Do you still use a traditional method of evaluating employee performance and are not sure if you should invest in a structured performance management process?
Well, the benefits of performance management will convince you otherwise.
With effective performance management, you can upskill your workforce and prepare them for taking on bigger roles within your organization. It will also help you keep your employees engaged and motivated, boosting retention.
Moreover, upskilling and training employees also gives them more autonomy and ensures accountability. These are just some reasons why you should create an optimized performance management process.
Read on to find seven key benefits of performance management for your company in the Middle East.
1. Improved Employee Performance
Performance management frameworks and processes are designed in a way that incentivizes employees to perform well to receive specific rewards.
Performance management for companies in the Middle East typically involves employee performance ratings. These year-end ratings determine who will be promoted or how much variable pay or bonus a person will receive.
That’s a good enough incentive to create healthy competition within a team and encourage employees to perform better than their team members to get the top ratings.
The result? Improved team and individual performance, which is a win for the company.
2. More Employee Engagement and Retention
When you give employees specific targets to achieve and a goal to work toward, they’re more engaged.
Performance rewards and regular one-on-one sessions to discuss performance keep employees engaged and motivated. This, in turn, leads to higher employee retention because disengaged employees are more like to leave than engaged ones.
You can further boost engagement by having employees keep track of their performance goals via a performance management platform.
PeopleStrong, for instance, makes it easy for both employees and managers to track performance goals and update progress periodically,
3. Skill Development and Internal Mobility
Performance management is a crucial process in any organization in the Middle East as it helps employers upskill their workforce and improve talent management.
Whether you want to fill a position or prepare someone to take on a bigger role, upskilling existing employees is easier than hiring externally.
By adding learning and development goals to your performance management process, you can achieve that.
Moreover, companies in the Middle East have been facing a skill gap. A recent survey showed that it’s most prominent in Kuwait and Qatar.
Effective performance management can help you bridge that gap by motivating employees to learn new skills as part of their annual performance goals.
It also helps with succession planning as you can train your employees to be ready to fill senior positions.
4. Fair and Transparent Performance Evaluations
Having a well-structured and transparent process ensures that there are no biases or favoritism in performance evaluations.
For the longest time, one major issue with performance evaluation was that the managers or evaluators had too much power. They could practically promote people they liked and hinder the career growth of those they don’t.
A well-defined performance management process changes that by ensuring there are clear, measurable goals, and performance is tracked in a quantifiable manner.
Using a performance management platform, employees can update their weekly or monthly achievements. Managers can review and approve or schedule a check-in to discuss. Everything is updated on the system to maintain complete transparency.
This makes the entire process unbiased and fair for all employees, which boosts job satisfaction and retention.
5. Higher Accountability and Autonomy
One important goal of performance management is to encourage employees to take on more responsibility and be more autonomous. As employees grow in their career trajectory and take on senior roles, they need less oversight, which saves time and resources for the company.
Moreover, performance management allows companies to set clear expectations for employees, holding them accountable when those are not met. This creates a fair system of evaluating performance and identifying low-performing employees who need to do better.
Interestingly, 83% of employees in the Middle East feel they have enough autonomy to do their jobs well.
Clearly, companies in the Middle East are doing something right. Having a great performance management process will further improve the situation.
6. Better Employee-Manager Relationships
If you design your performance management process correctly, it will include regular one-on-one meetings between employees and their managers. The purpose of these is to provide mentorship to employees and give constructive feedback to help them achieve their performance goals.
When managers work as mentors to help employees, instead of criticizing their performance, they end up building a great rapport with their team members. This helps build better employee-manager relationships and improves overall team motivation and productivity.
7. Overall Business Growth
As discussed, effective performance management has many benefits. As a whole, these contribute to the overall business success and growth.
When you have a motivated, engaged, and high-performing workforce, your company will perform well, win more clients, and retain existing ones.
Leverage a robust performance management platform like PeopleStrong to get performance insights to optimize your process.
With PeopleStrong, you can get individual and team performance insights that help you track and evaluate performance and take measures to improve.
Conclusion
Hopefully, reading these benefits of performance management has motivated you to create and implement a framework within your company in the Middle East.
If you already have a system in place, make sure you optimize it and ensure complete transparency.
Using a good performance management platform can help with that, as all the performance tracking and rating calculation can be done online. This removes the scope for human bias and unfair practices.
If you’re looking for the right performance management solution for your Middle East business, try PeopleStrong.
