Category: Performance Management

A familiar situation: the team can no longer cope with the volume of work, and the manager hires another employee. This is a perfectly logical decision, but far from always effective. 

Social psychologists have come to the conclusion that in a team, a person tends to put less effort than in individual work. 

In this article, we are going to tell you how to make teams work without losing efficiency, why to monitor employee performance, and how to improve performance management metrics.

What Is Performance Management? 

The most important goal in experimenting with performance management (PM) is to develop ways to align it more closely with company performance. As organizations become more team-oriented, a PM is also beginning to shift from focusing only on an employee’s individual performance to evaluating their contributions to the team, and the team’s impact on overall business goals.

Also Read: Why These 8 Top Companies Redefined Their Performance Management Systems

Cisco, GE, Google and Cloudways were the first to implement this model. These companies have built software to understand team dynamics, assess group goal systems, and evaluate how effectively employees contribute to their teams. The goal of performance management is now transformed from improving an individual employee’s performance to improving team results.

What Is the Ringelmann Effect?

Maximilian Ringelmann, a French agronomist, conducted an experiment in which he asked participants to pull a rope as hard as they could, first alone, then in pairs, threes, and finally in a group of eight. 

Being alone, the participant applied a force equivalent to 63 kilograms. It is logical to assume that two people together would apply a force of 126 kg, three people would apply a force of 189 kg, and so on.

But the results showed that as the number of participants increased, everyone’s individual effort decreased. The more people are there in the group, the less efficient each of them becomes. This phenomenon has been called “social laziness”.

5 Ways to Cope with the Ringelmann Effect

Increase Tasks as the Group Grows

When a manager tells employees that a new employee will join the team, he or she sends an unconscious message: “Now you can work less”.

This triggers the Ringelman effect. Instead of that, you should say: “We did 100% of the work when there were X people. Now, there are X+1 of us, let’s do 120%.”

Keep Everyone Motivated

When people embark on new tasks, it’s important for them to understand that their work makes sense. 

Constantly remind employees what the point of their job is, and why they are doing a particular task. It will help you keep them engaged.

It’s important that each employee understands exactly how much he or she contributes to the organization’s goals. 

Remember Exactly What Everyone’s Tasks Are

In order to evaluate an employee’s productivity and how it changes as the team grows, a manager or HR needs to understand everyone’s range of responsibilities. Well, let’s say that you run such a business type as an LLC.  Then, it will be easier to control that since all the nuances of the company are outlined in one document, which is known as an Operating Agreement. In this case, he or she will more quickly notice that the work is performed worse/slower. Accordingly, this person will be able to take action more quickly. 

Increase the Sense of Responsibility in the Group

The aim of the leader is to set tasks and achieve their fulfillment. 

Leaders should show that they need the professionalism and assistance of the employees in order to achieve goals. In this case, employees feel significant, indispensable, and make more efforts. 

Offer Employees the Role of Mentors

If you are hiring someone, offer current employees to act as mentors and help integrate and onboard the newcomer. This will increase productivity. Invest in mentoring software such as Mentoring Complete to find the right mentor-mentee match. Their 3 step matching process and proprietary algorithm ensures that employees are paired with the correct mentor.

A Few More Tips for Successful Performance Management 

Set SMART Goals

One of the most important aspects that directly impact performance is SMART goal setting. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time bound goals. If the tasks you set meet these criteria, your employees won’t encounter confusion and will know exactly what they need to do and why. It will help them stay focussed and stay engaged at work.

Poorly set goals and tasks are bound to cause miscommunication between managers and employees, poor performance, and uncertainty. 

Also Read: How To Use SMART Goals For Employee Engagement?

Focus on Team Accomplishments 

If the goals and tasks should be transparent and clear to all team members, as we mentioned above, so should the results and achievements. When people work together on the same project, neither the goals nor the results should be made confidential.

Connect With Your Employees Frequently

Employees should always be informed of all company innovations, new projects, and any other relevant information. That’s why we advise you to always keep in touch with your employees. Especially in the case when they contact you in order to get answers to their questions. Start using email marketing to always be in communication with your employees and strengthen the connection between departments. This is especially relevant for remote employees. 

Conduct Surveys

Periodic surveys help managers assess team effectiveness. Regular engagement surveys or “pulse” employee surveys provide insight into when and why some teams are ineffective, dissatisfied, or frustrated.

Also Read: How To Create A Good Employee Engagement Survey

Do Annual Reviews on Employee Productivity 

Depending on the size of a company, you may want to do this more frequently (semi-annually or quarterly). This can give you a full picture of each individual employee’s performance, helps qualitatively assess the situation and receive clear data. With this data, it will be much easier for you to define a strategy to improve the performance of teams or individual employees.

What’s more, to make your job easier, you can use one of the platforms to collect information on employee productivity. These platforms count the number of tasks completed, and the time spent on them. Some of these platforms even automatically average values and allow you to see ready figures for a certain period. 

