The negative press and feedback related to enterprise performance management approaches, processes, and practices continues to be a dominant theme in business and academic publications, and sadly, it appears to be deservedly so. Despite the emergence and widespread coverage of new models promoting more frequent feedback and coaching over 10 years ago, almost 49% of organizations continue to rely on annual or semiannual performance reviews. Disdain for these processes persists, as Gallup has found that only 14% of employees strongly agree that their performance reviews fail to inspire them to improve their effort or output, while 61% of managers and 72% of workers state that they do not trust their organization’s process to deliver fair and equitable assessments of their contributions. The need to move to an approach that more effectively guides, develops, and motivates performance excellence has never been greater, and this means transitioning from traditional performance management to performance enablement.

Why traditional performance management (PM) falls short

The amount of research devoted to evaluating employee performance is seemingly endless. A recent Google search yielded 32 pages of industry, commercial, and academic studies. Sadly, a cursory review of those studies found that a majority point to problems with satisfaction, trust, and accuracy of employee appraisals. Perhaps most damaging is the twofold finding by CEB that 1) managers spend an average of 210 hours developing performance reviews annually, while 2) 58% of employees say the feedback and guidance they received did not help improve their performance. The ROI on the hours managers spent did not meet expectations. 

Given that the purpose and rationale of formal performance management are to direct and motivate employee effort, the Perceptyx finding that only 42% of managers report that evaluations help them direct team performance is a major concern. Not surprisingly, 58% of managers view them as stressful, time-consuming tasks. Related to that is a lack of proper preparation, as fewer than 20% of surveyed companies require formal training on setting goals, providing constructive feedback, and conducting employee performance discussions. With widely reported managerial discomfort with delivering those, only 30% of employees say they have had 3-5 coaching sessions or more per year. 

Cornell’s ILR reports that only 20% of surveyed employees are motivated by their reviews, and fewer than 1/3 of executives say the performance management system supports high-quality talent decision-making. 

The most commonly reported shortcomings across organizations of all sizes and scale, industries, and global regions include: 

• One-way goal-setting that is handed down by the manager and fails to include consideration of employee input and career and skill development aspirations.
• Periodic manager-employee discussions and check-ins that do not occur.
• A lack of continuous, in-the-moment performance data capture throughout the course of the performance period.
• Managerial lack of preparation and discomfort with delivering feedback and reviews. 
• Employee discomfort challenging managerial assessments, leading to misperceptions of success by the manager, and unresolved dissatisfaction by the employee.
  
  

How performance enablement can change the narrative

Performance enablement is a humanistic, employee-centered, business-aligned model that moves the traditional process from something companies and managers DO TO their workers to something that companies and managers DO WITH their workers. It represents a collaborative approach to getting the most out of employees on a day-to-day basis. In place of the dreaded and highly stressful once-per-year performance evaluation and associated merit increase decisions as the focus, it instead creates a focus on daily interactions where managers and their employees engage in a dance with moves between guidance, iterative feedback, and coaching that engages and motivates workers to improve, do a little more, a little differently, a little better, with more skill and proficiency.

It is designed to reframe performance management as a process that continuously clarifies purpose and goals, provides iterative feedback on progress, and delivers coaching to enhance productivity, rather than an evaluation-and-compensation decision-making play. Performance enablement is an outgrowth of a decade-old movement by Deloitte and other leading firms to redesign performance management and improve its outcomes for workers and their employers. It targets three key elements of people management:

Providing context for future or subsequent job performance

The manager communicates what the organization or team needs to accomplish, and why and how the employee's work relates to those. Explaining the linkage between those goals and assigned tasks to team, function, or business objectives provides the “why”, or meaning and sense of larger purpose to the individual’s role and work. Goal setting establishes the “how” their successful task performance will contribute to achieving organizational goals and their own career aspirations and interests.

