At the end of the year you sit down and score your staff’s work, telling one person they did well and another that they need to do better, and perhaps you fill in a form and put it in a drawer. They nod and leave, and the following week they work exactly the way they did before.
That scoring is called appraisal, and it is only one piece of the job that needs doing. The whole job is called performance management.
What does performance management mean in a small team?
Go looking for performance management and you find two kinds of material. One is written for companies with hundreds of staff and a separate HR department, and talks about forms, indicators and annual appraisals. The other promotes software that turns those same forms digital. The owner of a team of five finds no place for themselves in either.
In a small team it is simpler. Performance management means first telling each person exactly what result you want from them, then checking every week whether they have reached it, and talking to them about it the moment you see they have fallen behind.
With systemization you build your business’s rules and roles, and with performance management you see whether those rules actually produced results. Appraisal is only part of that job, and without the rest it is like taking your car for its annual inspection but never checking the oil or the tyres the rest of the year.
Why doesn’t end-of-year scoring work?
According to Gallup, only two in ten employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work. In other words, eight in ten see the system set up for them as either ineffective or discouraging.
In a small team the reason is even clearer. Feedback given once a year reaches the person long after the work is finished and can no longer be fixed, so they feel you are judging their past rather than helping them improve. And since you sit beside that same person every day and see their work up close, sitting across a desk reading a score off a form feels more artificial than useful.
Four steps that have to keep repeating
Performance management in a small team needs no complicated form and no expensive software. It comes down to four steps, and each one is incomplete without the others.
- Make your expectation clear. Before you measure anyone’s work, it has to be clear what result you want from that role, not just which tasks it performs. “Answer the phones” is a task, but “no customer waits more than a day for a reply” is a result you can actually see, and that is what belongs in the role’s job description.
- Check the result every week. It does not need to be complicated. Pick one or two simple numbers, such as how many messages went unanswered for more than a day, and look at them every week to see whether the result is coming in.
- Give feedback straight away. When something goes well, say so that day, and when something falls short of what you expected, say so within days rather than months, because feedback only works while the person still remembers the work.
- Work out the reason together. The point is not just to say it was good or bad. Go through with that person what got in the way of the result and what the next step is, then return to step one.
These four steps are not done once and finished. After step four you go back to making the expectation clear, and that is exactly what makes it different from an annual appraisal.
When you measure presence instead of results
If you do not know how to see the right result, you start, without noticing, to measure who arrived on time, who stayed late and who looks busy. But looking busy is not a result, and someone who seems occupied for eight hours may deliver less than someone who did four hours of the right work. When presence is your yardstick, your team learns to look busy.
That mistake has another cost. As long as you cannot judge work by its results, you have to stand over everyone yourself to be sure things are moving, and that is exactly the business’s dependence on its owner. Once the expectation is clear and the result is checked every week, you no longer need to stand over anyone to know whether their work is on track.
Where to start
Do not reach for forms or software. Pick one role in your team, the one that occupies your mind most, and write down exactly what result you want from it that can be seen. Then pick one or two simple numbers for it and have a short conversation with that person about those numbers this week.
Repeat that every week and it will do far more for that person’s results than an annual appraisal meeting. And if you find you still have to stand over everyone to keep work moving, in a free diagnostic session we work out how you can see your team’s results every week so you no longer need to supervise anyone.