Trust Your Employees 

This point arises from the previous one. Why should leaders collect information about employee performance? A few years ago, it was done solely to evaluate the productivity of a person, nothing more. At most, it was the reason to get a reward. But not today.

Now, most successful managers, leaders, and business owners focus on coaching and developing the skills of their employees. This means that when they notice a problem in performance, they first want to help their employees solve it. 

Conclusion 

Match performance management to strategic and organizational needs: the basic principles of metrics, flexible goal setting, and frequent feedback are becoming commonplace around the world. But some companies still want formal reviews, numerical ratings, and development plans. Organizational culture takes years to change, so companies have to adopt these methods at a speed that works for business. 

Want to know how Engagedly can help you with performance management? Request a demo today. 

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Guest blog contribution by Dmitry Tsybuliak

Dmitry is the co-founder of AG Inc., a digital agency that specializes in website design and digital marketing. With over 10 years of experience in the technology, SEO and digital marketing industry, he is passionate about helping online businesses take their branding to the next level.

According to a survey by Zenger and Folkman, “Negative (redirecting) feedback, if delivered appropriately, is effective at improving performance.”

The outcome of a performance review will not always be up to your expectation, it can be positive or negative. Hearing that you didn’t perform well, or you were not up to the mark, can be overwhelming and scary. But it can happen and even the best of all performers can stumble. Even our best efforts aren’t fruitful at times. It will be a totally different scenario if you are not putting in efforts but still expecting to have a good performance review. In this case, evaluate your priorities and introspect to understand why things are not how you expected them to be.

In this article, we will highlight what to do after a negative performance review.

Don’t Overthink

Of course, this is easier said than done, but it is the first thing we need to keep in mind. After an instance of negative feedback, it can be very easy to spiral into negative thinking. It’s not long before this spiral can become a loop of self-recrimination.

However, this is not the correct way to approach negative feedback. Carefully re-evaluate. It helps to look back at work over the course of a certain period. Ask your manager for examples. Perhaps there are certain points you can refute. And perhaps there are certain points you can accept. Either way, do not assume it is all on your shoulders and that you are a terrible employee. Instead of overthinking, reflect deeply.

Also Read: Creating A Performance Based Structure In Your Organization

Take Time To Process It

Ask for some time to process the meeting. Be sure to set up a follow-up meeting. Your manager will not mind. Remember, they too may have been in the same place you once were. Handling a negative performance review in a sensible fashion while not being immediately reactionary is a valuable skill to have. It indicates maturity and thoughtfulness. This is not to say that you should listen to everything and refute nothing. Use rational thought to guide your words. In other words, pick the battles you want to fight. There’s no necessity to fight everything or accept everything unless of course, yours is an outlier of a situation that involves a bad manager and worse review practices.

Try Not To Get Overwhelmed

Once again, this is easier said than done. Obviously, negative reviews are a difficult pill to swallow (especially if you are dealing with one for the first time after years of having been a consistent performer).

However, all the trite phrases and proverbs you’ve heard your elders tell you over the years are finally going to make sense now, much to your chagrin. Failure will help you appreciate all your successes better. Failure teaches you how both sides of the equation are. It can install a sense of caution, temper aggression and even plant our feet firmly on the ground. Contrary to popular belief, failure is not a permanent blemish on your career. You can bounce back from 99% of the errors you have made.

The tag might follow you for a while, but subsequent good work will not only help the tag fade, but it will also help showcase your determination and hard work, and who knows, even an example of a success story to be admired for the years to come.

Also Read: Signs That Your HR Department Is Overwhelmed 

Take out the learning points

There’s a difference between maintaining a positive and upbeat attitude and willful ignorance. Do not make the mistake of being foolish and ignoring a negative performance review. At best, you really might be shrugging off minor mistakes or criticisms. At the worst, you might be ignoring blaring warning signs.
A negative performance review can be considered a reckoning. Use it to reflect upon where you currently are at. A negative review can help you ascertain quite a few outcomes.

• Maybe you aren’t a good fit for the job. That’s alright. You can consider a change.
• Maybe this new role isn’t your cup of tea. No harm in going back to your old role.
• Maybe you and your manager have very different working styles. There’s no way to reconcile this except by making your peace or choosing to move on.
• Maybe you overloaded your plate. You can always re-negotiate your responsibilities.

It is important to remember that all these instances are plausible and they are probably not the first time your manager has run up against them. There is no weakness in admitting that things aren’t working out for you the way you expected them to. Sharing this view with your manager could help both of you have an insightful conversation about what your next move is.

