Employee Engagement Through Effective Performance Management

A Practical Guide for Managers

Edward M Mone, Manuel London, Edward M. Mone, Manuel London, Edward Mone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317235286
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Business

This book is a practical guide for managers to increase and support employee engagement through stronger performance management tools and techniques. In this second edition, Edward Mone and Manuel London incorporate new developments in the field, including discussion of issues about the value of challenging goals, annual formal appraisals, forced ranking, and ways to give constructive feedback. The authors expand the traditional notion of performance management to include building trust, creating conditions of empowerment, managing team learning, and maintaining ongoing straightforward communications about performance, all of which are critical to employee engagement. Case studies offer concrete examples, and checklists and surveys supply managers with ways to assess employee engagement as well as directions for increasing engagement. An up-to-date, straightforward guide, this book is appropriate for graduate students in Employee Engagement, Human Resources, and Management Studies, as well as scholars and practitioners in those fields.

1
THE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT PROCESS AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

An Introduction

This book addresses how you, as a manager, can create an engaged workforce through effective performance management. We explain how to use state-of-the-art goal setting, feedback, coaching, development, appraisal and recognition processes, strategies, and techniques, and how to build a climate of trust and empowerment. You will learn about 360-degree survey feedback, professional coaching, and self-assessment. Overall, Employee Engagement through Effective Performance Management will help you to create a culture that encourages feedback and development, promotes self-direction for continuous learning, and fosters employee engagement.

You may work in a large multinational company; a smaller, perhaps culturally diverse domestic firm; or a corporate start-up such as an e-commerce business. Your company may have a traditional multilevel bureaucratic structure or a small, flexible structure. Your company may be stable or, more likely in today’s world, be undergoing transformational change. Regardless of your organizational context, the fundamentals of performance management are the same. Setting goals, giving feedback, coaching for performance effectiveness, evaluating performance, and recognizing accomplishments are the cornerstones for maintaining an engaged workforce.

Although your company may have a human resources department that designs programs to support these elements (for instance, the corporate performance appraisal program), the principal responsibility for performance management rests with you and your company’s management team. Performance management, though driven by the human resources department, is a business process that is really “owned” by line managers, and will be most effective when it has strong executive-level sponsorship (Bersin, 2006).

In this chapter, we define the performance management process, consider managers’ attitudes and research about performance management, and highlight the importance of feedback as a central element of the process. We then describe our model of employee engagement and present our study of employee engagement conducted at XINC. This study examines relationships between perceptions of job conditions and feelings of engagement. Throughout the book, we use these results together with research and ideas from other sources to make our recommendations for supporting and improving employee engagement through performance management. We conclude the chapter with an overview of the book.

The Performance Management Process

Performance management is not a fixed sequence of events but a continuous process that is constantly renewing itself as performance unfolds, especially as key events create opportunities to demonstrate expertise and contribute to organizational goals.

In fact, the elements of the performance management process are not standalone human resource programs. They are part of an integrated system and actions that should be aligned with organizational objectives; under these conditions of integration and alignment, the entire process moves away from being event driven and becomes more strategic in perspective (London & Mone, 2009).

To reinforce the notion of integration, consider, for example, the following relationships between goal setting, feedback, coaching, and appraisal:

• Goals provide the standard for feedback and performance appraisal.

• Feedback leads to setting goals for performance improvement and career development.

• Coaching helps to process feedback, set meaningful goals, practice new behaviors, seek additional feedback, and track changes in performance.

• Performance appraisal evaluates goal attainment and is a basis for ongoing feedback, development planning, and continuous performance improvement. Performance appraisal may be a formal annual or semiannual process conducted by the employee’s immediate supervisor and is the basis for changes in compensation. This is called “summative” appraisal. Performance appraisal may be informal and in-the-moment, coming from the supervisor and/or coworkers and be shaping and constructive—the basis for advice about how to improve performance. This is called “formative” appraisal.

