Barbara Brown, PhD asked:
Consider this scenario. You are planning for your next staff meeting, where you intend to discuss performance improvement. You have already identified several things your employees need to do to improve performance. These include:
1. Meet deadlines for delivering products or services
2. Meet deadlines for providing information to others
3. Meet deadlines for requesting information from others
4. Complete priorities in the proper sequence
5. Solve workload problems quickly and correctly
During this meeting, you also want to emphasize how important it is for your employees to improve in these areas. So your plan is to explain how these improvements could impact their performance. You don’t want to focus on benefits for customers, benefits for the team, or benefits for the organization. You want to emphasize the benefits for your employees, as individuals. How might you do this? Try explaining how performance improvement could lead to one or more of the following results for your employees:
1. They might spend less time reacting to others who are complaining about overdue or missing information
2. They might spend less time waiting to receive information from others
3. They might increase their ability to complete tasks in a timely manner
4. They might have fewer feelings of frustration from not having information needed to complete tasks
5. They might have a reduction in backlogs of uncompleted work
6. They might have fewer instances where a superior needs to follow-up to verify completion of critical tasks
7. They might have fewer instances where there is a need to handle the same request multiple times
Personal Performance Does Matter
When you tell employees how performance improvement benefits them, you increase your chances of getting a positive reaction. The key is broaden your list of what you might consider a “benefit†to employees. Sure, higher pay, more time off, and fewer work hours might top the list. But employees are also interested in things that lower their stress, reduce their workloads, and improve their performance. So remember to include “personal performance†the next time you plan to discuss the benefits of performance improvement.