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
Our latest research & thinking
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.
Article
6 strategies to improve employee performance—no matter where they work
Report
Want to transform employee performance? Recognize a job well done.
Recognition is a fundamental part of the employee experience, and is a driver of performance and engagement. Learn how to build a culture of recognition that can transform the employee experience in easy and affordable ways.
Blog
To return or not return to work? That is the wrong question.
By Andrew Edelson
Where teams are managed matters less than how teams are managed. We share how utilizing effective performance management can drive productivity, collaboration, customer service, and culture, regardless of where teams are working.
Report
Feedback on feedback: Five ways to create a constructive feedback culture
Feedback is important to professional development. We’ve identified five ways your organization can help support a constructive—and more productive—environment.
Report
Performance culture in a hybrid world
Improving performance in hybrid and virtual work means creating a performance culture of transparency, communication, and feedback.
Living lab
Performance acceleration in action
When we were spending too much time and effort in the year-end assessment process, we started thinking about how to make the performance management process a real instrument of performance acceleration. Here’s what we learned from our experience.
Report
The annual performance review: Old-school or timeless tool?
As business leaders second-guess their companies’ performance management programs, we surveyed more than 1,600 employees to get their thoughts on the review process and its ripple effects in the workplace. See what we found out.
Webinar
Webinar | COVID-19: Performance management in a new world
A culture of change is something many organizations are experiencing right now. A few of our top consultants at Eagle Hill share why getting your people on board and getting them through that change is the key to its success.
Infographic
Government telework and flexible work arrangements are resulting in improved performance
See how government telework and flexible work arrangements are improving performance for government teams.
Living lab
Performance management
Performance is dynamic… but oftentimes, its measurement is not. HR needs to institute more agile, user-centered approaches that let employees drive performance management. Here’s how we did that at our consulting firm.
Employee performance management case studies
Unconventional consulting leads to unbelievable results
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.
Healthcare and life sciences: Narrative
From performance management to performance acceleration
We used a data-driven approach to design a new performance management program for a health service provider that emphasizes employee feedback, elevates responsibility for performance and replaces static annual performance reviews.
Federal government: Interview
Developing competency models and workforce planning
We helped one highly specialized agency prepare their workforce for the future by implementing their forward-looking Human Capital Strategic Plan. Eagle Hill’s Mary Dalrymple, Director of Services and Innovation, explains how.
Nonprofit: Narrative
Standing up a performance management process to develop and recognize employees
An organization was experiencing growing pains, so we conducted our own research in order to understand employee perspectives, from the top down. We clearly defined all roles in the organization to ensure each person felt recognized and valued.
Federal government: Impact Statement
Data-driven program evaluation leads to breakthrough results
A large regulatory organization called on Eagle Hill to provide data-driven program evaluation services to aid in decision making and execution of their future state operations. See how our team maintained progress and momentum, while also safeguarding rigorous program evaluation standards.
Healthcare and life sciences: Narrative
Enhancing care delivery and operations through program management
In the face of increasing priorities and culture change, we helped one large healthcare organization roll out system-wide transformation of care delivery and perioperative supply chain operations.
