Performance Management Amidst COVID

COVID-19 has disrupted our world beyond imagination. The pandemic has further intensified the VUCA environment we were living in and has shaken up what used to be a well-working system of people practices built on years of research and experience. Social Distancing being a primary response to the pandemic, has resulted in sending millions of employees worldwide to work from their homes. Most of us have gone from working in spaces surrounded by colleagues with loads of human interactions to our kitchen tables, if we’re not fortunate enough to have a dedicated workspace at home. This enormous change, has come with its own set of emotional and practical challenges.

By the time we were hit by the pandemic, most organizations had already shifted from the traditional performance management process of setting annual performance goals followed by a lengthy and labor intensive annual review process to open-performance system with continuous feedback mechanism. The newer generation workforce who have grown up as digital natives connected better with a real-time method of feedback and communication.  

The new open performance management system, enabled managers to steer employees toward expected performance and output, as compared to the traditional method of retroactive reviews which resulted in disengaged employees and left little room for employees to course-correct. To add to it, forced rankings created a toxic organizational and team outcome.  Thanks to an improved understanding of employee motivation, current performance management platforms and systems have come to fill the void created by the largely broken traditional methods.

Covid-19 crisis has brought in an opportunity for organizations to further build upon and strengthen their open performance management. If executed carefully, there is tremendous potential now for managers to create highly engaged teams with greater productivity to client outcomes and longevity in the organization.

Employees have moved from their workplaces where protocol and procedures were intuitively understood, almost habitual in nature, to a place where everything has changed. Finding themselves in wholly unfamiliar work environments creates in employees working from home profound feelings of disconnection and disengagement that often manifests in diminished performance. Along with this big shift in where and how they work, employees also have the added stress of an intrusion to their loved ones and their family lives.

Performance management metrices should accommodate the new “how” of delivering the “what”. Across all cadres in the organization hierarchy - resilience, collaboration, integrity, agility and ownership are strongly emerging as behavioral patterns that will differentiate top performers and future leaders from the rest. New age performance practices will have to accommodate weightages on these attributes to drive a robust performance management system.

In the redefined world, driving an effective performance management requires significant shift in efforts from the HR manager, the performance manager and the individual employee.

The role of HR:

The workloads and work requirements are rapidly changing. There is an information overload and employees are receiving discordant, incorrect messages from multiple channels of varying credibility. There are disjointed messaging on team alignment, company goals and an added lack of empathy for employees’ lives outside of work.  Absence of feedback mechanisms leading to serious misinterpretations and undesirable behaviors can aggravate the confusion and frustration among employees. HR can play a pivotal role in driving clear, consistent, and continuous communication. In a time of uncertainty, authentic, frequent, bi-directional communication is extremely critical. HR can use gamification to aid engagement, motivation and to keep everyone informed and appreciated.

The role of the Manager:

Managers of completely remote working teams contend with unexpected distractions - from the home kitchen to the quarreling children that may take employees off task, a weakened sense of community and/or team, a sense of disconnectedness that impacts employees’ performance and confidence and diminished contact/communications with the manager and the team. Managers have the onus of keeping employees feeling as much like they did before they were sent on a complete work from home. By being more mindful of the changed circumstances, by showing empathy and taking steps to demonstrate care, managers can recognize and reward efforts frequently and in a personalized way. In a team setting, managers can promote peer-based recognition and ensure transparency to be perceived as objective & fair. Efforts need to be made to have open communication and coaching discussions. Managers can virtually drive a positive sense of achievement by keeping track of milestones and recognizing contributions in public, using collaboration platforms to showcase the innovators and achievers in the team. We are not able to celebrate like before – stepping out for a dinner with the team or celebrating our achievements. In a virtual environment, simple yet powerful ways of recognition could be an email or note of appreciation from a senior leader, involving family members in team activities, sending personalized messages and being respectful of each other’s home environments.

The role of the Employee:

As a recipient or customer of the performance management system, the employee’s role is of utmost importance. The surroundings that an employee operates in, could have a direct impact on the employee’s emotional and mental well-being thereby impacting performance outcomes. While employees have the responsibility to demonstrate ownership towards their performance, keeping the manager informed of any pandemic-induced challenges in the personal front enables the manager to be more empathetic and sensitive to the changed circumstances. Team members should be more respectful of each other including the manager, who also is operating under similar challenges. Demonstrating empathy towards their managers, helps foster healthy dialogues, by avoiding conflicts and misinterpretations of feedback. In the new normal, most learning opportunities have been made available on virtual platforms and employees should make a genuine attempt to reflect upon their development areas, set learning targets and achieve appropriate self-induced learning milestones.

In summary, the crisis has brought to organizations, the opportunity to collaborate and communicate in a more authentic, meaningful and humane manner. How performance management is dealt with, during the COVID scenario, in the remote environment by the HR, the performance manager and the individual employee could be the sole differentiating factor defining high performing organizations in the post COVID world.