Reward and development are often overlooked as reasons to have a performance management process because they don’t solve immediate problems. If you set goals and direction for your employees you immediately have something that you can use to benchmark someone’s progress. It is an instant solution of sorts. Reward and development are more long-term reasons for performance management. If you have a process, then it will make your life easier in the long term with respect to identifying development needs and rewarding good performance appropriately. You will not see the benefit today, next week or even next month. But when you come to increase time again, you will be grateful that you have put something in place that will enable you to make fair decisions that maintain the morale of your employees.

Reward and Development and the impact on morale

How do you reward performance if there is no process to help you decide who has performed and who hasn’t. Your decision on who has performed will be based largely on subjective impressions because lets face it you can’t be everywhere! Managers are often out and about and without agreed goals and measures you have no way of determining who has performed and who hasn’t. Without a process the risk is that those who ‘put on a good face’ get rewards and those who quietly get on with things are overlooked. Which behaviours do you really want to reward in your organisation?

Another question to consider is how you identify training needs if you have no process for looking at performance. The way in which development is normally identified is to look at the gap between existing performance and the desired performance and then identifying what development interventions will help that person to raise the standard of their performance. How do you do that if you haven’t ascertained what their performance is in the first place?

A while back I worked as a training manager and I regularly had requests from managers about development for members of their team. It would have been easy for me to reactively book employees onto endless ‘Time Management’ or ‘Presentation Skills’ workshops without asking any questions. The need for these workshops was often a symptom of something deeper and the real training need had not yet been uncovered – mainly because the manager had not really identified the difference between current and desired performance. In other words, the manager had not used the performance management process effectively.

Remember,

Training/ development need = Desired performance (goals/ standards set by performance management) – Current (actual) performance

You can make sure that you reward fairly and develop accurately, by putting in place a performance management process that distinguishes the excellent from the mediocre. The process should also enable you to identify the gap between current and desired performance so that you can put together strategic training plans that will move the performance of the whole organisation to a new level. It makes good business sense to reward good performers and to lift the standard of those who are not.