Ways to Boost Performance Management Strategy

Every time you set your objectives and key results (OKRs); you question yourself: Can I realistically commit to the set objectives? Alternatively, if your manager aligns his objective with you, you have similar questions hovering over your brain. Setting up and aligning OKRs that help you realize your performance management strategy is difficult. First, your employees are unaware of OKRs and can’t imagine the OKR framework as a performance measure. Second, while planning for your objectives and key results, you have concerns about alignment, transparency, and accountability. But, when you plan for OKRs, you expect better performance from your employees.

This blog helps leaders learn how an OKR framework acts better than a performance management tool and discover what value a tool like UnlockTalent brings to your organization.

Why Adopt OKRs in Performance Management

Feedback Matters

In any performance management framework, feedback is the most important. You need to tell your people if they need to change. However, conducting unplanned feedback sessions with your reports may seem to them as unhelpful criticism instead of supportive coaching that helps them improve and grow. As a leader, you can plan for feedback sessions and set cadence. With access to UnlockTalent software that features feedback, check-ins, and 1-on-1, your report may send a 1-on-1 request and collaborate better. You can thus offer him feedback during the OKR cycle, i.e., the quarter. Leaders may often find their reports getting off-track, implying that they are not progressing well on their goals. This makes opening a dialog with your team and discussing roadblocks to goal achievement more important. Using UnlockTalent as a performance management tool enables you to reach targets, whether they belong to an individual or a team. During the employee engagement exercise, when an individual makes weekly check-ins, his manager becomes aware of his planned and accomplished tasks, reflections and highlights, and challenges and roadblocks. Feedback may thus be on how the individual or team could have attained X, Y, or Z goals.

Unlinking Performance Management and Compensation

The focus of an OKR framework, the framework on which UnlockTalent is built, is only on goal attainment. OKRs never help you decide about compensation and bonuses. As a result, your employees cannot fall back on clever malpractices to fulfill their performance metrics. They cannot play safe and do what is required for the bonus. Besides, OKRs are not just committed but aspirational, implying you cannot achieve 100% of the moonshot goals. The OKR-based performance management can thus not be associated with pay and bonus. Using an employee engagement platform enables you to ensure goal alignment and transparency, with metrics attached to key results.

Reflection is Key

At the end of the OKR cycle, typically a quarter, there are times when you fail to accomplish 100% of what you want to. This is when you must figure out if you should include targets you couldn’t achieve in the next quarter or adjust them to current priorities. Being a leader, aim to close on objectives set in sync with the organizational goals. You must recognize when an objective is not a priority anymore. Assess the objective and have major reasons why priorities changed, and objectives of the past quarter became irrelevant for the current business. UnlockTalent software enables you to reflect on the past and focus on the right priorities for the ongoing quarter while aligning your team’s and organization’s OKRs. Leaders can guarantee that the team performance is measured on priorities for the remaining quarter. The “Reports” feature of the employee engagement platform clarifies where employees are progressing well on their goals and where they lag. As a manager, you also learn how an individual, his team, and the organization contribute to a specific objective.

Transparency Acts Like a Great Aid

The best part about an employee engagement tool is that it makes everyone’s OKRs visible to everyone in the organization. Employees know that they are dependent on one another. Performance management, hence, becomes more transparent. Leaders can easily find out what went wrong in the failure of an objective or why the progress on the set goal did not go as planned. There may not be a lag on the part of the individual, but others aligned to that objective in the team(s). Search for and find out how anyone in your team or other teams are doing on their goals. Positively, people can move unitedly towards success, and there is complete clarity and understanding. As individuals, you become aware of the results of your non-performance, even before receiving feedback during performance appraisal.

Cascading and Aligning is Strategic

Adopting and executing OKR methodology works in your favor, as OKRs do not only follow a top-down approach. Not simply cascading from the top-bottom, not just leaders set objectives and key results, with managers and their teams following them. OKRs can be set bottom-up and even sideways. Objectives and key results of the executive may become the key results or KRs of leaders next in line. OKRs may even be chosen at the individual level and merged with the overarching organizational goals. Thus, every employee is involved and owns and engages with OKRs. Team accountability also comes into the picture this way.