Somebody asked me the other day why I thought that they were being performanced managed. I asked them what they meant specifically, and they told me that they now had objectives that they had to meet, something that was new to them.
It’s a fair question, I suppose. It happens with reasonable frequency, too. Organisations use performance management tools that come and go, and a very large percentage of all staff have probably never had any real performance management.
It’s a common misconception that performance management is only for the poor performers. If that’s who you’re performance managing, you’re too late. Start earlier, and you’ll identify and resolve problems sooner. You need to know what performance looks like in your organisation.
Think of it from another angle. There’s an employee that you know isn’t performing. You bring it up with them, and they ask you “How do you know when I am performing?” Do you have an answer? “I’ll know it when I see it” doesn’t cut it here. There’s no way you can expect an employee to perform if you don’t know what that performance looks like.