Speaker 1: As the person responsible for HR, you hold the key to ensuring your employees are performing at their best. Obviously, the better your people perform, the better your organization performs. So let's take a look at what your responsibilities entail. Performance management is a systematic and ongoing process, and it should be tied to organizational goals. Consider your organization's strategy. If one strategic goal is to increase sales by 10%, your job is to ensure the organization has the human resources available to achieve that goal. As a strategic HR partner to your leaders, you should be working with them to determine how that 10% will be achieved. Does the sales team need to get better at upselling? Does the marketing department need to bring in more customers? Do you need more people on board? Work in partnership with leaders and managers to answer these types of questions. That leads us to manager training. In my experience as an HR consultant, I've come across hundreds of managers and supervisors who simply didn't know how to do performance management, and it's not their fault. Just because they've been given a performance evaluation form to fill out once a year, it doesn't mean they are good coaches at performance. They need you to provide them with the tools and resources they need to guide the behavior of their employees. They need you to train them on how to set goals, coach performance, provide effective feedback, and reward improvement or discipline poor performance. So let's take a look at the process of performance management. Notice the first step is to understand how job competencies fit into the organizational vision and strategic goals. You will do that by conducting a job analysis. Once you spend time understanding each job, you can understand its value and how it plays a part in organizational goals. From there you can work with your managers and your managers will work with their staff to define performance goals and standards of behavior that will achieve these organizational goals. If the goal is to increase sales by 10% for example, then you will work with your managers to determine how to make that happen and what behavior is required to make it so. Perhaps it is decided that the sales team is charged with 5% increased sales by each team member and standards of behavior are focused on customer service. Once performance goals and behavior standards are in place, your managers become coaches of performance. If the sales team is responsible for 5% increased sales and some people are not upselling very well in order to meet that goal, the sales manager must coach those people to perform. The manager might also seek outside resources with your help such as a sales training program. Meeting also involves meeting regularly to provide feedback. One company I know calls these monthly meetings one-on-ones. Sometimes they're 10 minutes and sometimes they're an hour, depending on what's happening during that month. Meetings should include discussion about what's working well and where the employees are excelling and provide ideas for improvement. The last step in this cycle of performance management is rewards or discipline. During the monthly meetings, employees might receive rewards in the form of a simple good job from their manager, or a gift card, or a half day off, or even a bonus. As a strategic HR partner, you and the managers would work together to ensure substantial bonuses are in your payroll budget and that they are being given fairly and consistently. Unfortunately, sometimes after several chances employees still do not perform well and they must go down the path of discipline. The best way to keep this from happening is to encourage your managers to discuss performance with employees as soon as they can and as often as they can. Keep the conversation going. In the end, an effective performance management system ensures employees understand the importance of their contribution, ties performance to organizational goals, and facilitates a strong and harmonious relationship between employees, their managers, and you. Performance management sets employees up for success. The sooner you can get started, the sooner they can be successful.