Critical to any company’s success is having an effective, fully committed and motivated workforce, who are invested in meeting the company goals.
Your people are the backbone of the company, your front-line employees know your customers and the ways to improve your customer service and products to best meet customer needs; internal staff use your systems every day and will have solutions on how to improve them which can save money by driving efficiencies. By empowering your employees, you allow creativity and innovation in the workplace which is necessary to succeed in today’s volatile marketplace.
Your people are your best brand ambassadors so treat them well and they will treat customers the same way.
Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.
– Richard Branson
So, what can you do to make your people the link to your business success?
Provide an effective performance management framework.
This gives employees a clear understanding of the company’s ethos and goals and how they, as an individual and their job role, fit into the company to achieve these goals. Rewarding individual as well as team performance for achieving values and objectives, will achieve ‘wins’ as well as appropriate behaviour and competency, allowing you to pay and promote in a fair and transparent manner.
This type of good performance management allows you to attract and retain bright people who work effectively and enjoy success, and by training and developing your employees it makes sure you have the right level of ability in place for the demands of each position, now and in the future.
The foundations of a good performance management framework are:
- Having clearly stated business ethos and goals of the company.
- Each role has objectives and performance measures that are clearly aligned with the company’s strategy and business plans.
- Each employee knows what is expected of them as stated in their objectives and how their performance will be monitored.
- All employees have in place development plans linked to both the achievement of objectives and development of competencies.
Regular feedback, discussions, meetings and updates between managers and employees on their actual performance will show progress throughout the year, ensuring that there are ‘no surprises’ at annual review time.
