Performance Management

The first step in Performance Management is understanding it is NOT a “once a year” event. Performance Management should happen all the time with your team! No one should ever be “shocked” they are doing a great job or a poor job.

Forms of Performance Management:

General Discussions - Have a way to document opportunities to establish trends. One mistake doesn’t mean that employee is bad, but if you formally address EVERY mistake, you can deter the employee from growth because they become so scared to make a mistake. If you can address opportunities through general discussions and only formally address them after a trend has appeared, you’re allowing that employee to grow on their own and still formally address unwanted behavior. Blatant disregard to policies, professionalism, and safety should be formally addressed immediately.

Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) - A performance improvement plan should be initiated when you need to formally address behavior that you expect to be changed. The stages of a PIP are Warning, Final Warning, and Termination. If you use the General Discussions in correlation with the PIP, an employee will have ample notification of the behavior that needs to change. Creating the documentation gives the employee a fair shot at changing the behavior and ample time to make the adjustment and gives you, the employer protection to demonstrate the employee understood any ramifications if they did not comply. The intent of a PIP should always be to help an employee improve. If you find yourself wanting to use the PIP to simply terminate an employee, you need to look in the mirror and determine what went wrong up to this point; either they were not a good hire (which is not their fault - review the hiring process) or you have not gone through the entire process of general discussions and PIP plan.

CELEBRATE THE WINS TOO! Performance Management is not just for addressing poor behavior and poor quality of work (that’s what a PIP is for), but to encourage your entire team to be the best they can be. When they see you calling out their wins, you’re managing their performance to be even better! Your employees will strive to get positive recognition from your management team! Ideas for positive reinforcement.