The nature of modern work has changed, as have employee expectations. Employees now have a desire to advance their skills with every work experience. They don’t want to feel like they are only there to serve the needs of the company. Employees want to take ownership of their development. They, too, want to contribute to creating a culture of healthy productivity and higher engagement.
Traditional performance management has been outdated and useless for years now. This system functioned on the basis of yearly employee reviews. It served the function to scale in an analog world. Now, however, the world is all about data, and your business needs a management system that keeps up with the times.
Monitoring software for employees and other management solutions help managers transform the dreaded annual reviews into a new continuous employee management system based on frequent reporting. In this system, you should deliver performance reviews whenever you feel like commending someone’s great work or want to offer additional support.
This way, you can react proactively, instead of retroactively.
Creating annual reviews is also a monotonous and demanding task, which managers often leave for the last possible moment. Most managers also forget the most pivotal moments in their employee’s work-life since too much time has gone by. It’s no surprise that workers often feel like the employee appraisals were not a true reflection of their work and dedication.
If the success of performance management relies exclusively on a manager’s point of view and a one-sided, yearly performance, employers are missing the chance to encourage employees’ development among many other things.
Eliminating Discrimination
Employee appraisals have always been a key part of determining bonuses, raises, or promotions. This gives managers a position of power, meaning that the personal discriminatory manager’s bias can damage their employee appraisal. This is only one example of why it’s so important to have anti-discrimination systems in place.
Regretfully, discriminatory practices at the workplace still happen to this day. Survey data gathered by Qz on performance management, indicated that 57% of companies weren’t doing anything to remove bias from their performance reviews.
Most common types of discrimination at the workplace:
- Race discrimination
- Disability discrimination
- Pregnancy discrimination
- Gender discrimination
- Age discrimination
- Sexual orientation discrimination
- Discrimination based on religion
By eliminating any potential bias or discriminatory actions through monitoring data, both the employee and the manager gain precise insight into employee development and overall performance. Data gathered by software for employee monitoring can’t get tampered with, meaning that discriminatory practices just won’t fly.
There is a common saying that employees don’t leave jobs, they leave bad managers. There’s a need for an accountable system that promotes transparency and fairness. Not to mention how harmful it can be to an individual going through a form of workforce discrimination.
This is why data-backed performance reviews play such an important role in ensuring organizational growth and workplace equity, in comparison to subjective annual assessments susceptible to bias and discrimination.
Not only is this approach also less time-consuming for managers, but it also helps keep the company compliant. Legal cases of workplace discrimination can also be harmful to companies, as the unnoticed and unstopped discriminatory actions of a bad manager easily damage the reputation and finances of the company.
No Favoritism – Just Data
Favoritism is another human element within management that can heavily influence employee appraisals, and affect teamwork and motivation. Per definition, favoritism is any situation in which someone who is in a position of power shows preference towards one employee or several employees in comparison to others. A clear example of favoritism that we can all recognize is a teacher’s pet at school.
Favoritism usually doesn’t have anything to do with an employee’s job performance, It happens because of a formed personal bond between the two colleagues. This, however, creates an environment where other employees feel overlooked and undervalued.
This creates an unhealthy environment for the workers, which is why employers need to be on top of this. When you create performance reviews based on relevant and recent employee tracker data, biases can’t happen. If any kind of favoritism or unconscious bias plays a part in how an employee’s work gets reviewed, the employee can easily complain to HR with data that backs up their claims.
Establish a Transparent Appraisal System With Data
We’ve already mentioned that one of the big plus sides of using data-driven performance review techniques is the fact that managers and employees can be transparent about productivity and personal development. And – it promotes trust and better company culture. However, some companies that use this solution choose not to let their employees in on “the data side of things”.
To put it plain and simple: transparency promotes trust. Trust creates tight-knit teams, enhanced productivity, and effective work environments. More trust, the better the performance, and the greater the company’s success.
The performance review process that is going to bring your company the best results is a process that is as objective as possible. To make this happen, employees need to have insight into their own performance data, too.
Through monitoring software for employees, managers and employees can collaborate, set up metrics and mutually agreed-upon goals, and track a worker’s progress without any secrecy, bias, or weird motives involved.
What The Future Of Data Reviews Holds
The data-driven approach removes the subjectivity from performance management and assures fair, unbiased employee reviews. The future is moving toward hybrid work and continuous performance management which, while mostly relying on data and technology, requires a more humane and communicative approach to workers.
With some performance management software moving toward becoming completely AI-driven (larger enterprises are looking and developing newer, more automated solutions), it’s highly likely that an even more data-driven approach is arriving soon. Perhaps maybe even one without any human interaction.
Whatever the future may hold, one thing is sure. A modern company that wants to prosper needs to start using data-driven employee reviews.