It is not about personal failure

Many hard things are easier said than done. A negative performance review is not a direct reflection of who you are. But it is a mirror of some of your abilities. The moment it becomes a personal failure, that’s when it stops becoming a necessary aspect of work and becomes an obstacle that you cannot overcome.
We wouldn’t say that everyone should experience negative reviews. However, it is important to see the other side of things. The fear of failure can oftentimes be a paralyzing thing. It is worth noting how you deal with failure. There’s no bigger lesson than learning how to overcome failure. And some people who are well acquainted with this lesson will have no problem moving on from failure. For others, it might take some work, but it can be done.

Absorb and Assimilate

Before you say anything or react to the review, listen to your manager and make a concentrated effort to understand what they are saying. If your manager hasn’t given, you cause to doubt them and their opinions before, then there’s probably a grain of truth to what they are saying. 

Ask for support when required

This is the best thing you can do after receiving a negative performance review. Asking for help to get better shows your manager you care. It might be difficult to ask for help, but asking for help is not a weakness, but rather you admitting that things aren’t so hot right now and you need some guidance to get through this.

Discuss an improvement plan with your manager. They probably have a few ideas as to how to help. Everyone knows that it is not possible for any employee to be superhumanly good. And neither should anybody aim to be one either. That way lies the specter of burnout.

Also Read: Employee Burnout: What you need to know about it

Instead, ask for help, put the review at the back of your mind, and keep going on. The past is not something you can change. But the future is something you certainly can control.

Want to know how Engagedly can help you with performance reviews?

Request a live demo from our experts!

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Time has changed, and this question is no longer debatable anymore. Today’s corporate world, 80% of which is functioning virtually, has long since embraced performance appraisal software and has understood the significance of having one in place. In fact, since the pandemic hit, you’ll know that there’s a steady change taking place regarding employee performance management and employee engagement. The performance review process is, not so quietly, being replaced by employee performance appraisal software.

This is not a death knell of the performance review process. The process will continue to exist. But it signals that nobody has patience for the old ways of carrying out a performance review process anymore. To be honest, the process has long been due for a change.

Beginning of Performance Management:

The concept of the performance management began the in the early 1900s. Several sources have mentioned several names, so it is hard to pinpoint who exactly came up with the idea. But one thing all the sources agreed upon was the fact that performance management seems to have come into being sometimes during the early 1900s. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that the concept of performance management really picked up. Employers began to understand that in order for employees to perform well or to be motivated to perform well, they needed encouragement and motivation.

Since then, performance review cycled through many iterations, including Jack Welch’s rank and yank system at General Electric and Google’s prolific use of goals and objectives to motivate employees.

Also read: Why do you need a Real Time Performance Management Software

In present times, however, there are a lot of conflicting ideas about what makes up performance management. Many companies which were once pioneers in the performance review process, such as General Electric, Enron, IBM, Motorola, and others, have either done away with the processes that brought them recognition or have themselves dissolved. The current trend is, of course, to get the review process off papers and take it online. In the past few years, so a good deal of software applications have appeared in the market. Is it any better than the traditional performance process? Definitely!

Here are three ways in which employee performance appraisal software can improve the performance review process and drive employee engagement:

Easily To Use and Navigate:

The problem with traditional performance reviews is that so many of them heavily rely on paper. It becomes a cumbersome task to take all of that paper and merge it into a review. With software, on the other hand, all you need to do is input your review. Most performance review software applications will even collate all your performance reviews into one handy document.

Provide Continuous Feedback:

Performance review applications make it easier for employees and managers to give continuous feedback. Feedback works best when it is given and received at regular intervals and is real time.

Continuous feedback isn’t something that is just reserved for a certain breed of employees. Constructive feedback is for everyone. It can help struggling employees improve, it can help good employees become better, and it might even help struggling employees figure out if they are suited for different job roles.

Also read: 6 Reasons To Invest In A Performance Appraisal Software

Add-On Customisable Features:

Most employee performance appraisal software applications come with a whole host of features that help aid the performance review process. Engagedly for instance, also has the OKR module which allows you to add and monitor goals and objectives for employees, 360 multirater feedback module, a continuous feedback model, all of which can be utilized during the performance review so that managers have a broad and comprehensive overview of how their employees are doing. Additionally, these features also make tracking an employee’s performance a lot easier.

Do you want to know how Engagedly can help you with seamless Performance Evaluation? Then request for a live demo.

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We are all responsible for creating and maintaining a positive work environment and interpersonal relationship between employees. The main responsibility of it, though, falls on the Human Resource department. The HR of any organization has many key responsibilities – starting from the recruitment process, education and training, to off-boarding/termination of employees. 

Recent studies have shown that almost 85% of the global labor force is actively disengaging from their work. Productivity and earnings have been affected to a great extent because of it.

Also Read: The Ultimate Guide To Effective Employee Surveys

There is a way to avoid such a situation. Wondering how? By implementing creative ways to engage your workforce in order to boost productivity. The tools stated below have the potential to increase engagement among employees and help your organization achieve set goals. Let’s go through them together. 

