What’s good for employees is good for business.
That statement is now more true than ever — partly because employees have more options than ever before. For many, it’s no longer just about money. They want to work somewhere that offers work flexibility, ongoing training, and pay transparency.
Employers are shifting their focus too. A staggering 91% say that soft skills are vital to their recruiting efforts.
With employees and employers at an impasse with their wants and needs, it’s more important than ever to stay on the same page. A performance management system is the solution.
In this article, we’ll define a performance management system and show you what to look for when purchasing one.
What is a performance management system?
In technical terms, a performance management system (PMS) is a system for managing the performance of employees in a repeatable and measurable fashion.
It provides oversight of ongoing performance and facilitates the activities necessary for individuals and teams to meet strategic goals.
In plain terms, a performance management system is a tool that makes it easier to see how well your employees are performing in their roles. It provides insights related to performance that help provide coaching opportunities and improve decision-making.
General components of a performance management system include:
- Performance goal setting and tracking capabilities
- Current and past employee performance metric tracking
- Employee ranking capabilities
- The ability to capture feedback on employee performance
- Development and performance planning
- Communication tools and document storage
Each system will offer a unique spin on the above components and likely have additional features to offer your talent management desires.
Why is a performance management system important?
Effective performance management comes down to having the right data at the right time so you can make more informed decisions.
That requires a mechanism for capturing data, organizing it, storing it long-term, and simplifying the way you interact with it.
Without performance management systems, you’d have to piece together multiple pieces of software to get the same result or do a lot of manual entry yourself.
As a result, you’ll likely do more admin work, fall victim to human error, and be less effective as a team and an organization.
Tracking individual employee performance with a PMS in place is akin to having eyes and ears seemingly everywhere.
You go from operating with limited data and relying on first-hand accounts to having concrete data related to attendance, performance, and the opinions of their customers and peers alike.
The best part is it’s all practically in real-time. All you have to do is understand how the system works.
How a performance management system benefits managers and HR departments
Nobody benefits more from continuous performance management than HR professionals and managers. They’re constantly trying to improve the organization by setting ambitious employee goals, offering continuous feedback, and seeing projects through to completion.
Let’s go over a specific example of performance management in action.
A big part of both HR partners’ and managers’ day-to-day responsibilities is onboarding new employees.
Gone are the days where you could onboarding someone in a day and expect them to be successful. It’s often a multi-week process filled with forms to sign, gear to collect, classes to attend, and more.
A performance management system keeps track of all the little things, so nothing slips through the cracks.
That means checklists are all in one spot, so you can see what’s complete and what’s not. All the new hire documents are at your fingertips as well. And all the necessary meetings get scheduled in the PMS.
HR gets to remain compliant and feel confident the new hire is now more an asset than a liability. Managers get to reap the rewards of a more integrated employee that’s set up for success.
The real question is, why isn’t everyone using one?
5 essential elements of a performance management system
Improving team performance comes down to doing the right things at the right time. There’s no better way to stay on track than by deploying a performance management system.
Yet, not all performance management tools are made equal. Some are limiting by nature with their lack of customization, and others are too complex to understand.
Finding the perfect PMS comes down to getting the right combination of features. Here are 5 key elements to look for when seeking performance management software for your organization:
1. Streamlined task management
If all performance management systems need one common thread, it’s the ability to track tasks.
All the data in the world is worthless if you don’t have a way to keep up with the daily tasks that give the data meaning.
Ultimately, task management is the act of managing all tasks in a given project, from planning to execution. With a Work OS like monday.com, you get more than just a simple to-do list of tasks. It provides you with insights you could only dream of before.
Take a look at the screenshot above. The blue dots indicate if each employee has the right amount of work or not enough. The red ones mean they’re stretched thin.
Don’t you wish you knew who was in danger of feeling burnt or overworked? monday.com’s Workload View — the one shown above — provides that clear visual of your team’s weekly capacity. You can see who has too much, too little, or just the right amount. Then you can leap into action and redistribute tasks to ensure the team’s collective performance is at its max.
2. Robust communication tools
Action is huge, but so is the ability to clearly communicate with your team or an individual employee.
Enhancing employee engagement and offering performance feedback is infinitely easier when you have communication tools built into your performance management system.
Communicating like a pro boils down to the tools that you use. It’s difficult to fully escape the endless email chains and long meetings, but monday.com is definitely your ally in that fight.
