When the PM gets tough, the HR team get going

The principles of performance management (PM) are simple. Make sure that the people in your organisation know what they need to do and why they need to do it; make sure they get the right support, monitoring and guidance while they work; make sure that their work is evaluated and recognised; make sure all this is built into wider more strategic activities like long-term planning. PM is no different to good management.

But the practice of PM is hard. Think about a typical manager with, say, five direct reports who works in an organisation with a conventional, old-fashioned hierarchical management structure. If that manager follows CIPD best practice and runs quarterly PM review meetings, allowing two hours for each meeting, that’s 20 meetings or 40 hours work. Once you add in time for collecting and collating evidence, preparation, writing up notes and consequential follow-up, that manager can be spending more than 100 hours per year on PM.

Of course, nowadays fewer and fewer organisations have conventional, old-fashioned hierarchical management structures. In matrix organisations, employees work on projects run by people other than their line managers. Indeed, such employees may hardly ever see their managers, spending all their working time with their project managers and co-workers.

In the matrix environment, the need for good PM is more important than in conventionally structured organisations. Employees need SMART personal objectives, to keep themselves focussed on priorities as they move from project to project. Line managers need reliable communication paths to project managers, so that they can create and maintain SMART objectives and collect evidence of performance. Employees and line managers need to meet and talk regularly to evaluate the objectives, the evidence and the structures within which the work is done.

Other common working practices put additional pressure on PM. Employees and line managers may work different shifts, or flexitime periods, or be located far apart – even in different time zones. Home-based working, teleworking, hot desking, part-time working, job-sharing and other flexible working patterns can all make it harder and more time-consuming for employees and line managers to get together for their PM meetings.

But as PM gets tough, the HR team must get to work. It’s not enough for us just to ensure that our organisation’s PM paperwork or online system is kept up to date. We must help and support line managers and employees to use and get real benefit from PM: training and policing the creation of SMART objectives, creating and maintaining the communication links between line managers and project managers, ensuring that line managers and employees have the time and resources to meet and discuss, and then using all the information collected in PM to make better HR plans which deliver on business-critical objectives.