Managing Performance Year-Round
Performance management is more than just the annual performance review. It is an ongoing and never ending process that sets employees up for success and helps them understand expectations, perform at their best, and help get them back on track if performance declines. Below are several key components of performance management.
- Set, communicate, and update expectations. This is done, in part, through annual goal setting and ongoing updates and discussion. Managers and employees can set, track, update, and review goals in Ignite. Performance goals are annual, job specific targets, while development goals are targets to grow the employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities for current or future roles and may span longer than a year. Instructions for entering and tracking each in Ignite are here:
• Performance Goals
• Development Goals
- Communicate and provide regular feedback through one-on-one meetings. There are many benefits to conducting regular one-on-one meetings, including the opportunity to provide both encouraging and developmental feedback on job performance.
- Seek and support learning opportunities. Managers have a tremendous impact on employee development through their level of encouragement, involvement, and integration of learning opportunities with performance expectations and goals. Baylor provides professional and leadership development opportunities and resources in Ignite as well as online through LinkedIn Learning and RightNow Media @ Work. Additionally, some of the most important learning opportunities also include hands on learning such as developmental work assignments, and learning from others through job shadowing, mentoring, or interactions with professional peers.
- Annual performance review. The yearly review is a part of performance management, and if the other steps have been done well, the review should be an anticlimactic summary of previous discussions and feedback. Please note, the performance process does inform the merit increase process. Read more about Compensation at Baylor.
- Performance Improvement Plan. There are times when an employee isn’t performing as expected and less formal communication and feedback is not working. The performance improvement plan is a formal action plan detailing the issues, expected changes, next steps, and timelines. This document is prepared in conjunction with the manager’s HR Consultant.