When it comes to getting employees to perform to a high level on a consistent basis, there’s no silver bullet. Inspirational talks may work on some, while others may need regular motivation or a light bit of bribery with a selection of donuts and muffins.
The truth is many factors come into play. Motivating employees is only the tip of the iceberg – everything else that goes on underneath the waterline has a major impact in setting each employee’s growth direction and keeping track of their progress.
The United Arab Emirates and Saudi are very similar in the respect that both have millennials making up a large proportion of their workforce. In the UAE in particular, over three-quarters of its workforce are millennials. With this in mind, many will be at a critical stage in their career and still have plenty of scope to grow within their business. So, enabling line managers to easily set trackable goals, organize one-to-one catch ups, and monitor employees’ progress will ensure successful professional improvement.
A decade ago, HR teams and line managers would have had to use manual, very rigid, and even in some cases paper-based reporting to create, track and review employee goals. Even today, 72% of UAE businesses we spoke to either carry out performance management manually or don’t have any processes in place.
Have you ever filed a performance review, only to never read it again? With manual processes it’s easy to do. Many documents just take up storage in our filing cabinets or on our IT systems. However, today technology is streamlining these processes and empowering HR teams and line managers with new capabilities that allow them to keep employee growth on track.
Setting employees up for success
The first step in any performance review is identifying areas for improvement and setting unique goals for individuals to work towards as part of the organization’s overarching objectives. Aligning these personal goals with the organization helps to maximize each employee’s performance and add value for the company.
Manual review processes have traditionally lacked clarity, since they are filed and largely forgotten about until the next review session comes around. When achieving certain milestones is beneficial for both the organization and the individual, centralizing and optimizing this process becomes incredibly valuable.
Being able to set each employee’s goals on a platform that is easily visible and accessible to them keeps it top of mind so that they can work towards achieving their individual targets. This also ensures that employees, line managers, and HR are all aligned on what progress is needed.
Growing day by day
Setting goals is all well and good, but unless we have a clear method to track the steps being made towards each goal and organize regular check-ins, staying on track can be difficult. Regular feedback and catch ups are essential to keep employees moving in the right direction.
Results over a given period will give us a clear indication of an employee’s performance, but feedback is just as important. With digital solutions, line managers and HR can easily schedule conversations with peers to discuss an employee’s performance, as well as schedule regular catch-ups with the employee being reviewed. Most importantly, technology can help ensure that these meetings are documented. Being able to receive written feedback from peers will allow line managers and HR teams to accurately measure the progress being made.
Not only will centralizing this feedback streamline the entire review process. It will also help HR teams to understand an employee’s performance over shorter periods of time and what steps they’ve taken towards achieving their goals.
Evaluating performance
Previously, reviewing employee performance by manually gathering data and insights from various different sources and peers would have been incredibly time-consuming. Asking co-workers to provide feedback can be difficult, since it won’t be their priority. And the issue is amplified during busy work periods where feedback can be late, extremely brief, or unclear.
This won’t benefit the individual employee either. To realize how they themselves have performed over a certain period, they need to have clear feedback and recommendations from their peers.
However, with technology’s help, HR teams can use real-time reminders to prompt peers to provide feedback in a more structured way. By setting up the review process we can even automate measurable feedback and provide a score based on how (or if) goals were achieved. This way, they can fully understand their performance and whether certain areas need greater focus in the months ahead.
Manual performance management processes of the past were typically mundane, time consuming and difficult to stay on top of. Goals and reviews were forgotten about, while every party involved spent large amounts of time away from their actual job function. Thanks to Bayzat’s new performance management feature, we’re now able to set goals, track progress and gather all the information we need to provide every employee a meaningful performance evaluation. This will enable them to grow as part of a high-quality team that ultimately gains better results for the business.
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