“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.”
– Ronald Reagan
A Manager would make his/her team perform by putting the performance review into perspective. But it would take a leader to implement an effective performance management system that would enable his/her team to strive in the performance area. The performance review was normally a stressful, tense and anxiety-inducing affair even before the global pandemic and its economic crises impacted the world. With the current situation of existential horror and uncertainty, the apprehension of employees towards performance review challenges went up a notch. When we talk about performance, it is the measure of achievement against a goal. Amid the uncertain Covid world, performance reviews are necessary to strengthen your employees. The notion of it being a razer-focused strategy for identifying poor performance or to hand out raises is not ideal for the moment. So, continue reading to understand what are the challenges involved in remote performance management systems (or performance review) and improve your process taking into account our most important tips to overcome those challenges.
Challenges In Manoeuvring Remote Performance Reviews
- Face-to-face interactions, which are susceptible to the building of trust, are not found when the meeting is conducted remotely through Zoom or Google meet or any other video calling application.
- Best employee performance management systems are set up to maintain better communication between manager-employees. In spite of the video calls, remote performance reviews miss out on the non-verbal cues such as body language, facial expression and tone of voice, which are essential for our communication. These cues cannot be clearly read with a video call.
- Because of not working side-by-side, there is not a clear picture of every little detail of your employees’ performance, thus leading to an incorrect review of employee performance.
- The remote performance management system employed by your company most of the time is not capable of providing adequate feedback. The success of a performance review depends on helping the struggling employee with feedback and actionable suggestions. Without sufficient feedback, improvement of performance is unlikely.
- Remote operation demands your employees to work with disparate applications and bridge the gap that comes from not working face-to-face. You, as a manager, will find it extremely difficult and time-consuming to gather information from all of these applications.
Tip To Strengthen Your Performance Management System In Regards To Remote Performance Reviews
1. Be Compassionate Towards Your Employees
Your employees are going through a lot like you, personally and professionally. What they have now is not a choice but an ultimatum to work from their houses. Most of them are trying their best to juggle meetings, projects and workloads with toddlers, caring for the elderly family members and other personal responsibilities. Also, there is a surge of mental health issues arising from the covid-19 and its social restrictions on society. As per the US census bureau, 42% of surveyed people were suffering from anxiety and depression, which is 11% more than that of last year. Therefore as a manager and the leader of your team, it is crucial to exhibit genuine compassion towards your populace. Let leniency and flexibility become a part of your employee performance management system. Understanding your employees’ work challenges and supporting them in it, can work wonders.
2. Act More Supportive Of The Employees with a great learning opportunity
During normal times, the purpose of the performance review is to confront employees with subpar performance and clamour for improvement. Keep in mind that the current situation is anything but normal. On finding poor performers within your organization during this time, it is shrewd to investigate what is happening in their personal life that disables them from working to their full potential. If personal disabilities are disarming them at work, make sure to lend a hand in support. Further, when employees falter, don’t be in haste to put them on warning. Instead, offer them a grace period to complete their work that is reasonably time-bound. Erecting a performance management system in these uncertain times, remember the biggest investment of your company is its employees. So make it your most important task to take care of them.
3. An Integrated Architecture For Employee Performance Information
The biggest challenge for you as a performance reviewer, as we mentioned before, is to gather performance data of your employees when multiple application tools are at play due to remote operation. The countermeasure to this is to implement a platform where all the data is collated. When such a digital platform is present, then it is a matter of using AI-powered analytics and automated reports to create a performance review report in a flash. Also, deploying a 360-degree performance appraisal system that makes use of all the employee data will be key in eliminating biased based reward systems.
Conclusion
The global pandemic and the economic crisis that it brought with it gave rise to multiple challenges in the performance review. But with efficient performance management systems that are tailored for remote operations, you could strengthen your employee performance. For creating and conducting efficient remote performance reviews, deploy employee performance management systems like that from Datalligence. Try the trial version now to get a taste of what a high-performance tool can benefit your remote performance review.
