27 Sep
Many organizations around the world have slowly started realizing that their current performance management (PM) practices are not helping them grow in the current market. Such methods are, in fact, bringing the performance of their teams down and keeping the growth restricted.
Now, in an intensely competitive world, most organizations survive, while only a few flourish. If you want to belong to the latter category, your PM techniques need to change. Performance management practices must be ready for the 21st century, just like the rest of your business processes.
How does technology enable high performance?
Before finding out how technology can enable high performance, we need to understand the problems with most traditional PM systems. These include:
- A serious disconnect between employee goals and overall organizational goals
- Limited to no opportunities to provide timely feedback
- Problems in communication within the organization
- Lack of agility thereby impacting response time to changing business dynamics
- Lack of real-time performance monitoring and limited data
- No clear way to identify and encourage skills and talent development
How can technology help businesses?
A technology-based performance management system is more holistic and focuses on developing people, and as a result, facilitates overall growth.
Such a modern PMS doesn’t stop with just qualitative benefits. You can compare and monitor results in real-time using the various tools and techniques designed for the process. With modern performance management processes, feedback becomes natural and regular. Performance Reviews are not left for the year-end appraisals only but happen more frequently . Communication is more streamlined, and the management is able to constantly align individual goals to ensure they match those with the changing organizational priorities.
Now, there are a few modern performance management practices. However the most popular with Fortune 500 companies, and that quite a few small and mid-sized organizations are embracing is the OKR+CFR framework.
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a framework that organizations can use to align business and individual goals, create transparency in the performance management system, get real-time data, and facilitate continuous feedback across all levels.
Conversations, Feedback & Recognition (CFR)
CFR is a part of the OKR cycle. Conversations, Feedbacks, and Recognitions improve in a workplace that follows transparent processes and complete OKR cycles. Some experts call CFRs a delivery system for OKR. It means that when conversations are regular, feedback is instant, and recognition is valuable, the workplace automatically becomes a high-performance zone and people contribute more. It also becomes easy to tweak and align individual goals with organizational goals.
Achieving high performance with OKRs and CFR
OKR, as a tool, is extremely agile and can help employees understand the organization’s objectives and work accordingly.
With this method, the management can create organizational objectives or goals and take up the following processes:
- Establish priorities
- Define the extent of work for teams and individual members
- Determine what behavioral and skill changes are needed to achieve the goals
- Onboard employees, if necessary, to achieve these goals
Now comes the most critical part of the OKR framework – Setting agile individual and team goals and initiatives.
- Organization should create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based) that can be quantitatively measured.
- The next step is to drive initiatives to help achieve each of these goals. Such initiatives help understand the focus actions or effort areas and being cognizant of these increases the likelihood of success early on, and it also helps tweak the efforts to match the needs.
An integral part of the OKR framework is where Conversations, Feedbacks, and Recognitions come into play. This is the stage of continuous feedback, which means an organization needs to do the following:
- Create an environment where it is easy to reach out to people across the organization and initiate a conversation.
- Make coaching, mentoring, and course correction methods natural processes.
- Make performance reviews a regular phenomenon and not a yearly mundane process.
- Have platforms where people can recognize each other’s work.
- Make it easy for managers and employees to know how people are being reviewed and rewarded.
Creating an environment of continuous growth, goal alignment, feedback, and support needs the help of the right tools and techniques.
Here is where PossibleWorks can help!
How “PossibleWorks” help drive high performance with OKR & CFR
PossibleWorks offers an adaptive platform that can help an organization to create holistic OKR and CFR processes and follow them through. Our tools and techniques are customized for small & medium organizations based on their growth metrics, needs, and objectives.
- OKR Consulting Productized : Conversational Bot that guides the CEO to define goals based on firm’s priorities.
- Goal Cascade : Enable CEOs accomplish firm’s goals by cascading down the line to each employee
- Alignment : Employee goals are tightly linked to organizational priorities
- Agile Goals : Instead of a static annual approach, PossibleWorks platform breaks down the goals into shorter cycles of monthly periodicity. With shorter framework, organizations can set agile goals and track progress more efficiently
- Cadence: Annual for Strategy, Monthly for Tactical & Weekly for Operational outcomes
- Simplicity : PossibleWorks is a lightweight process for straightforward goal setting. Minimalistic learning curve. PossibleWorks platform allows employees to focus more on achieving the goals rather than spending time on setting them.
- Chat: Intuitive chat-based conversations for coaching & timely course correction
- Objective & Fact-based Assessment : Remove subjective ratings and biases
- Mobile First : Putting performance management in the palm of your employee for greater adoption
Our OKR framework is designed for continuous feedback. We help build a system where it is easy to prompt and initiate quick and powerful conversations between employees and managers. It provides ample & multiple opportunities feedback to the employee and for managers to take up the role of a coach.
Our tools track real-time data to make sure the management is able to assess employees continuously. Frequent reviews with quantitative data makes performance appraisal processes more effective and valuable at year end. The platform help minimize surprises at performance appraisals as employees will know how they have been performing all through the year. They will also clearly understand what they should do to improve their chances of being eligible for recognition, rewards and higher compensation.
All this can create a highly efficient workplace where behaviors are altered, new skills are learned, and high performance becomes the norm.
Conclusion
So, businesses should talk to their Human Resources team and the management to understand the current performance management practice they follow. And ask these questions – How effective are their current performance management practices? How automated is the process? What do employees feel about the process?
Adapting to OKR can undoubtedly boost the overall growth prospects of an organization. OKR processes, when done right, using the correct tools, can directly translate into the success and growth of the organization. CFR too, when handled right, can support OKRs and drastically improve employee satisfaction levels, retention rate, and individual and team performances.
Modern Performance Management practices are largely automated, bringing down the chances of human errors, biases, delays and lags that can affect employee morale and performance.
