Companies are increasingly involving employees in their performance management processes. The study on this subject conducted by the Top Employers Institute, which included 600 organisations from 99 countries, confirms this fact that we had already observed in the 63 certified companies in Spain.
The performance management process, which is now a highly perfected practice in companies, is fast evolving to remain relevant in a rapidly changing environment. To achieve this, the companies with the best human resource practices involve their employees to ensure that it is an interactive process between them and their managers, incorporating continuous feedback and coaching and with a constant readjustment of objectives that goes beyond the traditional annual evaluation.
In fact, one of the main performance priorities of the Top Employers in Spain is for their management to be a two-way dialogue between employees and managers. In 98% of these organisations, the employees play an important role when it comes to providing information about their performance objectives.
Highlighted Top Employers
Of the companies implementing these good practices with a clear focus on dialogue, it is worth highlighting the pharmaceutical company Abbott, which identifies the professional concerns of each employee in its performance management process, the engineering consulting firm Altran, which requests evaluations from its employers and the insurance company AXA, which has a career plan that is agreed between the employee and their manager.
Additionally, the pharmaceutical company Novartis makes each of its professionals responsible for the process, by allowing them to set their own objectives, provided that they are aligned with the company’s strategy. In this process, the company not only reviews the fulfilment of objectives, but also the behaviour associated with them.
This is because the current trend in performance management goes beyond the clinical setting of objectives and fully integrates itself into the corporate culture, which needs to encourage transparency at the same time as open, honest and constructive feedback, from colleagues as well as employers and managers. The objectives must be clearly visible for all stakeholders, with the responsibility shared between the employee, who designs their own development path, and the managers, who must uncover and develop their potential.
The Top Employers companies in Spain are in no doubt about the importance of performance management becoming part of the corporate culture. 100% of these organisations have a description of the performance management culture that they want, and 92% of the managers are coached and trained in giving feedback to employees about their performance in an open and constructive way.
Performance management is becoming increasingly integrated into day-to-day operations, with the aim of making it a more dynamic and valuable part of the business cycle.
Continious improvement at Altadis
At Altadis they are in no doubt about the importance of performance management, designed as a process of continuous improvement. “I’ve always liked to use sport as a metaphor to explain the need to continuously improve performance", explains Luis Blas, the Director of Human Resources at this company. To achieve this, at Altadis they have gone one step further in performance management and reward practices, by incorporating a multiplier that is based on the calibration for the year into the performance model for its managers.
“Until now, like in many of the big companies here, the performance for the year was a critical part of the individual pay review, along with various other parameters. Since 2015, the result of the calibrations have also served as a multiplier for bonuses”, explains Blas. The aim of carrying out calibrations is to ensure that all of the company’s departments use the same parameters to measure performance.
Luis Blas continues with the sporting example to illustrate the importance of continuous improvement being linked to performance management: “If Johnny Weissmüller, the famous actor who played Tarzan and Olympic swimmer who won 5 gold medals, had competed in the last Olympic Games, he wouldn't even have made it as far as the qualifying rounds with his times”.
