The thought of managing the performance of your employees is not a pleasant prospect for many employers and as a result they often just accept poor performance.

There is an understandable anxiety at the thought of informing an employee - who you may also regard as a friend - that they are not up to scratch but this does not have to be the case, in fact effective performance management is probably the single most effective tool for achieving growth in your business and everyone; including the recipient of your feedback, can benefit.

Employees actually know when they are not performing as they should be and are often just waiting to be told so that they can tell you why.

Failing to challenge poor performance, not only misses the opportunity to change it, but can also miss out on receiving important feedback about your own short comings as an employer. The key to performance management is communicating an understanding that it is in everyone's best interests as:

• It provides a clear focus on the key objectives and priorities
• it ensures the correct allocation of resources
• it enables people to be absolutely clear about what is expected of them
• It provides an opportunity for people to express their concerns, views and ideas
• It creates an environment in which people feel that they get support
• It makes it possible to easily monitor how the organisation is performing and to take action to intervene and improve where necessary

If you are looking to establish a structured process for managing performance in your business then we can help.

SMEO have developed a series of workshops designed to help businesses incorporate a process into their business, it will enable you to:

• identify the right method of managing performance for your business
• establish the areas of performance that you need to be able to measure
• provide the necessary tools that will enable you to measure these areas
• identify reasonable targets for you and your team in these areas
• establish what will need to happen in order that these targets can be achieved
• compare individuals current performance against the targets.
  
• agree an action plan to bring about the necessary changes
• present the process to your team and explain the reasons behind its introduction and the benefits
• train those involved in delivery