Employee performance management
Developing high performers
Employee performance management should be flexible, responsive, and profoundly human-focused. Because your people are a strategic asset—and when they perform better, your organization performs better.
Read our latest article: 6 strategies to improve employee performance
Our approach to employee performance management
From confrontational to constructive
Traditional performance management isn’t working. Managers dread the complicated process of conducting employee performance reviews, and employees are frustrated by performance reviews that focus more on their flaws than on their contributions.
Getting the best out of people means changing the experience. While organizations have tried to improve employee performance management with significant technology investments they hope will add rigor and structure, the results are usually underwhelming.
Our approach is different. It’s grounded in simple and productive ways to collect performance data and drive valuable conversations that improve employee performance, engagement, and retention. By focusing on connecting people and their work, we help organizations accelerate performance by going beyond simply plugging in technology solutions, conducting annual performance reviews, and checking the box on compliance.
Everyone benefits from effective employee performance management
Organizations develop and retain high performers that are engaged, productive, satisfied, and better able to deliver on mission or business objectives.
Employees get regular feedback that helps them understand their role, what is expected of them, and the specific actions they can take to reach their full potential.
Managers learn how to give feedback, model desired behaviors, and build their team’s trust—free from time-consuming and complex performance management requirements.
What makes our approach to employee performance different?
We work with private sector, government, and nonprofit organizations to boost employee performance, development, and engagement. Our approach is grounded in several unique principles:
Optimize the most critical stakeholders: managers and employees. People leave managers, not jobs. The most pivotal aspect of performance—and performance management—is the relationship between managers and employees. We ground our solutions in supporting managers to identify issues earlier and provide opportunities that help guide their teams.
Deliver frequent, high-quality, and actionable feedback. Performance reviews typically happen once or twice a year, meaning feedback is irrelevant by the time an employee gets it. We help organizations evolve the cadence and structure of their performance management models to enable regular and timely feedback.
Conduct truly data-driven performance evaluations. The data used to evaluate employee performance is usually subjective. To get a more objective view of performance, our approach collects data regularly over time to capture performance trends. This data can drive other human capital activities such as workforce planning and organizational design.
Improve the returns from technology investments. Too many organizations waste resources by investing in technology solutions that don’t deliver results. Our approach works with any performance management system. There’s no heavy technology investment, just a focus on the relationships and needed changes that make managing performance both meaningful and effective.
Drive compliance and create a performance culture. Employee performance management isn’t just a one-and-done process. It’s about developing employees all the time. We help organizations do this while meeting compliance requirements. The key is to create a performance culture focused on building strong connections, delivering meaningful recognition, and retaining high performers.
Employee performance management insights
Keep your finger on the pulse of performance management trends impacting your business and your industry with actionable insights and best practices based on our proprietary research.
Employee performance management case studies
From implementing consistent performance standards to designing user-centered approaches, our years of experience in performance management have helped clients across industries reach their potential.