Communication Apps

An organization’s success depends on effective internal communication. A business that lacks communication suffers decreased motivation and loses sight of its purpose. As a consequence, productivity plummets to an all-time low. If you are wondering how you can enhance communication among your employees and enhance productivity and engagement levels, say thank you to productivity tools. This whole process becomes more streamlined and simplified by bringing in exactly what your workforce needs.

For example, apps like Slack and Confluence are great for improving communication. 

With Slack, you can easily organize your groups, subgroups, departments, or the entire company through various channels. Achieve two-way communication with ease while keeping necessary information organized, stored, and at an easily accessible location. 

Confluence is an app intended for bigger organizations in order to receive important information at lightning speed. It’s a versatile application that helps you organize a company’s policy, video tutorials, and transfer crucial messages.

Video Calling Applications

Video calling apps have become widely popular, especially post pandemic. Companies of every industry have used them for meetings, at one point or the other. Given their increased necessity in today’s world, no one wants bad connections, broken links, and unnecessary interruptions. 

To make sure everything goes in order, you can employ certain tools. This will ensure engaging meeting spaces that can be an effective way to boost team productivity.

Zoom and Google Hangouts are leading apps for video conferencing. They are free for use and their main purpose is to make video calls, send messages, and join a conversation within a group or just with one person. 

Mentimeter has also proven to be very effective when it comes to video calling. It is a software that employees can use to join video calls via their smartphones. They are able to send messages, vote, answer questions, or generally contribute to a presentation. 

If you are looking to host larger-scale meetings which involve presentations, there are a large number of webinar software options to choose from.

Also Read: 7 Video Conferencing Etiquettes To Follow 

Project Management

The aim of any project is to be a successful one, so it needs to be managed in the right way. Successful project management eliminates ambiguity among employees, respects deadlines, and each project is completed effectively and accurately.

Tools like Trello, Asana, and Hive can help you accomplish those projects with ease. For instance, during your workday, you may be thinking to yourself, ‘How am I going to rewrite my essay quickly and efficiently?’ You will have all the necessary tools for completing the project from start to finish with these apps. Trello has proven to be a great option for the ones who are just starting the project journeys, while Hive will give you the needed analytics reports for tracking the team’s productivity better. 

Management of Remote Teams

When we are talking about project management, it is easy to do it with the help of productivity tools. But, the projects are not the only things to be managed. After the pandemic hit, we now know better than that. Many companies have turned to remote work and the work of HR has completely changed. Remote teams had to be managed without adequate support systems and infrastructure. This means that the HR team needs to take care of the employees’ well-being; balance flexibility; reward teams and individuals for their accomplishments; maintain relationships with each employee, and aim to make a genuinely happier work from home environment. 

Also Read: Tips To Manage Stress Of Your Remote Team

Teamwork and collaboration

Efficiency increases when teams are provided with productivity tools that facilitate cross-functional collaboration.

This is very important, especially for companies that have departments that work in silos, have remote workers, and employees from multiple locations. This is where collaborative tools can benefit your organization through improved collaboration capabilities.

You have probably heard of Google Drive, as it’s one of the first choices for many companies. This storage-based service will allow you to upload all important documents for free on your secure cloud storage. 

Documents, slides, and Google sheets are available, which means you can upload files, pictures, videos, and audio. The documents can be shared and edited by the people who have access to them. This is especially useful for organizations that have a large or growing amount of files that need to be shared with other people, regardless of their location.

Similar to this service, that gives us the same options as Google Drive, is Microsoft’s OneDrive. The only difference is that this software allows you to view and edit files offline, which can be very beneficial at times.

Tools for time management

There are a lot of popular apps like customer data platforms, for tracking the behaviour of your customers. When it comes to employees, that platform is your HR worker. In addition, the time tracking will provide you with valuable insight into your employees’ work. You can know track each task and find out which areas are lacking productivity. 

Toggl is a great and simple-to-use time tracking tool. With just a click, you can track the time you spent on each task. You are available to see reports about each project and task you did over the past week. If you forget to start your time, a little bot will send you an alert each time.

RescueTime is another useful tracking tool. You can monitor the apps and websites employees are using during their work time. Besides that, you can even check at which hour the employees are the most or least productive, as well as their days and the weeks.

Virtual Recruiting

Pandemic has triggered a lot of changes in company policies. When it comes to hiring, the whole process of recruiting has become virtual. From planning, selecting, managing, to hiring, everything has become virtual.

Also Read: Remote Onboarding : Essentials To Know

The experience that a prospective employee had in their job interview has a great influence on their satisfaction level as well as on the whole company’s reputation. The ones who have had a positive experience will most likely accept the position, thereby becoming your company’s referral.

Summary

Running a business during a pandemic has surely brought about some changes in brand strategies, company policies, and staff support procedures. Since most things are now done in the digital environment, including our communication, there are necessary tools to keep workers engaged, while aiming for the highest performance.

