Performance Management Post-COVID| MIT Sloan

The impact of the coronavirus continues to force organizations to rethink and reimagine their workforce practices. One such practice is performance management (PM). With dispersed, distributed, and remote workforces–PM needs to take into account the realities of digital workflows and interactions. In many cases, productivity now demands more aggressive and actionable measures, which in turn requires a recalibration in key performance indicators (KPIs). The article provides examples of what a few companies are doing to redefine, repurpose, and remeasure their performance management, which presents truly disruptive opportunities for post-COVID-19 growth. For example, a) at one company, top management dramatically accelerated project delivery schedules for its new remote teams, which forced a mechanism for inspiring greater communication coordination, and collaboration expectations for team members. The same organization created a complementary buddy system to help ensure that more isolated and/or introverted employees felt connected. b) At Adobe, a senior global research project manager programmed his laptop to display a personalized end-of-day dashboard visually summarizing — with pie charts and graphs — “dashboard transparency” which has sparked cross-functional exchanges he’d never had before. Next-generation PM practices like these that enable more digital monitoring, tracking and collaboration can serve as enablers of performance. Other ideas are discussed.