Employees at every organization are faced with myriad challenges every single day. Whether it’s trying to hit a tight deadline, working within a team environment, or dealing with poor management decisions, employees don’t have it easy. On top of that, there are goals to be set, monitored, and achieved. But without proper leadership and guidance, employees aren’t going to be able to live up to their highest standards. That’s where something like a performance management system comes in handy. The concept of continuous performance management ditches the traditional idea of time-based performance reviews and sets it up to be a continuous process. In this article, we’ll take you through a few pros and cons of continuous performance management.
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Continuous Performance Management Defined
Before diving into the pros and cons of such an extensive system/process, it’s important to understand what it is in the first place. Simply put, continuous Performance Management, otherwise known as CPM, is a comprehensive process for helping manage employee performance effectively. Continuous performance management is on the rise these days. It’s more than just a fad. The process of performance management is popular, with over 78 percent of organizations now using some form of CPM. Continuous performance management is a process of monitoring employee performance on an ongoing basis and providing feedback to them regularly. It helps organizations to identify and address problems and reward high-performing employees for a job well done. It used a mix of coaching, corrective action, and feedback to ensure employees are doing what they need to do per the company’s standards.
Pro – CPM Helps You Set Goals And Identify Issues Early On
Perhaps the biggest pro of Performance Management is that it can help you identify problems early before they can become bigger issues. An issue that goes ignored for a long time can quickly snowball into something significant that can be very detrimental to the organization. Providing regular feedback to employees on an ongoing basis can be beneficial for preventing problems from sprouting in the first place. Performance management also helps align employee goals with your organization’s goals. This happens through goal setting, goal monitoring, and goal assessment (essentially feedback). Utilizing SMART goals—short for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—are part of what performance management is all about. By making your goals achievable and monitoring them efficiently as part of performance management, you’ll set up your employees for success every day at your organization.
Pro – Regular Feedback
Performance management excels when it comes to feedback. Providing feedback isn’t always easy, even for the best managers. Fortunately, performance management makes it easier to give, receive, discuss, and compile feedback. We’ve already established that in performance management, employee feedback is constantly being collected, so managers can address any issues before they become major problems. But it’s so much more than that. The modern type of Performance Management and appraisal uses 360-degree feedback, which is a comprehensive, all-encompassing type of feedback that can help employees succeed. How? It collects feedback and constructive criticism from everyone who works with the employee. This could be their supervisor, peers, coworkers, and even direct reports. Compiling all of this and presenting it to the employee during a check-in, streamlines the feedback process and can ultimately help the employee improve down the line.
Con – It Might Make Employees Might Feel Overwhelmed
Although a good performance management process is essential for running an organization smoothly, you have to consider how your employees are going to react to it. Sometimes such a comprehensive process will overwhelm them and make them feel pressured or intimidated. That’s not a good thing for morale. It’s not a good thing for performance. Constant feedback might do the exact opposite of what’s intended and make them feel overwhelmed or stressed out. To avoid this, you have to be consistent. That in and of itself is sometimes an issue because consistency can be hard to attain and maintain. Unfortunately, even the best performance management systems can have this type of effect on employees. To get around this issue, it’s integral to understand how to use your system, use it effectively, set up your corrective action plans to benefit the employee, and be as transparent as possible when assessing employee performance.
Con – The Risk of Micromanagement
One of the biggest problems with management, leadership, and assessment is the feeling of being micromanaged. Micromanaging is a scourge on workers, not to mention demonstrating a lack of trust and quality leadership on the manager’s part. Micromanagement happens when managers are too worried about details that do not need to be managed at all. This leads to big problems. When management stresses over the smallest, superfluous details it shows they don’t trust their employees’ ability to handle tasks independently. That’s a big problem when you’re trying to build trust with a team. This lack of trust results in poor employee morale, poor performance reviews, and a lack of motivation for both parties involved in the situation. Unfortunately, performance management can sometimes feel like micromanagement. To avoid this, be as transparent as possible throughout the performance management process and help your employees understand the reason behind regular feedback, check-ins, and communication.
