Employee needs and commercial needs go hand in hand: the factors that drive individual performance ultimately drive commercial success for the business. Yet all too often, leadership and human resources’ conversations around employee performance focus purely on its outcomes – commercial KPIs, productivity, output – and fail to address what’s impacting each employee’s performance, and how to influence it.
Here, we break down what employee performance is and how you can drive, measure and assess it, along with some clear steps to improving employee performance in your organisation.
Employee performance is, simply, how well an employee is performing in their role, but there should be more to it than output alone. Performance should cover the quantity, quality and value of each employee’s output, as well as their behaviour and efficiency.
Employee performance is a good indicator of the health of a business and its management structures. If every employee is performing at their best, so does the business. If they’re not, the business struggles to achieve its targets – it’s really that simple. In essence, every employee is part of the commercial puzzle: you need every piece in order to have a full picture of how well it's functioning.
Yet when it comes to managing employee performance, many organisations take a one size fits all approach. Instead of seeing each piece of the puzzle, they just look at the bigger picture – they can see that there are holes, but they don’t know how to fill them. As a result, they put blanket policies and initiatives in place to drive better performance, and they don’t work.
Why? Because performance drivers are deeply personal and unique to the individual. Every single employee is different. What motivates one person won’t work for another. A challenge for one team member might be a breeze for another. The things that are important to Sam in accounts could be low priorities for Alex in marketing. Understanding employee performance should really be about understanding individuals – which is easier said than done when you employ hundreds of people.
This is a bit like asking ‘how long is a piece of string’. What drives employee performance, depends on the employee. It’s a complicated aspect of human resource management, but it’s not an impossible one to deal with once you know how to take a people-centric approach.
In a people-centric workplace, there are three main factors that affect performance:
Inclusivity isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a key driver of employee performance. Employees that feel able to be themselves at work, and feel valued for their individuality, are more confident, more able to ask for support when they need it, and more driven to perform their best. Inclusive workplace culture doesn’t ignore people’s differences, it embraces them, recognising that just as everyone brings something unique to the table, so do they have unique obstacles and challenges to overcome.
Happy employees are more productive, engaged, and motivated. If managers are able to look after their team’s wellbeing, and help them to address stress, confidence and happiness, their performance will improve as a result. Yet that wellbeing shouldn’t just relate to how they feel at work: people don’t leave their troubles at the door when they walk into the office or open their laptop, nor do they leave their stresses at work when they leave at the end of the day. Wellbeing that takes the full person into consideration, tackling both personal and professional issues, has the greatest impact on employee performance.
Understanding every employee’s unique circumstances is a big step towards unlocking better performance. If managers can help their reports to identify what really motivates them, they hold the key to unlocking the full potential of their performance.
Employee performance drivers are the key things that motivate an employee. They are usually a mix of personal and professional factors, ranging from priorities in their home life to expectations and ambitions for their role. Every employee has their own blend of drivers: if managers can work with them to identify those drivers and the actions they need to take to achieve them, it has a powerful impact on employee performance. A platform that lists these drivers and enables the employee to score them gives structure to this process for both the employee and manager, helping conversations to stay focused.
Examples of drivers range from the personal (including family, partners, pets, health and exercise) to the professional (such as promotion, recognition, development, time management and supportive management). This is just skimming the surface: on the OpenBlend employee performance platform, there are 30 drivers, with employees choosing a blend of four to eight that best represent their needs.
If you take a broad-stroke approach to performance, it’s likely that metrics will fall into three areas: quality of work, speed and efficiency, and trust and consistency. The employee will have KPIs based on their output and their attitude to work, which a manager can effectively ‘tick off’ if they are met. If they are not, new goals will be set for the employee to work towards.
However, this approach might look at the outcome of employee performance, but it ignores half of the picture: what are the factors impacting this performance? How can you help employees to address these issues and perform at their best?
When measuring employee performance individual objectives and KPIs are much more impactful, as they set specific targets that relate to the individual, giving them clear goals along with clear steps to achieve them. Just telling someone they should be doing something – eg, increasing their output – without looking at why they are struggling to achieve it – for instance, because of stress, workload, or difficulties at home – is a recipe for failure and frustration.
If you want to improve employee performance across the board, managers should set achievable, specific goals with the employee, turning over-arching ‘performance metrics’ into actionable items and working them into employee development plans.
Managers can impact employee performance through conversation – but they need to be the right kind of conversations, not a coffee-break chat or a rigid performance review. Effective one-to-ones between managers and employees should cover a breadth of subjects, with employees openly discussing their performance goals and motivational drivers and managers asking simple, direct questions about wellbeing that prompt honest responses.
In effect, every manager needs to become a coach, which is no mean feat given that every manager is likely to have a different background, level of experience and interpersonal skills. Training sessions alone often aren’t enough to transform every manager into a coach: they need a framework that enables them to have consistently productive conversations. This framework should include clear goal setting, wellbeing prompts, a way to identify and prioritise individual drivers, and an easy way for managers and employees alike to add to the agenda.
The best thing you can do to improve employee performance is to shift your perspective, looking at what’s impacting the employee as well as measuring their output. The OpenBlend employee performance platform has helped the likes of Gymshark, Lacoste Footwear PCL, Foxtons and Dr Martens to transform employee performance in their organisations.
Find out how they did it: book a discovery call with our team today.