How to successfully performance manage your team remotely

With the observation from the UK Conservative Party Chairman, Oliver Dowden, that “People need to get off their Pelotons and back to their desks”, it seems that a rising number of the UK workforce, along with top Civil Servants, see the benefits of working remotely and plan to continue doing so.

I briefly touched on the benefits of remote working in a previous blog post, which you can catch up with here, but now I turn to the successful management of annual performance appraisals and how to do this when your teams are working remotely.

Effective performance management reviews don’t need to be an ordeal for management and their teams. A clearly structured performance management process, including deliverable objectives throughout the year, is imperative for setting expectations of all parties. Let us first take a look at an ideal flow of performance management to ensure that an employee can understand what is expected of them:

● Setting - An employee should have a clear job description and from this the manager can set well-defined and measurable long-term objectives and short-term goals. Training should be provided to ensure that the employee has the tools and knowledge to be able to meet the requirements. Employees should be asked to set some of their own goals, so that they are actively participating in their career development.

● Monitoring - the manager should set ‘mini’ review periods throughout the year, ideally at each quarter. This can be semi-informal, however it is important that the reviews are documented. If it is appropriate, additional coaching and mentoring should be provided to the employee to ensure that they are fully supported as they progress. It is important to highlight and provide the opportunity for the employee to correct any shortcomings so that the annual review does not contain any ‘nasty surprises’. Short-term goals should be reviewed and long-term goals updated if necessary.

● Reviewing - A formal ‘end of year review’ should be diarised with the employee and managers should encourage employees to provide ‘evidence’, which can be in the form of examples of work undertaken, feedback from other colleagues or clients, (this sometimes used to be the old-fashioned ‘STAR’ reports - Situation, Task, Action & Review). The quarterly review results should be considered, and ideally an improving path of the employee should be noticeable.

● Rewarding - Great performance should always be recognised, and although it may not always be possible for companies to financially reward their employees in the form of bonuses, alternative rewards such as an additional day off, lunches, job titles or learning opportunities ensure that employees are incentivised to perform at their best.

Now that we understand the need for performance management planning, we need to think about how a manager can implement this in a remote setting - in times past, employees would ‘clock-in and out’ of the workplace and it would be obvious to a manager if they were not at their desk working - but apart from basic ‘time tracking’ and managing workloads, an employee would be left to their own devices. With employees now working from home, it isn’t always obvious...

We can use an intuitive and easy to use performance management system to ensure that you can complete the review remotely and professionally. Software such as BambooHR can provide objectivity. It is focused not on ‘punishing’ bad performance, but on providing a template to get the best from your employees using manager and employee self-assessments, peer feedback and HR goals that can be automated to ensure continuous performance management is no longer a time consuming task to complete.

Performance management success factors

Businesses are now becoming more aware of their ‘company culture’ and understand that employee productivity is linked to their contentment. Managing poor performance is only one element of business performance management. Utilising performance software can allow companies to collate and track employee engagement. This allows them to build a holistic view of staff feelings in relation to the company’s overall performance.

Strategic performance management needs to be undertaken regularly to be effective, and not all companies have the resources and time to monitor and review the collated information. Remote HR support for small businesses or freelance business manager support can be hired to complete the analysis of the data, or even complete performance planning on behalf of a virtual office manager. A Virtual Assistant who specialises in HR performance management or KPI management can create a bespoke employee performance management plan, set-up and implement the relevant software packages, and even complete the employee appraisals or carry out the team performance management itself.

If this all sounds to time consuming or you are unsure how to manage employee performance or you recognise that your company needs to make changes to its productivity, I can review your current practices. I will work with you to create a bespoke action plan and ensure engagement with your employees to collectively manage and increase your business performance.

Contact me today for a free consultation.

Thanks for reading!

Amanda Watson

Virtual PA & Founder of Pavilion Virtual Assistance