Productivity tools mentioned above can facilitate one’s work and solve key problems. Although, you should avoid complicated and unnecessary tools that can just disrupt workflows and lower productivity levels.

Tools like the ones mentioned above are user-friendly and straightforward. However, you can always experiment, and try to find the ones that suit you and your employees the best. 

Introduce them to your workers, allow them time to integrate, and be open to feedback. Only by doing so, can you nurture collaboration and achieve the desired productivity.

Want to know how Engagedly can help your employees perform better? Request a demo today. 

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Guest blog contribution by Nina Petrov

Nina Petrov is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.

The corporate world has completely changed in comparison to what it was two years ago. Organizations adapted themselves to new methods of working and employees became completely remote due to the pandemic. In the current scenario, while many organizations are shifting to a hybrid model of work, remote work is here to stay.

This makes it essential for organizations to shift to performance management software from the traditional paper- based processes. While traditional performance management processes were not easy to follow, with the arrival of the pandemic it has become completely impossible.

Performance management has evolved at a quick pace over the last few decades. Earlier, annual performance reviews were the indisputable norm. It was a dreadful affair for both the managers and the employees. But now it is not just a yearly process, it has become flexible, continuous and more comprehensive. This helps employees to stay engaged and on the right track.

Also Read: 7 Proven Ways To Be A Better Leader In The Workplace

Traditional performance processes work fine when organizations are small or have a very simple review process. But once organizations get bigger and job roles get more complex, there’s a need for software to enhance the process, or rather, to ease the process.

Benefits of performance management software for your organization?

Helps Understand Goals Better

A recent study by Gallup indicates that about 50% of employees do not know what is expected of them at their workplace.

Imagine a situation wherein a remote employee is expected to put in his or her 100% effort but is not sure where this is headed or what’s the end result of this. Do you think she or he will be able to put in that much effort? Performance management software enables the company to have clear-cut goals and makes them visible to every employee. Every employee gets to see how their effort can help the company achieve higher-level goals.

When they see how they can make an impact at the individual level, it makes them want to strive harder. Managers can easily keep a track of their team performances remotely and can provide feedback accordingly.

Also Read: How To Set Effective Employee Goals?

Simplifies The Performance Management Process

One of performance management software’s biggest advantages is that it can be extremely easy to use, depending on the choice of software. All the things required for a review cycle are in one place, most of the processes are automated, and once the review information has been added, such as start dates, review templates, etc., there’s not much else an HR manager has to do, except oversee the entire process.

Even better, HR managers don’t have to frequently remind employees to complete their reviews. Most software has built-in reminders that will prod employees to complete the review process. The software takes the burden off HR’s shoulders and instead allows them to focus on the outcome of performance reviews, rather than the whole process of it.

Performance Management Software Stores Historical Data

With a performance management software in place, you can access data anytime and it helps to make quick and efficient decisions. They provide old and new data in one place, for you to compare and understand patterns and identify any gaps or bottlenecks. It becomes easy to track the performance level.

Also Read: Employee Feedback:The Do’s And Don’ts

Integrates All Aspects Of Employee Development

Performance management software does not focus solely on the review process alone. Rather, they offer other features as well, such as the ability to share feedback, goals and objectives, an LMS, etc. All these features are often integrated so that when the review process is going on, users can view an employee’s complete profile, such as the feedback they have received, the goals they could complete, to what extent they could complete their goals, or even what new skills they have learned.

Performance management software paints a broad picture of an employee’s performance. It helps everyone make informed decisions during the review process.

Gives Better Insights And Analytics

Performance management software can provide a very illuminating look at an employee’s performance. This is not just related to ratings and feedback they have received over the past years. Rather, many performance management software also offer performance analytics that track employee performance in graphical chart format, calculate leadership potential, etc. This way, you can also track how well an employee is performing remotely compared to when she or he was present in office.

These employee insights can help others make informed review decisions when reviewing performance. And they can also help managers make compensation decisions or even promotion decisions.

Also Read: The Ultimate Guide To Effective Employee Surveys

Better Visibility and Control Of The Process

Conducting the review process through performance management software offers HR managers much greater control over the entire process. They can control when the cycle starts and when it ends, how many employees should participate in the cycle, etc. HR managers can also restrict review visibility, call back reviews etc, thereby also maintaining a fair and just review process.

As a manager, you have a ton of other responsibilities, other than just tracking your employees’ performance. So if you wish to be more efficient and handle things with ease, a performance management software is your best option.

Want to know more about real-time performance management software? Request us for a quick demo!

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Performance management processes and approaches differ from organization to organization. These processes are intended to be fair and unbiased evaluation of employee performance. 

Effective performance management tends to motivate employees and improve organizational productivity, but why do employees dread them? For a few reasons like inaccuracy, being biased and contributing to the decrease of employee morale, employees tend not to like them.

