When Oakwood trainers ask students about what they do with the outcomes of annual performance management review meetings – documents composed and signed by both line managers and staff or similar files produced on computers – the answer is often ‘Filed’. This can be why performance management sometimes feels like a waste of time, if all the work just ends up in a filing cabinet.
But how should these important documents be used? Firstly they need to drive decisions about individual rewards (salary increases, bonuses and incentives), individual learning and development plans, individual career plans, and, in extreme cases, discipline or capability actions. These decisions need to be made by line managers with the support of their HR business partners, and then recorded and acted upon.
Secondly, the documents need to be put together, analysed and evaluated en masse to:
• Update the organisation’s succession plan
• Review the organisation’s competency framework and job family structure
• Assess the effectiveness of last year’s learning and development programme(s)
• Create the coming year’s learning needs analysis (organisational and occupational level) and learning and development plans
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the current performance management process and make recommendations for future performance management training
• Compare and cross-check the work of different line managers to increase fairness and consistency
• Enable demand-side manpower planning
• Audit the effectiveness of organisational development (OD) initiatives such as matrix management, virtual teams, hot desking, flexible working (such as part-time, annual hours and flexi-time, job sharing, home and teleworking etc.)
• …
All of which demonstrates how powerful a tool performance management outcomes can be. The LAST thing we should be doing is simply filing them.
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