Creating a high-performance culture depends not only on the quality of new hires, but also on ensuring employees continue to perform well during their time with the company. Employee evaluations are critical to guiding employees towards better performance, as they pinpoint in which areas individuals are doing well, where there’s room for improvement and how ready employees are for promotion. In addition, they help determine which employees are consistently underperforming and need to be let go so the company can invest in higher potential talent.
Furthermore, when all the data from employee evaluations is considered, it can help shape companies’ workforce strategies as a whole. It can help HR understand what skills and qualities predict high performance. It can also provide data to indicate where there’s a need to offer additional training and whether engagement efforts need to be stepped up.
The disadvantages of annual performance reviews
However, traditional annual performance reviews have several disadvantages. First and foremost, they don’t provide real-time information about performance. This can cause employees to lose morale and become disengaged, which has a direct impact on productivity and can even reduce retention. Second, they’re time consuming and costly, as they involve a lot of paperwork. Third, any data gleaned from these reviews only provides a historic overview that can go back as far as a year, which is ineffective when it comes to creating agile, effective and forward-looking workforce strategies.
Real-time employee evaluation and its benefits
Due to these disadvantages, a growing number of companies including Dell, Google, Adobe, Microsoft and Randstad are moving away from the annual performance review and opting instead for real-time employee evaluations. The components of these real-time employee evaluations can include frequent manager-employee check-ins, more rigorous employee coaching, the ability to request anonymous feedback from both peers and supervisors, and apps that measure productivity, engagement, and performance. According to Deloitte, there are currently more than 120 vendors that provide apps that provide culture, engagement and mood-monitoring assessments.
The benefits of real-time employee assessments are considerable. Employees are generally much more satisfied when they receive timely feedback and praise for their work. Moreover, they’re better positioned to improve their performance, which enables them to be better at their jobs and deliver more value to the company. Overall, employee morale is considerably enhanced.
Additionally, because real-time evaluations require far less paperwork processing, they deliver cost and time savings. Moreover, they provide the company with real-time performance data, which in turns facilitates more forward looking and agile workforce planning.
The role of analytics
With the ongoing advances in data mining and wearable technologies, there will be a growing amount of data available to evaluate employee productivity and performance in real time. Due to AI and machine learning, HR will increasingly have access to tools that analyse this data to gain insights in the clearest and quickest way possible. Moreover, thanks to advances in VR, data analytics findings regarding large data sets can now be presented in a manner that’s easy to understand for both HR and employees.
In addition, by combining historic and real-time data, HR can leverage the predictive capabilities of data analytics to help shape workforce strategy. For example, analytics give insights into traits and skills that indicate high-performers, as well as raise red flags when top talent is becoming less engaged and potentially considering a career move to another company.
Ensuring consistency and creating strategy
In order to achieve top performance, there needs to be consistency across departments and functions in the way feedback is offered. Many new real-time systems currently are not yet consistent, both when it comes to the frequency and intensity of feedback.
It is also important to fit factors such as promotions and pay raised into the evaluation system. While real-time evaluations allow employees to constantly improve, HR needs benchmarks in order to assess when employees qualify for advancement.
That’s why it’s key for HR to use the time it will save on paperwork processing to learn about assessment technologies so they can design evaluation processes that are consistent and deliver the maximum value to both employees and the organisation. By doing this, organisations can leverage analytics to their advantage to create high-performing environments with satisfied, engaged employees.
If you want to know more about the HR trends driving change this year and the next, get in touch with a specialist consultants on 1800 239 475.