According to the TriNet Perform Survey that was conducted by Wakefield Research, 22% of millennial employees have called in sick because they were anxious about receiving their review.

Many companies today are reinventing their performance management processes in a way that they contribute to an increase in employee productivity and improve employee morale. Do you want to reinvent performance management too? Here are a few tips for you.

Build A Transparent Work Culture

It is important for employees to understand the workflow in their organizations. In most organizations, only the information enough to get the job done is shared with employees. This approach not only damages the work culture but also decreases employee engagement and morale. The first step to change this is to encourage open communication throughout the organization. The next is to allow employees to make their own decisions, this improves employee accountability throughout the organization.

Also Read: Create A Positive Work Culture For Your Employees

Plan For The Future 

One of the most damaging mistakes that managers tend to make during performance reviews is basing the whole review on the employee’s past performance. Change this approach and focus more on the future. Take into account the organizational goals and understand the role of the employees in contributing to these goals. Analyze their pace and style of work based on past work but do not make the review entirely about it. Instead, talk to them about the plans you have for their future at your organization.

Support Your Employees

It is important for managers to understand the technological and budget requirements of their employees and provide them with necessary resources that contribute to their productivity. Though taking initiative as an employee is an important aspect of performance, you cannot expect employees to do everything by themselves. So, discuss this aspect with your employees and set a budget for their role and provide them with necessary resources.

Make Check-ins A Priority

The approach for performance reviews can be different for different organizations, but one of the most common issues that employees face with reviews in all organizations is that they do not get enough feedback. Frequent employee feedback helps employees gain a clear understanding of what is expected of them and gives them a proper direction. Managers also can utilize frequent employee check-ins and keep track of their employee progress from time to time.

Also Read: How To Conduct Quick Check-Ins Efficiently 

Appreciate Your Employees

This is one of the most underrated aspects of employee appreciation. When employees are good at their job, they need to know it from their managers. This motivates them to get better and contribute to organizational success. Recognizing and rewarding employee performance goes a long way. This not only motivates the employee being recognized but also the other employees to do their best to be recognized by their managers.

Set Goals For The Quarter

Like said before, it is important to check frequently and validate employee performance. In the same way, it is also important to change goals every quarter so that employees do not get stuck in a rut working for the same goals for one whole year. Quarterly performance goals give both the employees and managers a scope to experiment and implement new approaches to work.

Encourage Employees To Participate In The Review

This is one of the mistakes that managers do not even realize making. Some managers tend to make the whole review about what they feel about the employee’s performance and never make it easier for employees to participate in the discussion and give inputs. Always ask employees after review if they feel that the review was fair enough. This gives you a scope for starting a two-way discussion with employees.

Also Read: The Impact Of Employee Engagement On Productivity

Listen To Your Employees

Always remember to be open to feedback from employees. Performance review meeting isn’t just for managers to evaluate employee performance but also for employees to discuss what they expect from their managers. Being open to feedback from direct reports is one of the best approaches to improve yourself as a manager.

Do you want to know how Engagedly can help you with Employee Engagement? Then request for a live demo.

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There are a lot of dangers associated with micromanaging. Among other things, it causes demotivation and creates a stressful work environment (for both managers and employees).

Micromanaging often leads to higher employee turnover, which results in learned knowledge getting lost to competitors. Moreover, micromanagers may experience burnout with health issues resulting from stress. 

Either way, micromanaging is problematic.

Also Read: The Top 8 Leadership Skills You Need In 2021

That’s why it’s important to learn how to manage without micromanaging. This article will provide you with 6 best practices to help you delegate and demonstrate trust and encouragement among your employees so you can improve morale and build creative, cohesive teams who aren’t afraid to take the initiative.

What are Individual Contributors? 

The term “individual contributor” is a new phrase that is used to describe the role of senior professionals who work without people management responsibilities.

Individual contributors are employees who aren’t on the management track in an organization. Unlike management-track employees, they manage their one-person team on tasks and projects. 

They have developed useful skills in the workplace and are competent at:

• Listening effectively;
• Developing rapport with others; and
• Making relationships work. 

In fact, individual contributors can be a valuable asset that define the success of an organization.

Also Read: Stay Interviews: A Tool To Retain Your Best Employees

One of the major complaints ICs have about their jobs has to do with how much autonomy they think they have in their current role. 

The perceived level of independence comes down to how closely their immediate manager or supervisor dictates the production details and nuances of the work employees must complete.

Having said that, managers, HR, and company leaders are sometimes uncomfortable when it comes to giving people so much responsibility without keeping a tight rein on them. 

They feel the need to look over the shoulders of individual contributors, and these overzealous tendencies can lead to a lot of problems down the line. 

Dangers of Micromanaging Individual Contributors

A recent study conducted by AccounTemps shows that over 59% of participants admitted that they have at one time or another worked under a micromanager. 