Managers’ Attitudes and Research about Performance Management

Performance management, done well, makes employees more competitive and engaged, enhances leadership development, supports transformational change, and, in general, contributes to higher levels of organization performance (Bersin, 2006). However, in research we have conducted at XINC (discussed later in the chapter), we found that little more than half (53%) of employees surveyed believed the performance management process was valued in the firm. Laff (2007) also reported that 56 percent of line managers believe their performance management programs are not valuable. Bersin has helped us understand why managers might hold these views, noting that only 32 percent of organizations surveyed have a consistent, enterprise-wide performance management process, and that organizations vary significantly in the extent to which they have adopted key performance management practices, such as cascading goals, self-appraisals, 360-degree feedback, development planning, and coaching. In addition, in their review of relevant research, Kinicki, Jacobson, Peterson, and Prussia (2013) suggest that managers are just not that good at executing the performance management process—either because they are not sure what to do or are just not dedicating the necessary time to the process. This is why human resource professionals are concerned about making performance management a viable strategic process (London & Mone, 2009).

Finally, there has been some noteworthy debate that provides additional insight into making performance management more effective and successful. Specifically, Pulakos and O’Leary (2011) raise the question: Why is performance management broken? They report that through accumulated research and practice, managers have a set of performance management tools and processes that should work well (also noted by Adler et al., 2016), but that how they get implemented and used is the issue at hand. Fundamentally, Pulakos and O’Leary suggest that managers and leaders rush to implement new practices, such as cascading goals or using 360-degree feedback for development or evaluation without considering how to best implement those practices. The practices generally become an administrative burden as part of the formal system, and are uncoupled from the ongoing, day-to-day process of managing performance and development. Yet, as Mone, Price, and Eisinger (2011) argue, formal performance management methods and practices and tools can be of great utility and value when they mirror the informal conversations managers have with their employees. These are the kinds of valid, useful and practical methods, processes, etc., that we provide throughout this book, not only in support of performance management, but also in support of building an engaged workforce.

A Focus on Feedback

Although this book covers each of the major elements of performance management, we emphasize feedback because it is the common thread stitching together all the elements of the process and it often causes the most difficulty for managers. Many managers simply do not know how to give feedback and do not feel comfortable doing it. For instance, managers may fear employees’ defensive reactions and losing their loyalty and friendship if they give negative feedback. These managers avoid spending time talking to employees about their performance. Other managers do not value giving positive feedback, claiming that employees know when they are doing a good job.

Despite these difficulties, our research shows that the feedback element of the performance management process is a key driver of engagement. Feedback helps managers build a learning culture that is able to adapt to meet changing business needs. In this kind of culture, feedback and development are linked as employees take responsibility for their own performance improvement in order to meet new corporate expectations. As a result, employees value learning and development, and this strengthens the organization’s ability to succeed in turbulent times.

In addition, employees generally feel that feedback and coaching will enhance their professionalism and help them to maximize their performance potential and outcomes. Your feedback positions your employees to be ready to meet future, unanticipated challenges and to remain competitive for key positions and advancement within the company.

Employee Engagement

Engagement, as a construct, is relatively complex. Remember we said that an engaged employee is someone who feels involved, committed, passionate, and empowered and demonstrates those feelings in work behavior. So, when we set out to measure engagement and create a measure of engagement, we realized that we had to try to capture this complexity in the facets we chose and the questions we would use to measure employees’ level of engagement in our survey research. We wanted to capture the various attitudes, behaviors, and dispositions associated with employee engagement in order to help leaders and managers use the results at individual, team, and organization levels. On the other hand, academics and researchers tend to focus their efforts on narrowing and refining the definition and scope of the term (Byrne, 2015). Additionally, most engagement measures and the majority of the research emphasize job work engagement or the employee’s relationship to his or her work. Our measure also includes a focus on engagement with the larger organization, which again, may be more important to managers and HRM practitioners (Schaufeli, 2014).

Our model of engagement, therefore, contains the following six facets presented with the associated behaviors and attitudes that, in totality, represent both our model and measure of engagement:

1. Involvement (e.g., feeling engaged, challenged by the work, energized to perform at your best, and feeling good about the future).

2. Commitment (e.g., feeling committed to a long-term career at the company, to the company’s success, and to consistently working w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Performance Management Process and Employee Engagement
• 2 Understanding Performance Appraisal
• 3 Building a Climate of Trust
• 4 Setting Meaningful and Effective Goals
• 5 Meeting the Feedback Challenge
• 6 Recognizing Employee Performance
• 7 Learning about 360-Degree Feedback
• 8 Coaching for Success
• 9 Managing Employee and Team Learning and Development
• 10 Managing and Preventing Employee Burnout
• 11 A Closing Look at Performance Management and Employee Engagement