By Deb LaMere, Vice President of Employee Engagement at Ceridian.
As companies seek to improve their human capital management strategies, one thing they need to do is constantly take the pulse of their employees’ performance. In order to make optimal decisions about how to handle your staff, you have to have all the specifics on how well people are doing and what improvements the group has made.
It’s important to set goals and consistently gauge employees’ progress toward meeting those goals. Often, companies use official performance reviews for this purpose, meeting with each member of the staff on a regular basis (say, annually) and evaluating their work. This approach isn’t likely going away anytime soon, but it can be bolstered by incorporating it into a broader, yearlong performance management strategy.
Today, forward-thinking businesses are automating the performance review process to improve efficiency and still drive a high level of employee participation. This serves to get valuable employee performance information “out of the drawer” and into circulation where it can be useful. Executives and HR personnel alike can benefit from easier access to the data they need.
It’s fairly clear that relying solely on an annual review is not enough in today’s environment. According to Ceridian’s Pulse of Talent data, only 59 percent of employees had a formal meeting with their boss to discuss their job performance in 2012. Many members of Gen Y prefer to have these meetings often, but unfortunately a sizable chunk of the workforce isn’t having them at all.
To address this issue, we need a more formal performance management process. Integrating everything into a single tool – including employee evaluation, data collection and the setting and meeting of meaningful goals – is a step that can benefit both the HR office and the organization at large.
Here’s a closer look at three ways any employer can benefit from a more comprehensive performance management tool.
Managers speed up the process
For managers, evaluating the performance of the staff is a key part of the job. If they have a performance management tool that automates that process, they can gain efficiency in their jobs by leaps and bounds. By streamlining the evaluation, they can save time in the day to spend on more important things, like interacting with their staff members face to face.
Employees get their reviews
Reviewing employee performance is important to the employees themselves, too. It helps them evaluate their strengths and weaknesses on the job and figure out how they can improve. The good news is that with a streamlined review process, workers still get all the insight they’re looking for, and they get to save time and frustration in the process.
Executives have all the data
At the highest levels of the business, the corporate C-suite needs fast access to data about their workers’ performance so that they can make well-informed executive decisions. An automated review process makes this data handy within seconds, providing powerful insights that can help any organization become smarter and more goal-oriented moving forward.
Deb LaMere is Vice President of Employee Engagement at Ceridian
