Employee engagement
In this series, we’ve looked at a variety of stages of effective performance management. We started with potential, moved through responsibility, on to opportunities, and this week it’s time to understand the importance of resources.
With a huge push towards self-directed learning and an emphasis on employees taking matters into their own hands, it can be easy to forget the importance of facilitating growth and development within your organisation.
While 2019 saw an increase in employees wishing to take matters into their own hands, in order to encourage employee retention and avoid losing the most ambitious members of your team, it is vital to provide internal resources and grant accessibility to resources outside of your organisation.
Resources come in many forms; it’s not all eLearning or workplace handbooks. The term resources is pretty broad, so let’s take a closer look at what it really means and how you can make it work in your organisation.
In the workplace, the term “resource(d)”, sometimes accompanied by the word “under”, can refer to the number of bums in seats or boots on the ground to get the job done. While resourcing in terms of people may not seem like it has much to do with performance management, it can actually have a huge impact on the performance and morale of individuals as well as teams.
This in turn can stop your high achievers from progressing within your organisation and make it harder to manage performance in a sustainable way beyond fighting fires.
Performance management and L&D are intrinsically linked when it comes to developing employees. Whether you’re identifying those with potential for leadership, a team member who needs to retrain, or an employee looking to cross-skill, training and workplace learning are the perfect facilitators for professional growth.
So, in this case, providing resources means giving your employees access to an intuitive LMS, easy-to-follow and engaging digital learning, and access to a variety of learning materials that allow you employees to learn in their own way.
Offsite professional development is a great resource when it comes to performance management. Seeing that they’re being invested in, with both time and money, can create a fantastic two-way street of motivation. It allows your employees to get away from their usual work environment which can increase engagement with their job, as well as helping them to feel valued.
Offsite professional development can mean anything from external leadership training to attending an industry conference. It’s important as well to create an environment for your employees where they feel they can come to you with ideas, events, and training they can attend. Of course, costs and benefits need to be balanced, but keeping an open mind to these sorts of resources can boost performance and morale in the long term.
Perhaps the simplest definition of resources in the workplace, do you employees have what they need to get their jobs done to a high standard? For example, if you work in tech or in a digital industry, do your staff have the latest updates and software they need to complete their jobs effectively? Is the physical equipment your team use effective and efficient enough to create a positive and sustainable work environment?
What does this have to do with performance management? You can only really begin to tackle the issues and potential of performance once you are fully aware of limitations placed on your employees by the equipment and facilities they use every day. While problem solving is a great skill to have in the workplace, managing performance should be an ongoing and holistic process built on a foundation that enables success.
Speaking of enabling success, processes and systems for performance management are in themselves valuable resources. Whether you have the time and budget to go digital and invest in software, or you want to wait it out and focus on your strategy first, having a performance management process in place creates an incredible resource for your employees to push their own development forward.
Having a process and system in place also enables you to standardise performance management across you organisation, whether you have 100 employees in the same building or 10,000 employees across countries and continents. This resource empowers the self-starters in your organisation to show themselves and drive their development, as well as making is easier for HR professionals and line managers to give a helping hand to those who need it.
Conclusion
Performance management is all well and good in theory, but without the resources in place that enable success it won’t get you very far. From the basic levels of staff and equipment to get the job done through to technology and processes to create a culture of continuous development, resourcing performance management is becoming a critical part of maintaining employee engagement in the workplace.
Claire is an enthusiastic and meticulous content writer whose passion is to support growth and continual learning for everyone.
