What are some key factors for employee performance?
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Originally Posted On: https://www.strengthscope.com/blog/what-are-some-key-factors-for-employee-performance
There can be many reasons employees perform beyond or below expectations.
Managers and owners need to understand that getting the perfect group of employees to work together can be challenging. An employee’s average time working for a private company is less than four years.
Why do they spend so little time with one company? Sometimes, they are not a good fit for the company, and other times, the company could be a better fit for them.
If you are a manager or an owner, you may wonder how to improve team performance.
This guide will discuss 5 of the most significant factors for employees succeeding or failing with a company:
- Motivation
- Being heard and appreciated
- The right culture
- Communication
- Performance appraisals
Motivation
One thing employees need to perform at their best is a reason to do so. What are they working towards? How is it going to help them in the future?
Individually, there can be three reasons why an employee could be motivated to work harder. The first is to get a raise in salary at their current position. This can give them more breathing room with their bills and cost of living.
The second reason is that an employee could be working towards a promotion. They may see a chain of command within your company, with them having some potential for upward mobility.
However, if they discover that their current position may be the best they can do, they may lose the motivation to work towards a specific goal.
Finally, employees may work towards a reward or a bonus. An example is a sales team competing against each other to get the most sales and win a bonus for the month.
In that situation, employees have a good reason for working harder to make those sales. Employees need a push to get the maximum effort out of them. Make sure that they have some motivation to keep providing their maximum effort.
Being heard and appreciated
Something else that may affect an employee’s performance is if they feel like they are being heard or appreciated. They may throw in the towel if they feel their voice does not matter or they are invisible to the company.
Let’s face it; nobody likes being spoken over or entirely ignored. This can negatively impact an employee’s self-worth.
On the contrary, even providing a little effort as a manager to ensure employees feel appreciated can make all the difference. About 37% of employees in this survey said that employee appreciation was the most crucial aspect of working with them.
This means that if you give these employees recognition and let them know that you are listening to them, they may be willing to go more out of their way for you because they feel more confident that you will recognize their efforts.
The right culture
You should keep in mind if every employee working for you is the right fit for your culture.
You may promote an open environment where employees get more personal and share their feelings. On the other end of the spectrum, you may encourage a unique and competitive environment where the goal is to maximize profits and come out on top.
An employee that fits more into the first culture may not be a good fit for a Type A competitive environment. The same goes in reverse for someone who is competitive and focuses on not being a great fit for a team environment.
You need to have a good idea of the personality type of each employee you hire for your team, along with the kind of culture you want to promote amongst your employees.
Communication
Along with the above, there needs to be effective communication between the manager, the employee, and other employees. What good communication does is it gets everyone on the same page and gives everyone a clear understanding of their assignments.
It can also provide a clear understanding of what the goal is for your project or your general work. If you communicate these goals to your employees, they should be less likely to question why they are taking the path they are currently taking.
It also saves time in the future from having to explain tasks and assignments to people. Communicating these tasks early on gets everyone started on them simultaneously. As a result, this allows everyone to get a few steps ahead of the game.
Also, when you communicate well with your employees, you are more likely to sound competent and respectable. As a result, your employees could view you as a better leader than someone who communicates poorly with them.
Performance appraisals
Traditional performance appraisals often focus on weaknesses as the main topic for improvement and assess performance levels based on earlier activity. The fact that using this tactic often leads to lower performance, engagement, and confidence should not be a surprise.
Having a performance conversation that highlights a person’s unique strengths, achievements, and opportunities for growth can shift away from a previous negativity bias.
This is why companies like Siemens, Amazon Web Services and PhotoBox put strengths at the heart of their performance dialogues.
A strengths-based appraisal system can deliver exceptional results for the vast majority of your employees who now meet or exceed performance standards.
To embed this approach, your leaders and managers must be equipped to have these strengths-based conversations and be performance enablers rather than critical judges. Moreover, employees must be empowered to discover and optimise their unique strengths to find ways to deliver maximum value to the organisation.
Enhance your employee performance
These are some of the most significant factors regarding employee performance. Nurturing happy, satisfied and ambitious employees is a vital step to the success of any sized organisation.
Contact our dedicated team today to discover how integrating the strengths-based approach into your company culture will amplify your employee performance.
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