68% of those respondents believed that this management approach had a negative impact on overall team morale, and a high number of the participants reported that it seriously inhibited their work productivity, including that of the company at large.

Micromanagement can result in the loss of an organization’s important talent. It erodes trust, and over time, it can turn a workplace environment toxic. 

By consistently looking over the shoulders of your employees, particularly ICs, you make it a lot less likely that they’ll be able to become effective or excel on their own. 

Here’s a quick summary of the negative impact of micromanaging ICs:

• Destroys Trust: Constant micromanagement destroys trust and undermines the initiative and autonomy of employees over time
• Creates Bottlenecks: Micromanaging creates bottlenecks in decision-making and response time when employees won’t do anything without a superior’s explicit approval.
• Fosters Dependency: Micromanagement also leads to dependent employees who will start to depend on you instead of having the confidence to complete tasks on their own.

Now that you know why micromanagement of ICs is bad, let’s take a look at some of the best practices to help individual contributors without micromanaging.

Best Practices for Helping ICs Without Micromanaging

Listed below are 6 tips and strategies to help you stay involved and keep your employees accountable while avoiding micromanagement.

1. Allow Them to Create Their Own Goals and OKRs

There are many ways you can define measurable goals and track the outcomes of individual contributors. 

You can use objectives and key results (OKRs) as a goal-setting framework. This will allow you to manage expectations instead of tasks.

For the most part, managers spend a lot of time trying to communicate to their teams what needs to be done. However, there are times when what needs to be done is different from what is expected. 

For leaders to be effective, they need to do their best to ensure that individual contributors know exactly what is expected so that there is no longer a need to micromanage. 

When everyone is in sync with the expectations, it becomes about outcomes, instead of activity, and it all starts with letting them create their own goals and OKRs. 

2. Offer Assistance with an Open-Door Policy

It’s possible to offer assistance to individual contributors without looking over their shoulders. You can do this by having an open-door policy. It involves maintaining casual, open lines of communication to help you build rapport with everyone in your internal team. 

If you want to foster an environment of employee enjoyment and high-quality work, you shouldn’t only be communicating with your team about how they need to be doing their work in a different or better way. You should also build an atmosphere of openness and transparent communication by chatting to them about their work, and also investing in their personal well-being. 

For instance, you might take your team out to lunch or go to a local bar for happy hour, when not on the clock. This will help you build the social side of your relationship. 

Also Read: Create A Positive Work Culture For Your Employees

When your individual contributors know that they can rely on you to listen, they not only feel highly valued, but they are more likely to bring any problems that arise (professional or personal) to your attention to get your advice or assistance. 

Make sure you are there to address any challenges they might be facing. Be prompt to respond to all the questions your employee handbook doesn’t cover. 

Ultimately, this will help them to be more productive. It is something that probably wouldn’t happen if you were constantly picking apart their work (as micromanagers tend to do). 

At times, there will be common issues that need the attention of most, but not all employees. Instead of attempting to gather everyone up together for a conference, you can create unique webinars that employees can watch if they need to. 

Using webinar software to create these resources can also save time and money in the long-run because you won’t have to make all your employees stop what they’re doing to attend a conference or company-wide meeting.

3. Let Them Develop Their Own Systems and Strategies 

Once you’ve made sure that everyone understands their role in your organization, it becomes easier to allow them to develop their own strategies, tactics, and processes to achieve their objectives. 

All you have to do is make sure there are clear, well-defined goals where nothing falls through the cracks. 

Individual contributors will know their responsibilities, and developing their own systems and strategies makes them more accountable. 

The best part is that you’ll have to do less work to manage them since you’ll now be a facilitator as opposed to a taskmaster. 

Just remember to build in some flexibility into each role. 

Although striking a balance can be difficult, it’s important to take the time to work on this so your independent contributors can have room to be creative. By offering such opportunities, you make it more likely that your ICs will be innovative and still get things done.

Also Read: Why Managers Need To Focus On Employee Happiness

4. Use Gamification and (Non-Monetary) Rewards

As humans, we all love recognition. One of the best ways you can help individual contributors stay on track without crossing the line into micromanagement is by using gamification and non-monetary rewards to recognize their contributions and help them meet their goals and OKRs. 

The great part about non-monetary rewards is that they are perceived to be more authentic and decrease variable costs incurred by the business.

You can begin to build a culture of recognition as a way to support ICs by reevaluating how you reward employees. 

For instance, for those who are happy to remain ICs, you can replace promotions to management with new opportunities, such as:

• Opportunities for gaining recognition
• Opportunities for taking on new responsibility
• Opportunities for sharing their expertise

… and so on.

So, instead of giving ICs managerial responsibility for other team members, you might give them ownership responsibility for key projects. 

As they succeed (and their project succeeds), it gives them visibility across the entire organization, and they have plenty of small wins along the way that are worth celebrating.

