Your organizational success depends on employee performance. It’s your goal to maintain a workforce that consistently meets or exceeds performance expectations, with a focus on continuous improvement in all areas.
An effective performance development framework starts with your recruiting process and extends through every employee’s tenure with your organization. How can you best identify existing performance issues – and prevent them from recurring?
Spotting Performance Problems
Identifying low performance can be tricky. Use these indicators to help you find your problem areas – and from there, you can effectively address them.
- Goals not being met: You’ve clearly set and communicated an employee’s performance goals, and that individual is not meeting them.
- Employee relying on others to meet their goals: In this case, goals are being reached but an employee is depending too much on other team members to make them happen. If someone is constantly asking others for help, they interfere with the productivity of the entire group. This must be managed quickly in order to avoid serious conflicts.
- Poor quality work: Some individuals simply don’t have what it takes to succeed. As a manager, you need to carefully explain to them how their work is not meeting expectations and define what good performance would look like.
- Excessive absenteeism: You know what this looks like. Mondays, Fridays and days preceding or following holidays are especially noteworthy days to call in sick.
- Difficulty working with others: There are some isolated cases where individual contributors can succeed without interacting with bosses or co-workers. And if they are truly excellent performers, this may be a solution. But most of the time, employees have to work cooperatively.
- Inability to embrace company values: It’s critical that every employee believes in and can uphold your company mission, vision and goals. While many skills can be learned on the job, the right cultural fit can neither be taught nor bought.
Recruiting for High Performance
A key aspect of achieving a high-performing workforce is building your candidate pool even before you need it. You should always be recruiting, including the cultivation of relationships with passive candidates. These individuals, who are not actively job seeking but may be open to new opportunities, represent the top 5-to-10 percent of performers in their fields.
- Start with your own in-house candidates. Provide both lateral and promotional opportunities to keep them engaged and develop their careers with your organization. As millennials become the dominant workforce demographic, it’s more important than ever to offer work-life balance and involvement in challenging, interesting projects.
- Build your brand. Become known as an employer of choice. Continually reevaluate and enhance your practices for retention, motivation, accountability, reward and recognition. You want your employees bragging to their own communities about how great it is to work for you. Their friends and connections will believe them ahead of even your most sincere corporate literature.
- Involve employees in the hiring process. In addition to their social media reach, your current employees can and should participate in resume reviews, interviews and other aspects of your recruitment process. Those who take an active role are committed to helping newcomers succeed. If you don’t already have one, consider implementing an employee referral bonus system.
The specialized recruitment experts at Talent Bridge can partner with you to develop an industry-leading team and reach new heights in performance and profitability. Contact us today to learn more.