Concentrate on Coaching and Organizational Goals in Employee Feedback

What companies should communicate to employees about employee performance is a major area of management research and analysis.  Searching the Internet and academic article databases on such terms as employee, performance, evaluation, strategy, and alignment will find hundreds of examples of this research, analysis, and discussions about employee performance feedback.  Much of what is found in recent information recommends changes in the traditional supervisor to employee evaluation, assessment, and rating schemes in practice for dozens of years.

One article found at the Bersin & Associates website provides what seems to me as an excellent overview of the changes being recommended in employee performance feedback.  Click here to read this article.  This article does not eliminate the traditional supervisor to employee performance assessments, but indicates that this traditional practice is only one of the goals of employee feedback, and is a less important contributor to the company’s success than other goals for employee feedback.  These other goals deal not with past performance of the employee, as traditional assessments do, but with aligning the employee’s future performance in ways that support company strategic goals.

Therefore, the major objective of supervisor to employee feedback and supervisor and employee goals for this feedback is not past performance but future directions.  The supervisor now has the role of serving as a coach moving the employee in the direction of acquiring the skills, understanding, motivation, and activities aligned with the company’s strategic goals.

Consider as an example to demonstrate this forward-looking, coaching-management perspective of supervisor-employee feedback, a small company and its accounting function.  Assume the company has three strategic goals:  increased revenues; increased profits; and better customer and vendor relations.  The accounting department would then develop a set of goals for its function that support the company’s strategic goals.  These accounting goals might be: customer and vendor evaluations and analysis; cost analysis; and sales analysis.  Now supervisor to accounting personnel feedback sessions will have a new objective – the needed individual actions, competencies, and analysis to meet the three accounting department goals (which are tied to the company’s goals).

The traditional supervisor-employee work assessments still are needed, but with a lot less importance.  Its importance is now primarily only to screen out those employees who need to be terminated.  All other employees are accepted as worthy in the ways that they are worthy.  These employees are given encouragement and coaching to increase their worthiness, and are asked to set personal goals related to the accounting department’s goals.