Best product in its class? Your business still has a rocky road ahead if it isn’t prioritizing its people and their performance. Effective employee performance management extends well beyond productivity. Productivity is an output of good performance management, but the system itself is really about developing people, shaping culture, ensuring fairness, and building organizational capacity over time.Consider factors like growth and development, engagement and motivation, behavior and values alignment, and relationships and team dynamics.
While annual performance reviews are only one component of performance management, they’re crucial as the culmination of the year’s efforts, for both the organization and its individuals.
The key to nailing employee performance reviews is the friction-free processes taking place behind the scenes long before an employee sits face-to-face with their manager. But creating and optimizing those processes isn’t always easy, especially if you’re trying to build and adhere to them manually.
First things first: What makes for effective performance management?
Performance management is a Human Resources approach that strives to create and maintain an environment where employees can perform at their best. This involves building a framework that provides everything they need to get their jobs done, creates a positive company culture, and ensures HR processes run smoothly without causing delays or hampering productivity.
Think:
- Hiring policies to make sure you hire the right people
- Onboarding new employees in a way that gets them off to a great start
- Ongoing training to make sure employees have all the right skills
- Ensuring employee satisfaction and engagement remains high
- Exit interviews to make sure the organization can learn from its employees’ experiences working at your company
It’s a lot to manage, and organizations commonly run into roadblocks that keep them from managing employee performance the way they’d like to. But for every barrier, there’s a bridge to effective performance management.
Let’s home in on just one aspect of employee management — performance reviews — and look at how the Nintex platform can help you break through the barriers you’re facing.
3 barriers to effective performance management
1. Manual processes are unnecessarily time-consuming
Issue:
It’s time for another performance review, but you’re being pulled in a million directions, and filling out the review forms takes too much time. In some organizations, these forms are still a paper-based nightmare, and in others they’re digital … but still manual (and still nightmarish).
With busy schedules and higher priority tasks breathing down your neck, it can be easy to forget that a team member is anxiously awaiting your contribution to their review. This process is not only time-consuming but can result in reviews being rushed and completed half-heartedly — which can negatively impact the reviewee’s performance and engagement for the rest of the year.
Solution:
You can streamline the review process using Nintex Forms to automate sign-off and employee feedback. Anyone on your team can build advanced forms in seconds with our quick and easy AI digital forms assistant — no technical skill required. Use AI to automatically generate fillable digital forms from your outdated PDF files to rapidly convert your digitized paper forms into Nintex Forms. These forms can then capture data, start a workflow, and be sent to your employee automatically, so they can add to the review with questions, comments, or to sign off the review at the end of the process.
2. Poor communication causes delays and bottlenecks
Issue:
Performance reviews can take place annually, semi-annually, or quarterly so that progress or problems can be reported, addressed, and modified in a timely manner. But what happens if there is no system in place to notify managers when their employees’ reviews are due? This can cause the review process to be delayed, causing significant bottlenecks, or it could result in the review being scheduled at the last minute, meaning that both parties are not sufficiently prepared for the review.
Solution:
Use Nintex Workflow to create a workflow that automatically schedules performance reviews, sets reminders when review documents are due, and even allows AI agents to move the less sensitive aspects of the process along. This schedule will be initially updated during the onboarding process and will continue updating year after year until the employee vacates their position. The review is added to both the reviewer’s and the employee’s calendars, and they both receive email notifications in the run-up to the scheduled date, leaving ample time to prepare.
3. Poor visibility creates information silos
Issue:
Let’s say that after their performance review, an employee has received a pay raise. Woo hoo! However, when it comes to payday the following month, their raise has not been incorporated into their paycheck. Whoops.
There needs to be a centralized place to store employee performance review data. If the details of reviews are held onto by team managers and not shared with HR, it can result in document loss and delays, especially if that manager was then to leave the company. Relevant colleagues from other departments need to be able to access the information when it is required. Information regarding employee wages and bonuses must be conveyed through the right channels to the right people so that payroll information is correct.
Solution:
When using Nintex Forms, the data inputted during the review is automatically stored in SharePoint. This means that the raise has been recorded correctly and stored in the right place, so that it is ready to be confirmed when HR or finance is working on payroll for that month. This will ensure no one ever misses their due rewards.
Automate and Improve
These are just a few examples of how Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms can help you achieve effective performance management by streamlining review processes. Nintex can also help you automate a wide-range of HR and performance management workflows, including onboarding for new employees. With Nintex, it’s easy to automate, orchestrate, and optimize business processes like those mentioned above to drive better outcomes.