Have you ever heard of the term “Kaizen”? It is a Japanese term that is thrown around a lot nowadays. At its core, Kaizen means the process of continuous improvement. The very idea of “My only competition is with myself” or “Becoming a better version of myself” is put into practice every time with Kaizen.
However, what would that process be called when a person is responsible for analyzing your performance against a set goal of parameters and metrics. That is what is called Performance Management. According to Gartner’s report, as much as 70% of a company’s workforce feels more valued when their performance is put under the scanner regularly.
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In most companies worldwide, the performance review and appraisal process is done once a year. And that too by hand or by mundane manual tasks. The necessary steps of this process are:
- A meeting between the manager and employee
- Evaluation of the accomplishment of tasks as per set targets/goals
- Discussion and negotiation between the two parties on the approval ratings or appraisal
This tried and tested method seldom fails because of the metrics, personal human bias, and overall consistency errors that creep in quickly due to the “human factor” of the entire process.
“All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they are now getting. If we want different results, we must change the way we do things.” – Tom Northup
What is Online Performance Management?
Online performance management is a system that helps you track an employee’s growth and productivity in real-time against set targets and parameters. Most of the time, such a system is a directly available module in your company’s HR and Payroll system.
It can:
- Define content, participants, and process for employee performance evaluation
- Encourage meaningful conversations between the managers and employees
- Support SMART objectives, goals, check-ins, competency development, etc.
- Ensure better-informed decisions and feedback in minutes instead of in months
Top Benefits of Adopting an Online Performance Management
To achieve that fluidity in the appraisal/performance review process, the following are the ways an online performance management system can help:
1. Added flexibility for managers
The age-old performance management process takes anywhere between 4-5 weeks or even more from start to end. In fact, more than 32% of employees wait for proper feedback from their managers during their performance reviews.
Using an online system reduces that time to less than a week and adds more room for extra flexibility in dedicating that time to other tasks. Furthermore, this also gives the managers room to analyze more aspects of the employee – to get a holistic idea of the overall employee’s performance for the evaluation.
2. Well-defined targets and goals
The very idea of adopting an online performance system is to reduce the lead time of manual labor and set defined plans beforehand. Thanks to the system, you can set annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly targets/goals to be adhered to by every employee.
3. Better employee engagement
Handling and maintaining a team requires constant evaluation and feedback. For the best output from your team, it’s best to give them feedback at least once a week.
Employees whose managers communicate regularly with them can tend to be three times more engaged than estranged employees. The online performance system automatically gauges employee performance against the set targets and helps in better employee management.
4. Added personal touch to the process
Usually, performance evaluation and management of an employee means taking a particular time set out of your daily schedule. Thanks to online performance management systems, now you can simply start evaluating with a few clicks.
5. More reliable data
When evaluating someone’s performance, the essential requirement is the availability of useful quality data. Thanks to the automatic compilation, you will get valuable and dependable quality data in an instant with just the press of a button.
Overall, the data is as reliable as the managers put in their opinion. However, given that there is no tampering of the data, the final compilation is quite reliable.
6. More distributed evaluation annually
Instead of just evaluating an employee once annually, you can make the process more spread throughout the year. Based on these factors, you can automatically see where the performance rose and fell throughout the year and then decide on the final performance appraisal.
This means that you will automatically make the decision more well-informed and the overall process more streamlined.
7. Better Employee-Manager Feedback System
One of the most significant benefits is the feedback system. How a manager will provide feedback to the employee, the same way, an employee will use it to provide input towards their manager. It also makes the process more transparent for both parties.
Employees that received feedback on their strengths showed 8.9% greater profitability. But also make sure that as a manager you don’t focus on too much of weakness of the employees.
Teams led by managers who focus on their weaknesses are 26% less likely to be engaged. Hence, it promotes camaraderie and sportsmanship to accept responsibility and make changes.
8. Data and Goal-Driven Appraisal Process
The entire process revolves around metrics instead of bias performance evaluation. This is due to the year-round data available and the goals made aware to the employee beforehand.
It means that if the employee’s performance has been better than the expectations, that person is automatically recommended for appraisal.
9. Better Learning and Growth Opportunities
Besides the standard appraisal procedure, you will also open the gates to improving the employees’ performance. Thanks to the feedback, the employees also get more room for better learning opportunities.
Almost 92% of the employees agreed that even receiving appropriately delivered negative feedback can help them improvise their performance.
“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” – John F. Kennedy
Hence, the online performance management system helps in providing the very grounds for “Kaizen.”
10. Incentivizing Exemplary performance
One of the best motivators for employees is to let them know that they are valuable. While words and actions are all good, incentivizing performance metrics help the cause.
Using the online performance system, you can automatically come to know your best employees. You can then start providing them with incentives every time they achieve and overtake the goals by going the extra mile. Recognition, on the other hand, is equally important for employees to be inspired to produce better work performance.
Besides these conspicuous benefits, there are also other inconspicuous benefits that you will experience over time by adopting the online performance management system.
So get down on the floor and start managing because your employees are waiting for their annual performance reviews.
Did we miss any crucial points with online performance management? Let us know in the comments below how online performance management can better your business.
Jahnavi Vekaria is a Senior Content Writer at an E-commerce company, that has offices in India and the USA.
With a savvy understanding of language and search, Jahnavi grew her love of the IT and SaaS industry’s technical side, gravitating towards learning about SEO, audits, crawls, and other aspects of digital marketing.
