He is an HR professional with skills and experience in team development for creating great work places.

According to the 2019 Global Performance Management Study by Mercer, only 2 percent of companies feel their performance management approach delivers exceptional value. Even though there have been significant changes in performance management processes and systems in the last couple of decades, it still punches well below its weight. I feel there is immense scope for organizations to contemporize performance management and ensure it is in pace with the changing business needs. Here is how I look at the future of Performance Management:

Embrace Growth Mindset
One of the most crucial aspects when we talk about changing the future of performance management is encouraging a growth mindset at workplace. People with a growth mindset are more open to feedback, willing to change & adapt new skills faster, and are intrinsically motivated to learn and perform as compared to those with a fixed mindset. Likewise, growth mindset urges people managers to believe that every individual has a potential to flourish, skills can always be improved, and one can always learn from failures. This augurs well for a forward-looking performance management system.

Foster Innovation
Organizations today must breed a culture of innovation, especially after the COVID-19 crisis that proved that only way to sustain in a first-time situation is creative problem solving. Innovation leads to greater possibilities, cutting edge solutions and gives you a first movers advantage. A performance management system of future must promote flexibility, creativity and support risk-taking by encouraging people to work beyond their defined KRAs and KPIs.

Infusion Of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already made its way in several HR systems & processes like talent acquisition, learning & development and there is signification progress happening in this space. I believe in 2021, attention will turn to AI within performance management where organizations shall start employing technology to make informed people decisions. Future would see HR and businesses using AI to draw out themes from large amounts of performance data, predicting future trends of high performers based on observed patterns and getting insights on whom to promote, who requires training, who is a potential successor etc. without any biases coming into play.

Agile Goals & Continuous Performance Dialogue
In today’s VUCA world, organizations need to maintain an element of flexibility when it comes to setting goals. The current COVID crisis has cemented this belief further. It is no longer pragmatic to set goals once a year. Goals with a near-term focus ensure that organizations stay relevant to the changing business priorities and also keep people

hooked on to their deliverables. Real-time feedback at the end of every milestone completion truly aids performance development as it allows managers and individuals to keep conservation pointed to recent performance. Organizations should also look at incorporating frequent assessment cycles in their performance framework as it helps in ensuring consistent performance throughout the year than having to see a spike at the fag-end of the performance period, as seen in a traditional approach.

De-Coupled Performance Reviews & Performance Rewards
Organizations must steer away from using performance reviews as a mechanism for rewarding people. This dilutes true essence of a performance dialogue and reviews are done keeping the end goal as increment pay out percentage in mind. Organizations must devise ways to objectivize business goals and measure them rigorously and continuously to assess people & business performance. A metric driven approach to evaluate business imperatives is a far more meaningful way of evaluating business & individual performance than subjective assessment of people performance. Reward people on business successes and develop them for their future growth, this shall be a true future-focused, outcome-oriented performance management process.

One of the most crucial aspects when we talk about changing the future of performance management is encouraging a growth mindset at workplace

Inspire Collaboration
The workplace around us has changed significantly in the last couple of years and organizations are now becoming flatter with a mix of full-time employees, gig workers, and geographically spread contributors collaborating on multiple projects and initiatives. Today, there are functional teams, cross-functional teams, teams which are created to complete a specific task or project, teams based on skill-sets, etc. and hence it becomes critical for organizations to credibly measure team performance as much as they measure individual performance. I strongly believe that human resource professionals should start incorporating team based behaviours into their performance framework and inspire collaboration.

Integrated Talent Management Strategy
Any enhancement in the performance management framework can truly become impactful if organizations integrate it with their talent management strategy. Talent management aims at aligning employee performance with the business priorities and goes much deeper than your usual performance management process. It focuses on identifying individual potential, creating customized learning plans, enriching job roles, creating career progression plans, identifying successors and much more. It’s a much-needed change which focuses on the holistic development of people and goes beyond just performance reviews that are usually focused on current performance on the job.

Performance management is one of the most crucial processes in any organization and if organizations wish to derive greater value from it then they need to reimagine their performance management strategy. The future as I see is agile, tech-enabled and focused on growth.