Modern Performance Management—Lessons from the Road

This is a guest blog by RedThread Research.

In early October, we published The Makings of Modern Performance, a new study sponsored by Glint. We then hit the road to share our findings and learn from conversations with practitioners! After four interactive breakfast meetings, we came away with a few lessons. In wrapping up this project, we want to share what we learned.  

We are losing sight of the forest

Many organizations are hyper-focused on the tactics of performance management. As such, they’ve lost sight of the forest (why they do it) for the trees (how they do it). Many of the questions during our time on the road focused on identifying best practices, or the “right” way to do performance management, and were similar to those we heard during our research.

While some organizations have taken a step back to see performance management as a holistic approach to developing talent and improving performance, many organizations still struggle to shift their focus. Leaders need to focus on this question:

What should my organization do to improve the performance and engagement of our employees and the ability of us all to meet our business goals?

The fairness waters are a bit muddy

In our roadshow events, there was general agreement that fairness in performance management is important, and some of the new practices have helped make it more so (e.g., more frequent conversations to address recency bias; involving more people in performance feedback to reduce managers’ bias). However, we discussed how other practices, such as removing ratings or implementing shadow ratings, have increased some employees’ perceptions of unfairness. 

Our research found that creating fair evaluation processes—and connecting compensation to them in a transparent and fair manner—is an important part of performance management. In our (well-intended) efforts to address important concerns about ratings and evaluation methods, we might have muddied the waters. Our study gives some suggestions on how to address this issue. 

A closely related topic that we also discussed was pay transparency, which our research found to be critical. Interestingly, session attendees had different levels of awareness on this topic, but one thing was for certain: it doesn’t make anyone particularly comfortable. 

The challenge is that pay transparency is not an all-or-nothing concept, but a continuum. At one end of the spectrum, employees have no insight into compensation philosophy, structure, and outcomes. At the other end, employees and individuals external to the organization have full access to this information and data. 

Implementing pay transparency is full of “what ifs,” potential benefits, and some potentially serious drawbacks. However, employees are already having discussions about their salaries, and these discussions aren’t just among colleagues in the hallway. People are more open to sharing the details of their compensation and benefits package to just about anyone (e.g., Glassdoor). As a result, organizations need to figure out how they will address pay transparency sooner than later.

Organizations have a choice: They can be a part of these discussions, helping to craft the narrative and using the information to better address rewards and benefits, or they can ignore it and miss this opportunity.

Engagement and performance: increasingly intertwined

While we know that, in general, performance management, engagement, learning, and career management are increasingly converging, our roadshow reinforced that the first two have grown particularly close. Performance practices, when done well, can engage employees by providing them with a culture in which they can thrive and are provided clarity they need to perform well today and tomorrow. 

To that end, organizations’ performance philosophies and practices need to be designed and executed to engage employees, in addition to helping them perform better. In the future, this likely means that organizations need a more nuanced and personalized understanding of what engages employees, and to then provide them with the insights, resources, systems, and metrics that are most relevant. This will allow organizations to be more responsive to employees’ needs so they can do their best work.

Performance management is no longer about just measuring performance. It is about engaging employees—in a personalized and responsive way—in their work and enabling them to perform better as a result.

Where do we go from here?

While organizational leaders can certainly make significant and important changes to their performance management approach, we think there is a bigger question that can’t be answered just by changing performance practices.: 

How do organizations go about creating a more responsive organization?

This question is at the heart of our next project: The Responsive Organization (read the premise and the literature review), which is also being sponsored by Glint. 

In this study, we are trying to understand the changes leaders need to make to create an environment where people—and the organization as a whole—can be more responsive to employees and customers. For example, we think that a more responsive organization will lead to changes in the following (at a minimum):

• Communication channels: Individuals at lower levels will have data and information they need to react to needs “on the ground.”
• Power structures: Decision-making will be more decentralized.
• Employee development: More autonomy and continuous development will ensure that employees have the skills and knowledge they need. 
• Metrics: Measurements of efficiency will begin to give way to other types of productivity metrics that focus more on innovation, agility, and responsiveness.

Want to share your thinking on this topic? We are actively conducting interviews for this new research now. Feel free to reach out to us at hello@redthreadresearch.com, and we will find some time to talk! Also, if you want to talk more about performance management, we would love to hear from you.