they are not sufficiently tailored to individuals’ goals. They cannot briskly match the right people with the right business needs.
Traditional approaches also focus primarily on business efficiency and process, instead of individual engagement and growth. Managers and staff alike too often view it as time-consuming, excessively subjective, demotivating and, ultimately, unhelpful. So too can it even undermine performance as employees struggle with ratings, worry about compensation, and have difficulty in making sense of performance feedback.
Annual reviews simply are not suited to today’s fast-paced work environment. People need to reinvent themselves continuously. Employees who succeed are seen as “chameleons”, as they can adapt their skill sets to stay relevant. In today’s dynamic environment, people’s evolving capabilities are continuously matched to changing business needs. Among executives surveyed by Accenture, 81% agreed that people who have a variety of skills, and can therefore step into multiple roles, will be valued most in the future workforce. These will be people who can quickly react and leverage their capabilities in response to disruption. They will also help create an organisational culture that supports and celebrates agility and adaptability in the workforce and the organisation more broadly. According to Accenture Strategy research, only 34% of leaders believe current performance management approaches are highly effective at helping employees rapidly adapt to change.
Based on research, we highly recommend implementing a performance management system that is linked to technology in order to allow for the following necessary elements:
- Provide continuous feedback;
- Provide objective and real-time data;
- Assist employees in adopting new behaviours in the face of change;
- Provide meaningful performance results;
- Aid in the growth of training and career-development programmes;
- Help set expectations;
- Monitor performance;
- Not have forced rankings; and
- Assist in rewarding top performers.
According to Accenture Strategy research, providing employees with real-time performance data is ranked among the top-three changes that would most improve workforce performance. One way of moving towards a technology-based performance management system, is the inclusion of gamification. We present more informations in our articles on what gamification is and the psychology behind it.
References:
Accenture Strategy. (2017). Technology reinvents performance management. Retrieved from https://www.accenture.com/za-en/insight-technology-reinvents-performance-management
Kettner, G. (2016). How technology is transforming performance management. Retrieved from https://www.govloop.com/community/blog/technology-transforming-performance-management/
