So you’ve made it through our whole Pro Performance series. You’ve looked at what’s missing, filled the gaps, and maybe even taken steps to increase your team’s performance. 

You know how to get your people performing at their best, but what can we do to keep them there?

This is what we’ll be covering today as we look at how to maintain great people performance in the long term.

Make performance reviews proactive

Remember the continuous feedback and performance summaries we spoke about earlier? This is where they really become valuable. With continuous feedback occuring, and the tools to draw all your performance data into an on-demand performance summary, the way performance reviews are conducted can be completely transformed.  No longer are your team waiting for a half year or annual review to get useful feedback and support from their leaders, they can get it progressively when they need it. This helps increase transparency and improves you culture immediately.

Not only does continuous feedback mean managers and their team members can be having bite-sized discussions on a regular basis, but when it does come time for a more formal review, all those involved will have access to the most relevant and up-to-date insights. This means performance reviews can be turned into a proactive conversation, rather than a recap of what has happened in the past.

Use this as an opportunity to reflect on an individual’s role and reassess where their talents can best be applied in the future. For example, if you have two sales people in the same role, but one is excelling in lead generation, while the other gets less leads but has a better close rate – it might be worth redesigning their roles to cater to their unique skills. 

These proactive conversations are vital to help keep your people performing over the long-term.

Don’t rely on pay rises to motivate people

While we’re on the topic of performance reviews, ensure these are not used as an opportunity to focus on salary increases. Directly linking performance discussions with salary reviews can place limitations on performance over time. There are a few reasons for this.

One, increasing an employee’s salary every time they achieve higher and higher levels of performance will eventually become unsustainable. And if they have learned to be motivated by these salary increases, what’s left to keep them improving after their salary reaches its limit?

Secondly, not all of your staff will be motivated by money. In most cases, performance at work is more intrinsically motivated, that is, feeling valued and accomplishing goals is a bigger performance driver than pay rises.

So what approaches can we use to keep our people motivated? 

Set goals strategically

In the earlier parts to our Pro Performance series, we spoke about using Goals Management. Now let’s explore how we can actually design goals to help motivate great performance.

Having a sense of contribution or feeling like they play a valuable role within the organisation is another key intrinsic motivator for your people.One way this can be leveraged is to set high-level organisational goals within the system, and then cascade these down into smaller goals for individual team members so everyone can see the role they play and how it fits into the bigger picture. 

For high performing employees, you should also consider using OKRs or stretch goals, which can push their performance to new heights by getting them to find new approaches to their work.

Provide recognition

When goals are achieved in intelliHR, relevant leaders in the business are notified, and can then give recognition on the spot, which is key for making the most impact.

When deciding on how recognition should be delivered, managers should consider how their individual direct reports like to be recognised, as everyone has different preferences for which forms of recognition will motivate them and which may actually have an adverse effect.

Through engaging in continuous feedback and having regular one-on-ones, managers are able to start understanding their team members needs and motivations better, which will be invaluable when it comes time to recognise them for their work.

So there you have it, our ultimate guide to improving your performance processes and actually increasing people performance at the same time! If you’re curious about any of the concepts or tools we’ve covered in this series, our team would love to chat to you about how they might work for your business. You can reach us on 1300 993 803 (AU) or 0800 631 631 (NZ) or get a demo of intelliHR here.