12 Ways to Boost your Employee's Performance

The 12 methods for boosting employee performance are listed in descending order from the least impactful (#12) to the most impactful (#1).

12. Update Salary Structure

This is the least effective method to boost your employee's performance, but at some occasions it can be useful, even necessary.

Survey the market to determine how your salary scale compares to similar companies. If you found the mark to be too far, then perhaps it is time to update your salary structure in order not to suffer from high employee turnover and the retention of only poor performers.

11. Fire Employees

Although this might not be a popular intervention, yet during times of economic downturns it might be a necessary measure for the company's survival.

10. Adjust Organizational Structure

Maybe the organizational structure is suffering from having too many levels which results in slow decision making and efficient information flow. Perhaps you need to flatter your organizational structure a bit to improve performance.

9. Give Instant Feedback

If there is a delay between the time an employee performs and the feedback he gets from his manager, the performance can suffer. As a manager, always provide your team members with instant feedback on how they are performing. This way, mistakes will be handled early and great performance will be maintained and even exceeded.

8. Adjust KPIs

Keep an eye constantly on employee satisfaction. Design KPIs that measure this frequently. Any noticeable drop in employee satisfaction can be a warning sign that should be dealt with instantly. Employee satisfaction can be measured through a various methods including surveys and other metrics. Examine the root causes of any drop in employee satisfaction by using one-on-one and well as group interviews. Decide on an appropriate intervention after understanding the root cause to get things back on track fast before the declining level of employee satisfaction shows up in increased employee turnover and decreased productivity.

7. Reduce Turnover

When one employee leaves, either on his own initiative or having been forced to leave, this might result in other employees leaving as well, specially if he was a good employee. In an extreme situation, this will snowball into having many great employees leaving the company. Therefore, an organization, in normal conditions, should attempt by all means to retain its best employees, not only because loosing them is a great loss in itself, but also because their moving from the company may result in others leaving as well.

This concept also works the other way around. By attempting to attract the best employees in the market, and succeeding in doing so, this tends to attract more great employees to join, as likes attract likes. The great employees contribute to creating a positive culture to which others would love to belong.

6. Boost Communication

Information is the lifeblood of any organization. The message of company executives, their vision and strategic direction must be communicated clearly to each and every employee at the company. Failure to do so will degrade employee performance and consequently result in a degraded company performance.

Information should also travel well from bottom to top. Managers and executives at the company should not be in the dark on what's going on inside the company. Being aware of what's going on helps them make better decisions and intervene quickly whenever needed.

Communication can be boosted mainly through improving the quality of reports and meetings.

5. Adjust Policies and Procedures

Policies and procedures should be realistic in order to be enforced. Negative employee behavior may sometimes be a direct result of poorly designed policies and procedures.

A review of company wide policies and procedures should be conducted in order to ensure that they are both realistic and are not resulting in any negative behavior from the side of employees.

4. Encourage Autonomy

A company without structure that leaves employees to do whatever they wish will not survive for long. On the other hand, a rigid system at any organization that does not give room for employees to have a say about how things work at the company will not see the best performance and will suffer from many problems.

The best approach is to attempt to strike a balance between putting structure in an organization and providing employees with some freedom to have a say in changing such structure as they see appropriate. Structure can in the processes used to carry out work or even in the structure of the team and job division itself.

Striving for providing employees with autonomy goes a long way in motivating them and getting the best out of them which indeed boosts their performance.

3. Company Mission

Some companies do not have a clearly defined or communicated mission. Some have a documented mission statement that is not communicated well to all employees. Some have a mission statement that is just written on paper but not actually implemented by company executives. All these can suffer the consequences of a missing actionable mission for the organization.

When carving the company mission, top executives should take care to make it realistic and actual, something they will indeed act upon. The best approach is to try and involve the top executives in creating the mission statement and also get input from the rest of the employees about it. After that, the mission should be communicated at all opportunities to all employees and should be acted upon from the top executives to the smallest of employees.

The mission of an organization acts as a compass that guides the actions of executive management and every employee at the company. It also helps in giving employee autonomy, as they have the compass that guides their actions towards a mutual aim.

2. Mindset

Executive coaching can go a long way to transforming an organization. Executive management at an organization set the pace for the whole organization. This is a very high intervention point. Helping executive management at an organization undergo a paradigm shift and transform their mindset is a key point in sustainably improving an organization and its performance and therefore its bottomline.

1. Transcending Paradigms

Having a fixed mindset and holding to a specific management style will prevent an organization from growing sustainably. Flexibility of management and their ability to see things from different angles and appreciate different management styles and approaches helps an organization become more flexible and open to positive transformation.

Leverage Points

The above 12 points are applications of leverage points mentioned in the book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. The lower the number of the leverage point the more impact it has. For instance, adjusting employee salaries belongs to #12, which does not have a powerful impact on the company. In contrast, helping company executive management transform their mindset through executive coachings belongs to #2, which has a really high impact on the whole organization.

If you have been trying once and again in making changes in your organization only to find strong resistance or that things do not change permanently, perhaps you can consider attempting to implement one of the 12 points mentioned above, for if done correctly, they have the power to sustainably transform your organization in a positive way.