Ongoing and iterative coaching, feedback, and support for performance 

The manager meets regularly with each direct report to provide coaching, feedback, and support in the moment that performance milestones are achieved (or not), questions arise, and support is needed. While consciously avoiding micromanagement, interactive discussions create trust and joint problem-solving. Coaching drives iterative corrections and solutions before shortcomings become performance issues. Support provided by managers is designed to remove obstacles to performance and productivity, identify resources the employee can leverage to improve or achieve assigned task outcomes, and develop new skills or enhance proficiencies.

Continuous and embedded development

Performance enablement drives employee growth by supporting both current role development needs and career aspirations. It requires the manager to understand employees' skills/proficiency levels, as well as their future career goals, so they can embed those preferences into coaching, job assignments, project opportunities, learning recommendations, and networking introductions. It can also include the company provision of workflow/system-enabled support with personalized prompts and resources for action, preparation for feedback and development discussions, and recommended learning objects or pathways. 

Performance enablement operationalizes what the ideal manager-employee relationship is meant to accomplish—providing direction and guidance, clearing barriers to success, and developing the self-sufficiency and incremental capability growth that motivates employees to perform, exceed expectations, and align themselves with enterprise objectives.

Understanding how performance enablement differs from traditional performance management

Although performance enablement is closely related to performance management, it differs primarily in focus and emphasis. Supporters of traditional processes will argue that performance management inherently encompasses performance enablement. But managers and leaders prioritize its evaluation and rewards aspects over the guidance and development process that defines enablement. The differences are in time, effort, and focus—where PM allows managers to focus their efforts on a group of employees on an annual or semi-annual process, performance enablement requires daily or weekly interactions focused on providing iterative guidance and support on a highly individualized basis.

What separates performance enablement from performance management becomes clear when contrasting them:

• The timeframe: Looks back at performance vs. Looks forward to what is needed to succeed
• What is assessed: Completed work vs. Work in progress
• When it is assessed: Periodically vs. Continuously
• The focus: Grading effort and outcomes vs. Enhancing quality, quantity, timeliness of outcomes
• Process output: Top-down evaluation vs. Collaborative improvement
• Feedback utility: Final, uncorrectable vs. Real-time, allowing for adjustments 
• Accuracy: Incomplete, non-comprehensive vs. Collecting and tracking continuous data that minimizes the effects of latency, memory loss, and resulting biases

Performance enablement is designed to shift the focus from a periodic evaluation event with a couple of associated skills and career development discussions to a series of continuous interactions that integrate performance planning, direction, coaching, resourcing, and feedback with skills and career aspirations. The key difference is a focus on iterative and collaborative performance and development discussions between each employee and their supervisor.

The benefits of moving to performance enablement

The shift to a performance enablement approach clarifies to each employee what needs to be accomplished and how it contributes to larger team, function, and/or business objectives. At the same time, it provides the day-to-day guidance and resources workers need to ensure the larger teams meet or exceed their goals. It creates an environment where line managers and leaders fulfill their assigned purpose as directors of human effort.

The primary purposes and outcomes from adopting this focus include:

Greater alignment of organizational and individual goals

Goal-setting is a collaborative activity in which the leader or manager articulates the company, functional, business unit, and team objectives and helps the employee understand how their assigned role and responsibilities can contribute to achieving them. The employee should be prepared to ask questions, seek clarification, and suggest ways or opportunities to make those and other contributions in the context of their role, level, and development aspirations. This exchange provides the added benefit of conveying meaning or context to the individual’s subsequent work, helping them understand the importance and impact of their efforts.

Better engagement and work output

Research by Perceptyx has found that employees managed using performance enablement principles are almost fourteen times (13.7x) more likely to be engaged and 51% less likely to voluntarily resign. The combination of clear work expectations, access to necessary guidance and resources, and a heightened sense of fairness in evaluation drives such positive and stable talent outcomes. They are also 1.4x less likely to report work stress that lowers their productivity.

Improved manager and employee connections

With widespread reports of ongoing low employee engagement, high burnout, eroding trust in leadership, and poor managerial effectiveness, performance enablement helps build stronger interpersonal connections, trust, and engagement. Consider the added benefits of having the majority of employees working for someone who is genuinely focused on helping and guiding their performance, while developing their capabilities and supporting their advancement.

