How to Improve Employee Performance?

Summary: There are multiple ways to enhance the performance of your employees like improving communication, identifying and resolving poor performance issues, etc. Let’s learn more about these ways in the article below.

The capability of your business to accomplish its goals majorly depends on your employee’s performance. A skilled and productive employee can be an instrumental asset to push your business towards achieving success.

On the other hand, an employee’s underperformance may lead to chronic absenteeism, decrease productivity, and increase turnover rate. Hence, an employee’s performance is crucial for the overall success and profit of your organization.

If you have measured your employees’ performance and found out that some of them are underperforming, then you must adopt strategies to boost their performance. Here are a few strategies that can help improve employees’ skills and performance.

What Is Employee Performance?

Employee performance can be defined as how well an employee fulfills his/her job responsibilities, completes tasks, and behaves with team members and other colleagues. When managers monitor an employee’s performance, they evaluate it based on employee effectiveness, work quality, work quantity, and also the overall output efficiency.

Qualitative skills, such as communication skills and problem-solving capability are also used to measure employee performance.

Why Is it Important to Improve Employee Performance?

Maximizing the employee performance can help an organization to accomplish goals in a most cost-effective and timely manner. The success of an organization depends mainly on the employee’s performance. And, when your employees are productive and motivated, they can easily achieve the target on time.

Moreover, improving the employees’ performance will not just help in achieving goals but also improve their work satisfaction and decrease the staff turnover rate.

How to Measure the Performance of Employees?

Before you start measuring your employee’s performance, it is important to define goals or metrics against which employees’ performance will be measured.

• Fix measurable OKRs (objectives and key results) and individual objectives
• Conduct regular performance review of employees
• Perform a skill gap analysis to identify the required skills
• Gather qualitative feedback from customers and employees
• Measure the percentage of tasks completed by employees within the stipulated time
• Use a 9-grid box method to assess and evaluate employee’s performance

7 Ways to Boost Your Employees’ Performance

In your organization, you can implement different strategies that can help your employees feel supported and valued and enable them to perform better. Here are some strategies you can implement within your organization to improve the employees’ performance.

• Establish an Effective Communication

Ineffective communication can lead to confusion and disengagement among employees regarding their job responsibilities and projects they are working upon. Therefore, it is important for managers to communicate effectively with employees regarding job responsibilities.

With proper communication, you can improve the coordination among employees, enhance organizational management, and also ensure that all the information related to a business project is communicated properly to employees. When the work-related information is passed to employees properly, they will be able to complete the assigned task efficiently and on time.

Key Takeaway: According to The State of Business Communication Report, 2023, 72% of business entrepreneurs found out that proper and effective communication has helped in increasing the team’s productivity.

• Identify and Resolve the Poor Performance Causes

Identifying the causes of your employees’ poor performance is the first step towards improving their performance. The reasons could be high workload, lack of skills for the specific role or tasks, personal or financial problems, etc. Once the reason is identified, you can quickly devise a plan to fix the problem that helps an employee to work better.

Example: If an employee is facing problems in his/her personal life like marital issues, drug addiction, or a recent death in the family, the company can provide counselling sessions through their EAP programs. These sessions can help employees feel better and suggest ways to overcome these issues and work with more concentration.

• Giving Rewards to Employees

Giving incentives and recognition to the employees’ contribution is one of the best strategies that can make employees perform better. If not appreciated properly, the employee can start looking for better jobs where his contribution will be valued.

The recognition can be in the form of monetary rewards or non-monetary rewards like appreciation mail, handwritten cards, etc. Regular recognition of employees’ work can help in boosting their morale and motivating them to work better.

Example: An organization can pay their employees an extra amount for achieving the target on time along with a shopping voucher that can be redeemed on any e-commerce shopping site.

• Providing Proper Training

Proper job training for the required skills is important to retain your employees and increase profit margins. Well-trained employees can deliver the highest quality of work instead of employees who lack the required skills.

To train your employees, you can use training software through which you can provide training courses that the employees can take conveniently. Further, you can also provide on-site training by inviting training personnel to your organization.

Case Study: Amazon Company Work: Amazon is an e-commerce company that sells products in various categories. Training Programs Offered: The company provided a month-long leadership and training program prior to employees hiring. Further, it also prepays almost 95% fees for courses that help the employees enhance their skills. How these Programs Helped? These programs help employees to build necessary skills required for their job and take complete ownership for the work they do at Amazon.

• Set Realistic Projects Deadline

Many managers try to create pressure on their team members, believing that this will result in increased productivity. On the contrary, setting unrealistic expectations may not create good results. Not providing enough time to complete projects often culminates in employee’s frustration and burnout.

Therefore, it is essential that you set realistic targets so that employees can provide quality work within the stipulated time without any stress.

• Provide Promotions Internally

Many times, organizations reach out to external candidates instead of the internal workforce to fill up the open job posts. However, internal recruiting can be an effective incentive for your employees to improve their performance and boost productivity.

It is because when you recruit your well-trained employees for a senior role position, they already understand the company’s mission, objectives, and values. Moreover, it will also help save the training costs for new employees.

Key Takeaway: Employees stay 41% longer in a company that promotes internal candidates as compared to companies having lower internal hiring rates, LinkedIn’s 2020 Global Talent Trends report.

• Constantly Evaluate the Employees Performance

An employee’s performance cannot be improved if he or she does not know that they are underperforming. Therefore, it is important to monitor and evaluate your employee’s performance and provide 360 degrees feedback to help them improve their performance. For that purpose, you can use the 9-box grid system.

Under this, the performance is measured against the x and y axis. The (y) axis will highlight growth potential, referring to an employee’s potential to grow into senior and leadership roles. On the other hand, axis (x) represents your employee’s current performance to identify whether he is working below expectations or exceeding the expectations. In this way, you will be able to find out the areas for improvement to help employees perform better.

Case Study: Deloitte Company Name: Deloitte, London, United Kingdom Objective: The company wanted to improve their employees’ performance by changing the performance review procedure. Changes Made: Deloitte adopted three different types of performance review procedure, recognizing the contributions of each employee in every team, overseeing the performance with no bias, and helping employees in enhancing the performance potential. Outcome: After following these practices, Deloitte can contribute and improve its employees’ performance in a good way.

Conclusion

Maintaining a healthy and positive work culture is essential to help employees perform better. In addition to that, implementing strategies like setting realistic deadlines, providing proper training, and rewarding employees can make a significant impact on employee’s performance.

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