With communication, context is everything. Using monday.com, you can log your communication against specific tasks, so you always have the relevant information you need at your fingertips.
If someone marks a task’s status as stuck, you can click into their task and send an instant message by tagging their name and asking how you can help. They’ll get notified immediately too.
You can also see who’s viewed certain posts and even get likes on your communication updates to acknowledge them. Less back and forth means less fluff and more rich insights like setting an objective for the day or outlining performance expectations for a specific project.
3. Simple survey creation
A big part of boosting morale in your organization comes from your company’s culture. If leaders make it a priority to survey their employees regularly, then everyone reaps the rewards.
monday.com makes it easy to survey your employees at any interval you desire. There’s no limit to the questions you can ask, and the best part is it’s all integrated into the app. That means you get beautiful charts of the results, like the one below.
Plus, all that data is neatly stored so you can access it anytime and anywhere.
All it takes to set up a survey is creating a board, adding the right questions, assigning it to the right people, and letting the system know where to send the data. All that’s as simple as selecting from the dozens of customizable column options
It’s not enough to survey the team, though. You need to do something with that data if you want to strengthen employee engagement.
Follow through and connect the dots from survey to survey to find themes, process bottlenecks, and opportunities for coaching.
4. Endless automation possibilities
Arguably, the number one reason companies fall short of offering regular performance feedback is that it feels cumbersome. With countless conflicting priorities, it can feel daunting to slow things down to ensure everyone is getting adequate coaching.
If you feel like you do too much manual work, then your organization could probably benefit from the automation that performance management systems provide.
monday.com makes it easy to set up custom workflows, so your team has a set process for everything they do.
In addition to custom workflows, monday.com can take some work off your team’s plate by creating simple or complex custom automations. Each recipe consists of a trigger and an action.
Some common examples of triggers and actions you can use in performance management include:
- Automating surveys to go out at regular intervals throughout the year
- Notifying HR professionals when individual performance hits a certain level
- Assigning checklists to employees when a specific date arrives
- Notifying HR and individuals in need of coaching when a manager creates a coaching task
The list of possibilities is quite literally endless.
5. Powerful reporting and dashboards
Conducting performance reviews and offering continuous performance management are essential parts of your organization’s success.
Without them, your employees will never know what’s going well and where they can improve.
Arguably the biggest problem with annual performance reviews is that they are annual. Most employees and employers would benefit from a more regular cadence of feedback. Doing so will help positively shift the company’s direction and make them less scary for employees.Organizational psychologist Adam Grant says, “Feedback is only scary when it’s rare. If it’s something that happens every day, you don’t feel like you’re being judged anymore. You just feel like you’re getting useful tips.”
People crave continuous feedback, and doing a meager annual review isn’t going to cut it. Switch to a quarterly performance process at a minimum and reap the rewards of proper goal management.
When it’s time to conduct performance reviews, you’ll need hard data to review together. That’s where monday.com comes into play.
You can combine all the data from your boards to create robust reports and dashboards that provide a visual representation of each employee’s performance over time and, if you want, put it alongside the performance of their peers.
Building a custom performance management system with monday.com
You’ve heard a lot about what performance management software can do to revolutionize your career development program, and along the way, we’ve highlighted monday.com as a first-rate solution.
The reason it’s all-powerful as an HR tool is because it’s a complete Work OS, which means you have complete control over how you customize your boards, integrate with other programs, and automate your processes.
It all starts by creating a board with the right mix of columns for your organization.
As your needs evolve, so will the number of boards you deploy to meet each objective. They’ll all connect together to create a solution that’s unique to your organization.
Beyond the items we’ve covered relating to performance management, there is a heap of other monday.com features you’re sure to love:
- 8+ data visualizations, so your projects and performance metrics are viewable in the format that best suits you
- Fully functional mobile apps that keep you informed wherever the world takes you
- 24/7 customer support, so you have the confidence needed to make a lasting impact
- Dozens of integration possibilities, including Zapier that connects you to 3,000+ apps
- 200+ templates that help you get organized in a matter of minutes
We’ve built something special with monday.com and believe you’ll see the difference right away.
Leading the way
monday.com is essential to creating and executing a rock-solid performance improvement plan.
HR professionals and leaders alike benefit from the transparency, automation, and ability to communicate throughout the organization.
If you’re on the fence, then use our free trial to see it in action for yourself.
Here’s a centralized HR Services Template that provides a bit of everything you need to kickstart your performance management desires.
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