11 Practices To Drive Employee Performance
Motivation Magic: Employee performance thrives on motivation, which inspires individuals to excel. Nurturing a supportive environment can boost morale, leading to a more engaged and enthusiastic workforce.
Goal-Setting Game Plan: Clear goals provide direction and purpose. Setting well-defined objectives helps employees focus their efforts effectively, leading to efficiency and a sense of achievement.
Skill-Building Bonanza: Developing skills is crucial for performance enhancement. Providing training opportunities enables employees to advance their capabilities, contributing to personal growth and company success.
Driving employee performance is about more than simply boosting productivity. It involves fostering motivation, establishing clear goals, developing skills, and aligning employees with company objectives.
This article explores actionable practices to define, measure, and enhance employee performance to achieve optimal results.
Defining Employee Performance
Employee performance is the effectiveness, quality, and contributions an individual brings to their organization. High-performing employees not only meet their productivity targets but also demonstrate alignment with company values and contribute to a positive work culture.
Modern performance management tools can help you measure how employees are performing in key areas and even aid managers in suggesting ways to improve. So what are those areas?
Key elements of employee performance
Key elements of employee performance include:
- Task Completion and Accuracy: Meeting deadlines, delivering work on time, and maintaining accuracy.
- Meeting Job Expectations and Responsibilities: Understanding and fulfilling the specific duties and responsibilities of their role.
- Professional Behavior and Soft Skills: Demonstrating communication, teamwork, and adaptability.
- Contribution to Team and Organizational Goals: Actively supporting team and organizational objectives, enhancing the company’s mission.
Performance vs. productivity
It’s easy to confuse high productivity for high performance, but they’re not the same thing.
Productivity measures the quantity of work produced within a set time, but employee performance encompasses quality, teamwork, and adherence to company values.
Balancing productivity and quality is essential to ensure work is both efficient and impactful. Over-focusing on productivity may lead to a decline in the effectiveness of a person’s work as well as their wellbeing.
Factors That Influence Employee Performance
Employee performance can be built on or derailed by any number of factors, from distractions in employees' home life to ineffective changes of course from company leadership. Here are some of the ones that are most common.
Organizational culture and environment
A supportive culture, where trust, employee recognition, and regular, constructive or positive feedback are priorities, helps employees perform at their best. Companies that value collaboration and respect see higher levels of performance because employees feel secure and motivated.
Effective performance management techniques are key to helping managers build trust and create the kind of culture you’re looking for. A sense of security comes from knowing your goals are aligned with larger org wide goals.
“Performance management can motivate employees by showing how their goals connect to the company’s objectives,” says Jesse Ajebon, Founder & CEO at People Street. “Without clear goals and alignment, it’s hard to foster a culture of performance and progression.”
Leadership and management style
Leadership naturally affects performance. Managers who practice open communication, provide constructive feedback, and empower their teams with autonomy help create an environment conducive to high performance.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is Netflix, which encourages decision-making autonomy and transparency, leading to improved employee satisfaction and performance.
Workload and resources
Realistic workloads and access to adequate resources are essential. Employees need the right tools, training, and support to meet expectations. For instance, providing project management tools like Asana or Monday.com can streamline work processes and boost efficiency.
Employee engagement and motivation
Employee engagement is directly linked to performance. According to Gallup, highly engaged teams show 23% greater profitability and 18% higher productivity. Engaged employees are more likely to bring their best efforts, stay loyal, and positively impact team morale.
Measuring Employee Performance
Measuring performance helps managers identify strengths, address areas for improvement, and track progress. Data-driven insights from performance metrics enable better decision-making and resource allocation, ensuring employees are both effective and aligned with company goals.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring performance
Common KPIs include:
- Revenue for sales roles.
- Customer Satisfaction Scores for service roles.
- Project Completion Rates for project-based roles.
Selecting role-specific KPIs ensures a tailored and accurate assessment of each employee’s performance.
Quantitative vs. qualitative metrics
Quantitative metrics (e.g. productivity rates and deadlines met) measure tangible outputs, while qualitative metrics (e.g. teamwork, quality of work) assess more subjective performance elements.
Balancing both types of metrics provides a comprehensive view of employee contributions and areas for growth.
11 Practices To Improve Employee Performance
Improving employee performance is about getting to the bottom of what an employee struggles most with and helping them identify tactics and techniques that can not just raise their performance levels, but also make their working lives easier.
1. Set clear, achievable goals
Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals gives employees direction and purpose. Clear goals reduce ambiguity and align employees’ efforts with organizational objectives.