More frequent acknowledgment, recognition of contributions, growth

The more people meet, the more opportunities there are to provide employees at all levels with what they need as humans—positive reinforcement of their efforts, contributions, and development. While managerial skill and attention to this are certainly required, with the right training, prompting, and motivation, the likelihood of workers receiving this can increase exponentially.

More focus on skill development and enhancement

One of the perennially top reasons for employee turnover is a perceived lack of development, growth, and advancement opportunities. Performance enablement addresses this by focusing managerial guidance not only on the tasks or initiatives to be delivered, but also on the development of skills and capabilities that enable greater subsequent independence and success. Managers are guided to understand that the more capable their people become, the less direction and oversight they require to perform their jobs, freeing them and their managers to focus on improving work processes and approaches, as well as more strategic tasks.

Building a performance enablement ecosystem

Performance enablement is more than a process—it is an ecosystem of processes, activities, enabling technologies, and, most importantly, managerial and employee behavior, all of which are interconnected to achieve optimal effect. That ecosystem is established by creating a culture, defining competencies and behavioral standards, delivering training and developmental support, and measuring outcomes, all of which are designed to drive sustainable adoption and gains.

1. Articulate a vision and strategy

Start by developing a vision statement that explains what performance is, its intended purpose, how it relates to and enhances organizational values, and how it will impact and deliver noticeable value to the culture, leadership, and management of people, processes, and stakeholders. Develop a strategy for defining it, engaging and inspiring leaders, managers, and employees, implementing and supporting it, and tracking its impact.

2. Develop a business case 

A formal business case for adopting the new performance enablement ecosystem should be developed to gain support from top leadership and persuade them to move to a more business-responsive model. The focus should be on identifying how improved employee management practices can deliver higher output, productivity, quality, agility, and customer success. Using advanced statistics and predictive analytics that leverage a mix of HR, financial, and operational data can establish a firmer, more credible, and more compelling case for change.

3. Engage leaders with a formal governance model

Charter a formal top leadership committee to oversee the execution of the strategy, and generate and evolve their awareness and ownership. Their oversight will focus on documentation, policy development, roll-out progress, adoption rates, and activity and outcome metrics. While used to provide a jump-start for the process, once the performance enablement concept is adopted by managers and employees in widespread practice, the council structure can be folded into other existing leadership and governance committees.

4. Leverage a change management model

Develop a comprehensive communication, engagement, and training program in a sequenced process that: 

1. Raises top leaders’ awareness of the business case, vision/purpose, and implementation plan 
2. Engages them as champions and leads awareness sessions for their senior leaders, middle managers, and supervisors that lay out the business case, rationale, development process, expectations, and support mechanisms that will be used.
3. Has them participate in pilot training to build their skills and act as role models and influential executives and senior leaders for others to emulate
4. Establish manager training and post-training support activities to build skill proficiency. Develop ongoing (manual and automated) reminders, prompts, and refresher/remedial coaching and skill development support.
   
   

5. Develop and deliver effective training and support

Deliver required training for all leaders and managers with ample opportunities for practicing techniques (e.g., goal-setting, structuring and managing check-ins, delivering constructive feedback, active listening). Use knowledge checks and expert observer-led skill assessments to evaluate participants’ skill acquisition, proficiency levels, and skill gaps. Perceptyx reports that Managers trained in coaching techniques report 2.8x higher confidence in performance conversations and achieve 45% better employee development outcomes.

Consider awarding certifications as a form of reinforcement and a source of pride, and recognize increasing levels of proficiency achieved in a gamification-style campaign for continued reinforcement. Engage peer groups in support and social/experiential learning activities, and deliver remedial and reinforcing sessions for those struggling or hesitant to adapt. 

Employees should be trained, prompted, and encouraged not only to own and press for their regular check-in sessions, but also to come prepared with questions, requests for support, and an openness to feedback and willingness to use the time wisely and be transparent about their needs.

