How to Keep Employees Accountable While Driving Engagement

As an executive, empowering team members to take ownership of their work is critical. We all get trapped managing performance, especially under pressure, that too often turns into micromanaging and that only dissuades employees from grabbing hold of their responsibilities and powering our organizations to new levels. By enabling performance through the combination of investments in culture, skills, and resources, employees will be more productive and engaged. 

With this combined approach, evaluating performance becomes more than just the focus on personal performance numbers; it becomes about emotional investment in work, development of skills, the alignment around company goals, and effective teambuilding. 

So how can we effectively evaluate our team members’ performance when hitting our numbers is more critical than ever, yet not the entire story? 

Let’s review how executives can strike the balance of engaging employees while also hitting hard goals and driving shareholder returns:

Measuring Performance with Metrics and KPIs 

Logically, evaluating employee performance based on key performance indicators (KPIs) is the best measurable value to demonstrate how effectively an employee is achieving their objectives. Depending on your industry and role, examples of KPIs can include sales conversions to qualified leads, customer engagement, customer retention, sales revenue or net cash flow, among other things.

One drawback with a singularly metric-focused approach is that employees will work to meet the goals to survive the evaluation process rather than consider other aspects of their work. Additional benefits such as the ability to see the big picture, innovate, adapt to change, and offer discretionary effort can become limited. Therefore, managers must strike the balance between that data and the personal development of the employee. 

Incredibly, a growing number of companies have abandoned the pure metric-based evaluation approach. The best approach is one of balance, working to empower employees by providing more frequent performance appraisals and proactive coaching, while holding them accountable to business goals.

Managers & Emotions: Key to Employee Engagement

There are two specific ways that strike the right balance between blindly following metric reporting and scrapping them all together. Immediate managers play an outsized role in an employee’s level of engagement. Think about it, they are the day-to-day contact and the lifeline from the executive team down to the employee. Making sure that your front-line managers have the right people skills to engage and lead teams is the cornerstone of any successful organization.

If front-line managers are the cornerstone, then emotions are the bricks that surround them. Dale Carnegie conducted a study to examine emotions in the workplace and their relationship to employee engagement. The study revealed that feeling valued, confident, connected, and empowered are key emotions for an engaged workforce.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from our study is how serious of an impact the lack of those emotions can have on employees. More than 50% of employees who don’t associate any of the four emotions listed above with their work report they are disengaged with their supervisor and workplace.

When it comes to employee performance, emotional drivers can be as important as the skills and knowledge employees bring to the role. Thus, it’s important to monitor, assess, and measure the engagement levels of your team members. Essentially, taking a more connected approach where employees feel valued, confident, and empowered maximizes engagement in the workplace will yield results for the organization and unleash team members to hit their hard performance goals. 

So, strike a balance between hard KPIs and personal/professional development when holding annual performance reviews.  

Mission accomplished? No! There’s more work to be done.

A Push Towards Continuous Feedback

Traditional annual performance reviews and approaches to feedback may provide more harm than good. According to Gallup, only 14% of employees strongly agree that their performance reviews inspire them to improve.

Rather than holding reviews once-a-year, executive teams must instill a culture of continuous feedback and evaluation. So, by the time the employee hears praise or criticism, the issues are already recognized and addressed. This allows employees to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses throughout the year and strategically work towards goals. Nothing in a year-end review will be a surprise, just the continuation of a conversation.

Workplace studies back up this approach showing that many employees feel disengaged with the traditional review process. Over half of employees want more regular performance check-ins — at least once a month. Real-time feedback, during and after projects, is favored by 94% of employees and is implemented by highly regarded organizations such as, Microsoft, Deloitte, PwC and IBM.

Ideally, conversations are regular and constructive. As projects start and finish, managers remain updated with their teams and offer solutions to problems in real-time.

 According to Gallup, when managers provide weekly (vs. annual) feedback, team members are:

• 5.2x more likely to strongly agree that they receive meaningful feedback
• 3.2x more likely to strongly agree they are motivated to do outstanding work
• 2.7x more likely to be engaged at work

As the economies begin to bounce back, organizations are already starting the battle for talent. Executives who could reach the right balance with performance and employee development will enable their teams to go the extra mile – that stay at their job and that are focused on a culture of continuous improvement. Get ready for the recovery, build your leaders, give them the tools to empower and engage your teams and see the success ripple out.