Additionally, you can encourage employees to take part in webinars or use online course platforms that can help them learn new tasks or overcome common problems. Not only does this save costs by getting employees engaged without monetary rewards, it can incentivize employees to stay up-to-date with changes in the workplace. 

5. Provide Avenues for Social Engagement and Praise

Yet another way to help individual contributors without micromanaging is to provide them with avenues for praise and social engagement. 

This means building your skills for managing your culture rather than managing people. 

The importance of social engagement in the workplace cannot be overstated. Social media is key to mobilizing and engaging employees at work. It provides great avenues for praise, particularly in larger organizations. 

You must be able to create opportunities where you and the rest of your team can engage socially while still being able to communicate with clarity.

Also Read: The Impact Of Continuous Feedback On Employee Performance

6. Use Surveys to Find out What ICs Need

Last, but not least, use surveys to understand what your individual contributors need and how to help them. 

A lot of micromanagers only do so because of the trust issues they harbor. In their eyes, no one else can do the job as effectively as they would do it. 

But, by asking questions to gain a better understanding (instead of constantly criticizing), you’ll be able to find out exactly what ICs need in order to be more productive. 

Furthermore, using employee surveys will allow you to offer constructive and actionable feedback on a consistent basis, giving you the opportunity to provide your employees with specific ideas pertaining to how they can perform their jobs better. 

In other words, using surveys will allow you to discover what you can do to provide encouragement and opportunities for improvement. It will help you get outstanding results from your ICs – all without having to micromanage any of them.

Conclusion

There is a very thin line between being an involved manager and becoming a micromanager who drives all the individual contributors mad.

Use the tips outlined above to help you give your ICs the support they need without micromanaging them.

Which of the tips outlined above appeals to you the most? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Author:

Ron Stefanski is an online entrepreneur and marketing professor who has a passion for helping people create and market their own online business. You can learn more from him by visiting OneHourProfessor.com

You can also connect with him on YouTube or Linkedin.

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The Impact of Continuous Feedback: Do you wait till the annual reviews to share your feedback with your employees? You might want to reconsider. We are here to talk to you about the value of continuous feedback. But before we take a deep dive into how it can help improve employee performance, let us look at a small example first.

Charles, a recent graduate from college, joined the analytics team of ABC corporation remotely on May 2020. His manager, Robert, trained him over the first few weeks and assigned him to a project. After the completion of the project, Robert came across some errors, but did not highlight it as he wanted to take it up with Charles during the yearly performance reviews. Back to present in March 2021, when Robert highlighted the issues to Charles, he was surprised, and at the same time defiant. Was this avoidable? We would say absolutely yes. A timely feedback would have helped Charles to understand his mistakes in time and take corrective actions immediately. 

Also Read: 6 Real-life Examples Of Giving Effective Employee Feedback

To avoid any such similar incidents, here are some ways in which feedback can help your employees to improve performance.

Feedback Guides Employees

The worst thing about traditional annual performance reviews is that they wait till the last minute to let employees know that they have veered off course, have wasted their efforts, or are not doing well. Time is precious in the context of performance and, of course, money as well.

Real-time feedback can help employees course-correct as and when necessary, can help them fix mistakes that were holding them back and, sometimes, it can even help them revamp their goals or increase their targets.

Instantaneous And Simple

One of feedback’s biggest plus points is that it is instantaneous and does not require much fanfare. As opposed to an annual performance review, which conjures up a much more formal and stiff image. Besides, it’s not easy to share as much feedback during an annual review. Both the manager and employee are conscious of the time spent in the meeting, with the manager being aware that she does not have the luxury of addressing the employee’s performance completely, even if she really wants to.

Feedback, on the other hand,can be as easy as a quick five-minute chat in the cafeteria, or a congratulatory email about a job well done.

Also Read: Employee Wellbeing And Absenteeism At Work

Improves The Performance Review Process

When feedback is shared or received throughout the year, it helps managers visualize an accurate image of an employee’s performance. Managers can make a note of significant achievements or issues that are negatively affecting an employee’s performance. They can even record their own reaction to the employee’s performance. And over a period, it can paint an impressive picture of performance. 

Continuous Feedback Helps In Career Growth

Source: rawpixel.com

A culture of continuous feedback helps employees to receive inputs from their managers leaders throughout the year instead of waiting till the last minute for performance reviews. It helps employees to plan their career growth well. The process of continuous feedback helps leaders to understand their employees better and helps them plan their career trajectories.

Also Read: Embracing Hybrid Work Culture In 2021

Feedback Enhances Engagement

Feedback helps employees stay motivated and engaged continuously. It helps leaders to monitor the performance of their employees continuously and improve it. Also, continuous feedback helps in developing a two-way communication channel between employees and their managers. It helps employees feel that the organization wants to understand their opinions and issues and solve them. 

Do you want to know how Engagedly can help you with performance management in your organization? Talk to our experts and request a live demo!

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