Let’s imagine you are going into your quarterly performance review, armed with all the great results
What a lot of HR systems that track performance reviews fail to connect the dots on is how your individual performance or projects or results impact the company’s business performance. At the end of the day, if you are wonderful and working so hard and getting great results, but your efforts and energy don’t move the company forward on its key results, then how valuable are your contributions?
In order to make the best case for your performance, you need to be able to connect it to your company’s goals. You’d be in a powerful position to ask for a raise or make a case for that performance compensation if you could say, "Here’s what I achieved, and here’s which specific company-level priorities and metrics I was able to impact with my work this quarter."
As an individual contributor, you need to know how your work is important to the business as a whole. If you aren’t able to clearly connect those dots, you should go ask your leader today: "What is the most important thing for me to focus on in my current role to move the business forward?”
If you have this role clarity and understand the connection between your goals and your company’s goals, you will be able to focus on what’s most important to achieve - this is not only helpful to you in your quarterly performance reviews, but it’s critical to your company’s success. If you don’t know what to work on, your company can’t harness the power of its talented people to work on the right things to move the company strategy forward.
If you are a leader or HR professional heading up the performance review process, consider the Gallup research which states, "Traditional performance reviews and approaches to feedback are often so bad that they actually make performance worse about one-third of the time.”
It may be time to reconsider this practice as it could be incentivizing the wrong behaviors in your organization. Rather than annual or quarterly reviews, consider the following instead:
The Power of Systems and People: Accountable Leaders and Teams
Comprehensive List of 179 KPI Examples for Any Industry
27 Recruiting KPI Examples for the Staffing Industry
The Five C's of Team Accountability
25 KPI Examples for Manufacturing Companies
33 KPI Examples to Measure Productivity & Prevent Organizational Drag
KPI Examples for Successful Sales Teams
Comprehensive Guide for KPI Evaluation
Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images