SMART is just one framework for setting employee performance goals, however. Other options include OKRs, FAST, BHAG, and goal pyramids. Whatever you choose for your performance goal framework, it should help the employee focus their work on being intentional, impactful and actionable.
2. Provide regular feedback and recognition
Consistent feedback allows employees to understand their strengths and improvement areas. You can do this through regular check-ins, or feedback notes delivered in your performance management tool. This is becoming more common in fields with front line roles, such as retail performance management.
Recognition, whether verbal praise or formal rewards, reinforces positive behaviors and increases motivation, and it doesn’t have to be a manual process driven by the attentiveness of managers. There are plenty of employee recognition platforms out there that will help you automate the process.
3. Invest in employee development and training
Offering training programs and workshops equips employees with skills to excel. Investing in both hard and soft skills development—such as technical skills and leadership skills—leads to better individual and team performance.
There are a variety of career development courses that you can offer access to in addition to your own training in order to ensure employees are learning new skills to bring into your organization.
4. Encourage ownership
Involving employees in decision-making and giving them ownership over their tasks fosters accountability and motivation. When employees see their contributions impacting organizational success, they are more likely to perform at their best.
5. Create a supportive work environment
A supportive environment prioritizes flexibility, trust, and employee wellbeing. Reducing workplace stress, offering flexible work arrangements, and promoting work-life balance are essential for sustained performance.
6. Empower with the right tools and resources
Providing employees with effective tools and resources, such as communication software and project management systems, enhances efficiency and enables high-quality output.
If you decide to implement an OKR framework, you might also consider a specific OKR software that can help you implement that type of goal setting and keep employees aligned as business goals or operating conditions change.
7. Encourage a growth mindset
Promote a growth mindset by encouraging employees to view challenges as learning opportunities. Fostering a culture that celebrates feedback, small successes, and continuous learning cultivates resilience and adaptability.
8. Encourage efficient cross-department collaboration
Facilitate cross-functional teamwork to broaden skills and perspectives. When employees collaborate across departments, they develop new skills and gain insights that enhance their work.
With that said, it’s important to not allow cross-departmental work to lead to excessive meetings, overwhelming amounts of feedback, and unclear decision making hierarchies. This is sometimes known as collaboration drag, a phenomenon highlighted by Gartner earlier this year.
9. Foster a culture of accountability
Clearly define roles and responsibilities, hold regular accountability check-ins, and encourage personal ownership of tasks. Accountability drives commitment, ensuring employees meet or exceed their objectives.
10. Promote open communication
Create channels for feedback and conduct regular one-on-one meetings to address individual goals, challenges, and achievements. Open communication helps build trust, but it’s something that tends to be lacking. Numbers vary depending on which study you look at, but typically only around 20-30% of employees say they experience open communication with managers.
Worse than that, a Harris poll shows that around 69% of managers say that they are uncomfortable communicating with employees. Breaking down these barriers to create streamlined communication and feedback is not a nice to have, but an absolute must if you want to improve employee performance.
11. Encourage reflective practice and self-assessment
Promote regular self-assessment to help employees reflect on their progress, identify strengths, and uncover areas for improvement, while also taking time to examine any personal or external factors that might be impacting their performance.
Encourage employees to set personal goals, review their achievements, and recognize their own growth over time. Create space for employees to share their reflections in team meetings or one-on-one sessions, fostering a culture of continuous learning and self-motivation.
Challenges in Driving Employee Performance
If all of this was a formula, there’d be no reason that employees across all industries haven’t done it. But as you might expect, there are plenty of challenges to improving employee performance that impact effectiveness.
Resistance to feedback
Some employees may resist feedback, especially if they perceive it as unjust criticism. Make feedback constructive and empathetic by focusing on specific behaviors rather than personal traits to ease this challenge.
Lack of motivation or engagement
A disengaged employee is unlikely to perform at their best. To counter disengagement, recognize achievements, provide growth opportunities, and involve employees in meaningful decisions.
Unclear expectations
Unclear expectations lead to confusion and underperformance. We’ve gone over goal-setting strategies and the importance of open communication, but within that communication, you’ll need to clearly spell out expectations for the role as well as any expectations for development and behaviors you’d like to see them exhibit, not just expectations around performance and project work.
Burnout and work-life imbalance
Excessive workloads or stress can lead to burnout. Prevent burnout by offering flexible schedules, adjusting workloads, and implementing wellbeing initiatives that allow employees to recharge.
What’s Next?
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