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Five tips for effective workforce performance management
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Five tips for effective workforce performance management
Workforce performance management, or WPM, systems enable organizations to automate and optimize their performance processes and align employee development and goals with corporate objectives.
Below are five tips talent managers can use to get the most out of WPM investments.
1. Calibrate performance ratings across the organization.
Ratings distribution management, or ratings calibration, ensures more consistent application of performance ratings across an organization. In a typical global organization, performance rating scales differ from division to division. Ratings distribution management ensures that employees are rated consistently and fairly across the entire organization and, as a result, incentives and rewards can be applied more appropriately. It directs managers to make oftentimes difficult decisions about the performance of their reports, and the resulting ratings calibration typically resembles a bell curve.
2. Link performance processes to career development and learning management.
While the output of the WPM process is a finalized performance review between a manager and his or her direct report, the process also identifies employee skill, competency and behavior gaps. Along with other forms of self-assessment and 360s, if used, a clear picture of the employee emerges. With this picture in hand, employees are better able to build career development plans that focus on improvement in their current role, better prepare them for a future role of interest, or both.
Once employees have created their development plans, the next step is to select educational and training activities as developmental goals in the WPM system to improve skills, competencies and behaviors. This step requires seamless bidirectional integration to a learning management system, which ideally is built upon the same technology stack as the WPM system.
3. Enable pay-for-performance to build a merit-based culture.
Programs that align employees` compensation - merit increases, bonuses, long-term incentives - to their performance have proven to be very effective in driving actual performance. Often called pay-for-performance, the concept is to build a culture of top performers by aligning goals, performance and rewards across an entire organization.
Ideally, a single, centralized HR platform that natively connects all of the required components for pay-for-performance - WPM, compensation, reporting and auditing - is required because it facilitates cross-functional reporting and eliminates the technical challenge and cost of integrating and managing disparate systems.
4. Drive continuous improvement by improving decision making.
Traditional transactional reporting and spreadsheet-based tools are often inflexible, difficult to use and inaccessible to the average HR and line-of-business user. Strategic workforce analytics, on the other hand, provide more meaningful cross-functional metrics to measure HR program effectiveness. For instance, what HR leader would not like to know the true impact of learning programs on employee performance or the effect of employee engagement programs on productivity?
Part of the challenge facing many organizations is the fact that data is spread out in various silos and there is no common employee system of record. A single, fully connected HR platform that covers the gamut of talent functions can alleviate some of the problems since the data is all in one place. With a robust analytic and reporting function, along with predefined cross-functional metrics, previously unavailable insight can be gained.
5. Reduce total cost of ownership by configuring, not customizing.
The elements of a WPM system must be fully configurable to suit each organization`s unique needs. The sections of a performance form, such as goals, competencies and development activities, as well as the number of steps in the process (e.g., workflow) must be selectable by the organization, division or even geography. Configuration includes which actions can be performed at each step of the process, security controls over who can read or edit the form, and the text of automatic e-mail notification messages.
Configuration is vastly preferable to customization, as the latter approach entails making programmatic changes to an application. Configuration, on the other hand, is achieved through user-driven, parameter-based utilities and wizards that do not require technical programming expertise, thereby providing organizations with flexibility and complete control over their environments. The benefits include lower total cost of ownership as well as more seamless future application upgrades.
Below are five tips talent managers can use to get the most out of WPM investments.
1. Calibrate performance ratings across the organization.
Ratings distribution management, or ratings calibration, ensures more consistent application of performance ratings across an organization. In a typical global organization, performance rating scales differ from division to division. Ratings distribution management ensures that employees are rated consistently and fairly across the entire organization and, as a result, incentives and rewards can be applied more appropriately. It directs managers to make oftentimes difficult decisions about the performance of their reports, and the resulting ratings calibration typically resembles a bell curve.
2. Link performance processes to career development and learning management.
While the output of the WPM process is a finalized performance review between a manager and his or her direct report, the process also identifies employee skill, competency and behavior gaps. Along with other forms of self-assessment and 360s, if used, a clear picture of the employee emerges. With this picture in hand, employees are better able to build career development plans that focus on improvement in their current role, better prepare them for a future role of interest, or both.
Once employees have created their development plans, the next step is to select educational and training activities as developmental goals in the WPM system to improve skills, competencies and behaviors. This step requires seamless bidirectional integration to a learning management system, which ideally is built upon the same technology stack as the WPM system.
3. Enable pay-for-performance to build a merit-based culture.
Programs that align employees` compensation - merit increases, bonuses, long-term incentives - to their performance have proven to be very effective in driving actual performance. Often called pay-for-performance, the concept is to build a culture of top performers by aligning goals, performance and rewards across an entire organization.
Ideally, a single, centralized HR platform that natively connects all of the required components for pay-for-performance - WPM, compensation, reporting and auditing - is required because it facilitates cross-functional reporting and eliminates the technical challenge and cost of integrating and managing disparate systems.
4. Drive continuous improvement by improving decision making.
Traditional transactional reporting and spreadsheet-based tools are often inflexible, difficult to use and inaccessible to the average HR and line-of-business user. Strategic workforce analytics, on the other hand, provide more meaningful cross-functional metrics to measure HR program effectiveness. For instance, what HR leader would not like to know the true impact of learning programs on employee performance or the effect of employee engagement programs on productivity?
Part of the challenge facing many organizations is the fact that data is spread out in various silos and there is no common employee system of record. A single, fully connected HR platform that covers the gamut of talent functions can alleviate some of the problems since the data is all in one place. With a robust analytic and reporting function, along with predefined cross-functional metrics, previously unavailable insight can be gained.
5. Reduce total cost of ownership by configuring, not customizing.
The elements of a WPM system must be fully configurable to suit each organization`s unique needs. The sections of a performance form, such as goals, competencies and development activities, as well as the number of steps in the process (e.g., workflow) must be selectable by the organization, division or even geography. Configuration includes which actions can be performed at each step of the process, security controls over who can read or edit the form, and the text of automatic e-mail notification messages.
Configuration is vastly preferable to customization, as the latter approach entails making programmatic changes to an application. Configuration, on the other hand, is achieved through user-driven, parameter-based utilities and wizards that do not require technical programming expertise, thereby providing organizations with flexibility and complete control over their environments. The benefits include lower total cost of ownership as well as more seamless future application upgrades.
