By automating the process of creating, cascading, monitoring, and measuring performance against goals, your company will enjoy a wealth of benefits. Here are the seven top reasons to implement a performance management system at your company:
1. Establish a more effective and efficient goal-setting process
2. Speed completion of corporate goals exponentially
3. Boost employee cooperation company-wide with shared goals
4. Accelerate performance improvements with clear, continuous feedback
5. Gain powerful insights by using collected data more effectively
6. Improve the quality and relevance of feedback with real-time coaching
7. Improve your company's bottom line
- . Establish a more effective and efficient goal-setting process.
Often the task of setting company-wide goals can be even more difficult than actually accomplishing them. By deploying an automated performance management system, your company can significantly streamline its entire goal-setting process.
For instance, the best performance management solutions include technology to help managers set goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based-or S.M.A.R.T. for short. Many automated systems also offer role-based goal libraries, developed in conjunction with organizational development experts, which include lists of appropriate goals for specific job titles. These goals can then be easily customized for your particular needs. Finally, performance management systems can help keep the goal-setting process on schedule by sending automatic reminders to managers and reporting their progress back to you.
- . Exponentially speed completion of company goals.
By providing everyone at your company with the same vision of success, automated performance management solutions that include goal alignment help your organization achieve its corporate goals quicker. These systems increase goal visibility and boost shared accountability, allowing both your employees and managers to:
- Understand how their individual goals match up with your company's business objectives
- Achieve more-in less time-by providing greater visibility into both individual and company-wide goals
- . Boost employee cooperation company-wide with cascading goals.
No employee is an island when it comes to accomplishing your company-wide goals-most can be achieved only through the combined efforts of many people. By cascading and aligning goals across multiple employees, you can create a corporate atmosphere of shared responsibility that will drive the success of your company. An automated performance management solution can greatly simplify the task of establishing these shared goals and help keep your entire organization working together toward the same objectives.
With an automated solution, goals can be easily aligned and cascaded for shared accountability.
- . Accelerate performance improvements by tying reviews directly to goal performance.
If you want to improve worker performance, you must provide employees with clear and consistent feedback. Most managers rely heavily on memory to evaluate employees. This leads to a disproportionate consideration of recent actions and performance. An automated goal management solution that pulls performance data on each goal directly into the employee appraisal allows for more accurate and fair employee evaluations.
Additionally, leading automated performance management systems include writing and goal-setting tools to help managers communicate their thoughts more effectively so they can easily provide meaningful, concise goals and reviews.
Automated systems like SAP SuccessFactors let managers more easily stay in touch with employees, allowing them to immediately reinforce progress or to coach workers to get their performance and deadlines back on track.
- . Gain powerful insight by using collected data more effectively.
With most paper-based systems, employee goal plans and reviews usually get filed away somewhere, never to be seen again. But an automated solution collects feedback and other valuable information and stores it conveniently online where can be utilized by authorized personnel. Who has and has not set their goals? Which teams are behind their milestones and need extra attention? By making this important data available company-wide, managers can always find the information they need to make the best business decisions possible.
Leading automated systems allow you to:
- Track your company's overall progress against its goals
- Identify key strengths and weaknesses, organizational skills, total-rewards drivers, and other employee performance trends
- Determine competency gaps and pinpoint any missing organizational skills
- Closely monitor any rise (or fall) in employee ratings
- Assess employee rating distributions across the company, so you can appropriately reward your best performers
- . Improve the quality of employee feedback with real-time coaching.
Many automated solutions include integrated coaching tools that offer professional advice on promoting individual employee achievement. Managers receive specific suggestions for coaching employees on office communications, interpersonal skills, and other competencies. These tools not only make it easier for managers to deliver actionable feedback, but also improve its quality and relevance. The end result? Employees have a clearer understanding of what they need to do to be successful at their jobs.
- . Improve your company's bottom line.
Automating your performance management process can provide huge returns for your company, generating thousands of dollars annually through increased employee productivity, improved retention, and compensation optimization. The following tool will help you estimate the typical bottom-line savings your organization can expect to realize each year.
Automation can bring about dramatic cost savings by impacting the three cost figures in the above formula in the following ways:
Increased operating margins via improved productivity
- Align employees to corporate goals
- Increase daily engagement
- Improve performance accountability
- More efficient employee review process
Cost savings via better compensation planning
- Reward top performers
- Remove "blanket" bonus plans
- Real-time view of budget allocations
Cost savings via higher retention
- Create meaningful feedback
- Understand development needs
- Provide fair compensation adjustments
Companies that increase employee engagement see improvement in operating margins.
– Towers Perrin, New Realities in Today's Workforce