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On-going performance management consists of the actions that supervisors and employees take to keep employees' performance on track, help them be successful in their jobs, and make course corrections when performance is off track or priorities change.

Some supervisors give employees a work plan, say nothing about performance for the next 11 months and then complete a performance appraisal at the end of the cycle. Supervisors who take this unfortunate path fail to leverage the power of performance management and instead turn it into a bureaucratic exercise.

Tracking Performance

Throughout the performance cycle, both employee and supervisor keep an eye on performance to make sure things stay on track and to make adjustments in case things get off track or the direction changes. Some key points about tracking performance:

• Results expectations can be tracked in a number of ways, depending on the nature of the expectations. Some sources of performance tracking information include:
  • System reports — Variance to budget, processing time, number of cases successfully closed, error rate, etc.
  • Customer feedback — Scored questionnaire, complaints per unit volume, etc.
  • Judgment — Evaluation of performance by individuals the employee and supervisor agree beforehand, or "judges", on agreed-upon factors.
• Behavioral expectations are always tracked by observation. Supervisors, co-workers, customers or employees themselves can make observations. You can use questionnaires as a structured way to collect peoples' observations.
• Who does the tracking? In most cases, employees themselves can and should track their own performance. Supervisors can do a "quality check," sampling measures occasionally to verify that their employees' reports are accurate.
• "Automated" reports still need to be touched. Some results expectations are tracked by systems that generate periodic reports. Someone will need to extract the data from the report and look at it. Too often, automated reports are filed away and the data never used for tracking.
• Set up a schedule for when measures will be updated. How often should employees document how they are doing? How often should you, the supervisor, document how your employees are doing?

Status Reports

The idea of status reports is that employees, themselves, know best how they are progressing with regard to their results expectations. So why not have employees periodically report on their progress?

Status reports are not appropriate for all employees, but they make sense for many. It usually is impractical for supervisors to know how their employees are progressing on their expectations without requiring status reports.

The most effective status reports are limited to one page and allow supervisors to see at a glance how their employees are doing on each of their work goals. Status reports focus entirely on results expectations (vs. behavioral expectations), which means that they can and should be freely shared within the work unit.

The best format for a status report depends on the type of work employees perform and the type of results expectations defined in the employee's work plan. In general, however, status reports should tell supervisors four things:

1. What has been done — What has the employee done since the last status report?
2. Obstacles or opportunities encountered — In the process of doing those things, what did the employee run into, both positive and negative?
3. Actions taken — What did the employee do about the obstacles or opportunities that they ran into?
4. What will be done next — What is the employee going to do next?

The report should be organized around the employee's results expectations. Check out the Examples of Status-Reporting.

Discussing Performance

If you and your employees do not talk about their performance periodically, you are missing a huge opportunity to influence their performance. These discussions can lead to high levels of employee engagement and productivity. Research suggests that, when these conversations include discussion of performance standards and providing informal feedback that helps employees do their jobs better, performance can be increased by more than 30%. ¹

When supervisors and employees talk to each other, the subject of their conversation can vary across a range of topics. In a performance culture, conversations tend to focus on performance. What do your conversations sound like? Take the quiz, How Performance Focused Are You?, to determine your performance focus.

Supervisors can create performance discussion opportunities in a variety of ways. Some of the most practical ways to create discussion opportunities include:

• Staff meetings
• One-on-ones
• Informal drop-bys

Sometimes, after asking, "How's it going?", supervisors are at a loss as to how to engage their employees in talking about performance. Here are some performance-related topics that could be covered, as appropriate, whenever you have an opportunity to interact with your employees:

• Ask about their progress on specific results expectations.
• Listen to what your employees have to say about their performance.
• Give feedback.
• If there is a performance problem, counsel.
• If you see an opportunity to help the employee solve a problem or otherwise learn and grow, jump on it and coach the employee.
• If there is an obstacle blocking the employee's performance, get the facts and deal with the obstacle.
• If there are changes in priority, communicate them and help the employee see the need for the change.
• Express your appreciation for your employees' good work; be specific about what work you are praising.

Use the worksheet Create Opportunities to Discuss Performance to plan how you can most effectively initiate performance discussions with your employees and keep performance the main topic of discussion.

Giving and Getting Feedback

Supervisors have the necessary, although not always pleasant, responsibility for giving feedback to employees on their performance.

There are some general principles of feedback that should always be kept in mind:

• It is the supervisor's responsibility to address performance issues and feedback is the appropriate starting point in the effort to change the behavior in question.
• Whether giving feedback (or asking for it), it is useful to think: What should you (or I) do more of? What should you (or I) continue doing? What should you (or I) do less of, or do differently?
• When negative feedback is directed toward the task, employees improve their performance. When it is directed toward the person, it disrupts the employee's focus on the task and performance worsens.

For more specific tips, check out the document, Give and Receive Feedback.

Too often, good work goes unnoticed. In a performance culture, results are what matter. But to get results, employees often work hard over long periods of time before seeing their efforts emerge as measurable results. In the interim, supervisors can acknowledge their employees' efforts and thus help sustain them in their work. A little positive feedback here and some encouragement there can help ensure that employees meet or exceed expectations in the long run.

In your brief conversations with employees to acknowledge their efforts:

• Pinpoint what is being acknowledged
• Tailor it to the situation
• Tailor it to the individual
• Keep it positive and brief

Use the worksheet Sustain Good Work to work out a template that you can use whenever the opportunity arises to acknowledge the work efforts of one of your employees.

The Logic of On-going Performance Management

As a supervisor, you would like to see your employees performing in ways that both deliver the expected results and are consistent with agency values. A shorthand way of saying this is that you want employees' performance to be on "should."

If an employee's performance falls below "should," you take action either to bring the performance up to "should" or, if performance does not improve after you make reasonable efforts to coax improvement, to terminate the employee. Dealing with performance that falls below "should" is what we call the "dark side" of performance management and involves counseling (discussions) and a corrective action plan (documentation). See the separate section on Counseling and Addressing Performance Problems for more detail.

There is a "sunny side," too. When your employees' performance is on "should", you want to act to maintain or enhance that performance. Your employees may want to grow in their jobs and exceed rather than just meet expectations, or they may want to build their skills in preparation for assuming greater responsibility. Maintaining or enhancing employee performance makes it easier for you to deliver the results you are accountable for as head of your work unit. It also helps create a performance culture in which employees are engaged in their work and committed to contributing long-term to the success of your agency. The sunny side of performance management involves coaching (discussions) and development plans (documentation). See the section on Coaching and Developing Employees for more detail.

This is the logic of performance management. You take actions to improve, maintain or boost your employees' performance. This is why it is called performance management. It is not a passive process where you sit idly by and watch as your employees excel, get by or flop. It is largely through your actions (or lack of action) as supervisor that employees exceed, meet or fail to meet expectations.

See The Logic of On-going Performance Management for more details on the logic of the process.

References

¹ Corporate Leadership Council, "Building the High-Performance Workforce," 2002.