Priming Performance Management | Heidrick & Struggles

Organizations continue to make decisions on how they will handle performance management (PM) in 2020. Examples of questions that organizations are grappling with include: How much should you consider the impact of COVID-19 on your assessment? How can an organization be equitable—and continue to show empathy— when managing performance? Since the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted organizations in different ways (e.g., some firms won’t be on a clear path to recovery by the end of 2020 whereas others have thrived during the shutdown), the answers to these questions will depend on an organizations’ situation. Regardless, many organizations will continue to provide guidance to their workforce on resetting or modifying goals. While this article provides various insights on PM, it also reinforces four types of goals associated with PM, what they intend to achieve, and the pros and cons of each. They include: 1) Output – focused on desired business outcomes, 2) Input – focused on steps required to achieve the outcome, 3) Learning – focused on how to get better at achieving the desired business outcome, 4) Team – focuses on how to enable teams to operate more effectively. Organizations can use this framework along with their unique situations to provide to their workers on how to handle PM in an unprecedented year.