Are Employee Engagement and Performance Management the same thing?
In the last year in the Employee Management Software world, there’s been a lot of press about how traditional Performance Management needs to change to embrace new ways of working and more modern work practices. Also in the last year, there has been the emergence of almost a new industrial trend and in some tech areas a new wave of tools around employee engagement.
Am I missing something here? Or are they the same topic?
Recently I read that Performance Management should at the very minimum force a conversation between employees and their manager, taken that as a given, is that not what employee engagement is about?
What would happen if you merged employee engagement and performance management into one process, even go one step further and also including employee development and enablement into the mix?
In the tradition of emerging trends, we would have to give this activity a new name, how about “Employee Performance Engagement” or EPE?
What would EPE do? It would allow Employees to relate how they engage with their company and depending on whether their engagement was positive or negative it would give them a score, you could then over time relate this score to the overall success of the company which would determine what bonus this employee would get.
What Tools Could We Use to Improve Engagement?
1. Continuous feedback loop through instant messaging.
2. Training requests related to the company and employees’ success, feeding into a dynamic training needs analysis for the company creating a training plan that can change with the strategy of the company.
This would create a constant engagement between the employee and their manager but it would also mean the managers that need to meet constantly with their direct reports and these meetings should be hardwired to the company’s objectives all the time.
So what would this mean in real terms?
1. That the employees’ training needs would have to stay aligned with the strategic direction of the Company.
2. Conversations around job roles, training company objectives and the strategic direction of the company should be held regularly.
So how does this change things?
It doesn’t!
The modern trend means we need to take more feedback from employees on a more regular if not unstructured basis, we need to take this feedback and align it with the company goals and strategic objectives feed these into a continuous loop, and constantly act on and update your training needs by your company goals and strategic objectives.
Finally, how do you align these employee achievements with reward promotion or appraisal?
So nothing has changed? You still meet with your employees, you still need to measure what your employees do and their behaviour, you still need to measure your employees against the overall goals of the business (taking market changes and changes in the company strategy into consideration) you still need to ensure your employees’ behaviours are in line with the company accepted behaviours and you still need to take the employees training needs and requests into consideration, the only new thing is that you need to have a continuous feedback loop that should be confidential.
Performance management has changed to include this continuous feedback loop, so we can now call it “Employee Performance Engagement” or EPE and here is a new industry trend.
We would love your feedback and thoughts on this as it will help in developing our new features going forward.
Adam Coleman
Chief Executive
