The last few years have seen an enormous drive to achieve higher performance and increasingly engaged staff. New and sometimes controversial performance management systems have been introduced and often quickly abolished, but all seem to miss the point. The secret to achieving higher performance and highly engaged staff is developing an embedded performance culture.
So what are the essential characteristics of an embedded performance culture?
Purpose
Knowing why you are doing something, how it contributes to the work being done by others, and understanding how your work makes a worthwhile contribution over and above the success of your contribution, generates greater motivation to perform better.
Challenge
All people perform better when they are challenged to achieve something which they believe is possible even if they cannot quite see how to achieve it. If challenges can be aligned to their personal strengths and motivation, as well as organisation strategy, and reviewed regularly to ensure that they remain valid and relevant, they are most likely to rise to the occasion and achieve them.
Attention
Everyone likes a degree of attention and to be appreciated. Ensuring that you are aware of what everyone is doing, telling them that you have seen them doing it and providing frequent, constructive feedback, is a very powerful incentive.
Development
Another powerful motivator is encouraging people to believe they can get even better. Aligning their roles to their strengths and skills and giving them an insight, through further training, secondment or stepping up into more senior roles for short periods into the better prospects they could achieve, can encourage people to develop, even when pay rises are scarce.
Recognition
Recognition is one of the most powerful motivators there is. However, any form of recognition must be seen as fair, based on clear criteria and applied consistently. People who believe that they are being treated unfairly rarely perform well.
Choice
Whilst people cannot always choose their circumstances, they can choose how they think about them and what they are going to do about it. Encouraging optimism, focusing on the factors that are within their control and creating effective technical, emotional and practical support networks helps to create conditions of “choice.”
