Effective performance management is one of many ongoing objectives that Human Resources departments contend with every day. In this post, we look at three barriers to effective performance management, specifically in relation to creating performance review processes, and address how Nintex can help HR teams overcome these issues.
What Makes for Effective Performance Management?
Performance management can mean different things to different people. The term is often used interchangeably with “performance reviews,” but performance management has a much broader reach and role. It is an approach to HR that strives to create and maintain an environment where employees can perform best. This involves employing a framework that provides everything they need to get their jobs done, creates a positive company culture, and ensures HR processes run smoothly without causing delays or hampering productivity.
There are many areas of work that are instrumental in achieving effective performance management, including:
- Hiring policies to make sure you hire the right people
- Onboarding new starters in a way that gets them off to a great start
- Ongoing training to make sure employees have all the right skills
- Ensuring employee satisfaction and engagement remains high
- Exit interviews to make sure the organization can learn from its employees’ experiences working at your company
Using workflow automation, you can improve performance management in your organization. Below are three barriers to performance management, and how to solve them using the Nintex Platform.
3 Barriers to Performance Management
Let’s focus on one area of performance management – performance reviews:
1. Paper-based processes are unnecessarily time-consuming
Issue:
It’s time for another performance review, but there are many other tasks to complete and filling out the review forms by hand takes too much time.
Traditionally, performance reviews involved completing paper forms. More recently, this has been conducted via email, sharing online documents back and forth. With busy schedules and higher priority tasks to be worked on, it can be easy to forget that a team member is awaiting your contribution to their review. This process is not only time-consuming but can result in reviews being rushed and completed half-heartedly – which can negatively impact the reviewee’s targets for the rest of the year.
Solution:
You can streamline the review process using Nintex Forms to automate sign-off and employee feedback. The information entered will automatically be stored in your document management system, such as SharePoint. It will also send notifications to the relevant parties when it’s their turn to add to the review with questions, comments or to sign off the review at the end of the process.
2. Poor communication causes delays and bottlenecks
Issue:
Performance reviews can take place annually, semi-annually, or quarterly so that progress or problems can be reported and addressed. But what happens if there is no system in place to notify managers when their employees’ reviews are due? This can cause the review process to be delayed, causing significant bottlenecks. Or it could result in the review being scheduled at the last minute, meaning that both parties are not sufficiently prepared for the review.
Solution:
Use Nintex Workflow to create a workflow that automatically schedules performance reviews and sets reminders when review documents are due. This schedule will be initially updated during the onboarding process and will continue updating year after year until the employee vacates their position. The review is added to both the reviewer’s and the employee’s calendars, and they both receive email notifications in the run-up to the scheduled date, leaving ample time to prepare.
3. Poor visibility creates information silos
Issue:
Let’s say that after their performance review, an employee has received a pay rise. However, when it comes to payday the following month, their raise has not been incorporated into their paycheck.
There needs to be a centralized place to store employee performance review data. If the details of reviews are held onto by team managers and not shared with HR, it can result in document loss and delays, especially if that manager was then to leave the company. Relevant colleagues from other departments need to be able to access the information when it is required. Information regarding employee wages and bonuses must be conveyed through the right channels to the right people so that payroll information is correct.
Solution:
When using Nintex Forms, the data inputted during the review is automatically stored in SharePoint. This means that the pay rise has been recorded correctly and stored in the right place, so that it is ready to be confirmed when HR or finance is working on payroll for that month. This will ensure no one ever misses their due rewards.
Automate and Improve
These are just a few examples of how Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms can help you achieve effective performance management by streamlining review processes. Nintex can also help you automate a wide-range of HR and performance management workflows, including onboarding for new employees. With Nintex, it’s easy to automate, orchestrate, and optimize business processes like those mentioned above to drive better outcomes.
Learn more about Nintex solutions for Human Resources here.
