There is an increasing awareness amongst organisations participating in the Top Employers certification programmes, that having a sophisticated Performance Management process in place is not enough on its own to help realise best-in-class results. For high performance to become sustainable the Performance Management process needs to be embedded in a ‘High-Performance Culture’. This idea is widely adopted by the participating companies as already 95% of them (and even 100% of the Top Performers) include a description of their desired Performance Management culture when defining their Performance Management process.
Transparency and open feedback
We see Performance Management philosophy evolving towards the creation of an organisational culture that can promote transparency and open feedback. This helps employees to improve both their individual performance and that of their teams on a continuous basis. The most effective Performance Management philosophies should help organisational culture develop around specific organisational dynamics such as the balance between collaborative and competitive mind-sets. A traditional rankings approach could work against this, encouraging competition over collaboration, and inevitably driving behaviours that might be different to those aligned to core organisational values and purpose.
The most effective philosophies will be those that are fully aligned with organisational values and culture. For example to help create the link between open, honest and constructive feedback, and effective continuous improvement, will require an environment that supports transparency. The second most important objective of the Performance Management process, rated by companies participating in our research, was ‘effective two-way dialogue between manager and employee about performance’ (behind alignment with business goals and strategy).
Building culture and habits
One company certified as a Top Employer, a global sports and leisurewear brand, re-designed their Performance Management process around elements from their culture, ensuring that principles were open, honest, collaborative and fact-based. They use manager/ employee dialogue as the centrepiece of their new processes with traditional competency models replaced by the encouragement of mind-sets that focus on building culture and habits. This ensures that Performance Management is, in turn, part of the wider organisational culture.
Another participant in our certification programme, a global publishing business, have clearly shifted their philosophy and redesigned their process in line with the new Performance Management paradigm. Linking a culture of high performance and accountability to the attraction, development and retention of talented employees, they have created a global Performance Management approach which aims to achieve superior business results and align employees’ efforts with business strategy, by driving employee satisfaction and engagement through transparency and fairness, which builds trust and positive performance.
Four key trends
‘Performance culture as a foundation’ is one of the four key trends we have identified in our Performance Management report. These four Key Trends are shaping the future of
Performance Management, influencing the approach of many global businesses. Each trend underlines a growing move towards performance being seen as an on-going process of learning and improvement rather than an annual assessment of an individual’s contribution and progress. Download the full Performance Management report to learn all about the current trends and how organisations deal with these trends in their business processes.