6. Rewire performance appraisal and management processes and tools 

The adoption of performance enablement will naturally impact existing performance management processes, necessitating more frequent check-ins and discussions on skill acquisition, proficiency growth, and career development. With goal setting that creates a better shared understanding of how individual goals align with larger team or operations objectives, the process and systems will need to capture a broader set of contributions to the organization, culture, operational improvements, customer value, and financial outcomes. They will need to support capturing agile goal revisions during the performance period as business conditions and requirements change. 

With enabling technology support, a shift from single-manager, top-down performance data to a multi-source, multi-rater evaluation process can bring greater accuracy, reliability, objectivity, and fairness. The use of goal and performance calibration sessions, in which a panel of leaders evaluates individual managers' assessments, further enhances the accuracy and fairness of performance evaluations, offering more robust and trustworthy feedback for employees.

Finally, keep the year-end performance evaluation and documentation process, but improve and adapt it to encompass the changes. The value of a summary that drives comparatives across similar-role and level employees, meets leadership expectations without radical departure, and informs pay, advancement, deployment, skills, and career development direction and decisions remains important.

7. Free and empower managers through job redesign 

Industry research data is consistent—middle managers are overwhelmed by bureaucratic and time-consuming administrative requirements. What suffers is their time and focus available to manage, direct, and coach the employees for whose performance they remain responsible. Removing responsibilities for technical contributions (by creating dual career tracks that establish senior-level expert roles), using AI agents, bots, and other automation to handle repetitive tasks, and installing expert proxies to conduct candidate screening and assessment can free up their time to coach their assigned workers.

8. Leverage performance enablement technologies

Performance enablement technologies are available and continue to improve and expand their capabilities. HR systems ranging from integrated talent management and LMS to dedicated performance and major human capital management (HCM) platforms offer embedded capabilities. Many of these leverage AI agents that summarize data and insights on goals, achievements, skills, and growth; draft feedback and guidance; and automate behavioral prompts that managers can use to prepare for and manage discussions and to communicate feedback more efficiently.

9. Establish monitoring processes and mechanisms

Develop measurement standards and metrics to assess and track the acceptance, adoption, and use of performance enablement techniques. Use employee listening systems and techniques, 360-degree and upward feedback on managerial behaviors, and pulse surveys to assess adoption and effectiveness. Use AI capabilities to capture and summarize calendar and email data that reveal the frequency of check-ins (and canceled sessions) and the delivery of managerial feedback and development recommendations. Use automated systems and AI tools for contemporaneous note-taking to document check-in conversations and data on performance feedback, progress, and skills development recommendations and actions taken.

Track and assess the impact of changes and the effectiveness of performance enablement by analyzing and comparing measured performance, productivity, and outputs of well-coached teams with those of teams with lower or still-emerging adherence to processes and behaviors. This allows HR to measure the true ROI of the ecosystem and its associated processes and practices.

Relevant Practices & Tools

Advanced Performance Management Practices that are Strategy Driven and People-centered. >

Performance Management at this level is both a strategy and a process deliberately designed to align employee work efforts and behaviors with the strategies and priorities of the larger business... more »

Incorporating Coaching and Mentoring into Performance Management to Better Engage Employees in their Own Performance. >

Enhancing managerial feedback and coaching is a process informed and driven in part by training and development, in part through feedback, and in part by reinforcement or rewards tied to excellence as a coach... more »

Providing Frequent Coaching and Feedback to Adapt and Adjust Performance Throughout the Year. >

Coaching & Mentoring is an employee development activity that, in the context of performance management, involves a manager providing feedback and guidance on an ongoing basis to help employees improve how they conduct work and achieve outcomes... more »

Calibrating Goals and Performance to Enhance Group Equity and Fairness of Performance Evaluations. >

Key elements to emerging performance management are the group comparison and alignment of employee goals and performance evaluations... more »

The Change Readiness Approach Tool: Define, Measure, and Report Organizational Readiness to Adopt New Ways of Working. >

The purpose of the change readiness assessment is to understand the readiness for change across the various stakeholder groups, with a focus on identifying the opportunities and barriers that may impact adoption of the new ways of working... more »