In an interaction with Higher Education Review Magazine, Shalini Seshadri, Vice President- HR, State Street, shared her insights on various aspects of the key strategies that can help in motivating employees to achieve their performance goals, challenges that organizations face while implementing an effective performance management system and more. Shalini is a seasoned HR professional with over 17 years of experience across diverse HR functions. Prior to joining State Street in 2017, she has had successful stints with companies such as Thomson Reuters, Barclays, Adventity and SAP Labs India.

What are some of the key strategies that can help in motivating employees to achieve their performance goals?

Instead of waiting for every three months to do a proper appraisal, it is important for managers to do a monthly one-to-one meeting with every employee to let them know about their performance and suggest on areas that might need improvement. Thus, keeping an open line of communication between the manager and the employees serves as a very advantageous move for the organization towards helping its employees achieve their performance objectives. Companies must also have a proper employee rewards & recognition program in place to recognize outstanding employees and create a sense of healthy competition among all employees. Most importantly, companies must ensure that all the roles are well-defined so that there is no confusion/conflict in carrying-out any tasks.

Throw some light on the common challenges that organizations face while implementing an effective performance management system.

The first challenge in this regard is the employees not having clarity of what their roles and responsibilities within the organization. Thus, it is very important for business leaders to clearly define each role and explain to every employee what their job profile entails. Secondly, most employees feel that they are the best at what they do without even comparing their performance with fellow employees and thus do not take feedback from others regarding their work performance. This will have a very adverse impact on their performance. Thirdly, many employees stick to their domain role and do not attempt to explore roles in other domains. This not only hinders their career growth pace, but also creates a barrier in terms of their knowledge base and the skills that they possess.

Suggest a few key metrics and KPIs that organizations can consider to measure the effectiveness of their performance management program.

Attrition rate of top talent is one of the key metrics to measure the success if a performance management program within an organization. Also, the number of people willing to explore roles in other domains and the number of people that are being promoted to higher positions are two other simple, yet effective metrics in this regard. In the case of low performing employees, the number of them who are taking-up training programs to improve their job performance also is a clear indicator of the effectiveness of a performance management program. Most of the organizations only look at their top & bottom performers, but fail to pay close attention to mid-level performers, who comprise the majority of their workforce. Business leaders must make sure that as part of their performance management program, there must be opportunities made available for this segment of employees to be able to easily switch job roles and foray into other domains & functions as well.

How can we leverage technology and data analytics to enhance the effectiveness of performance management processes and decisions?

Today, we are in an age where technology is at the core of every process and function in in an organization; the same holds true for performance management as well. One noteworthy contribution of technology is in terms of the HRMS (Human Resource Management Systems) that are being widely used across majority of the organizations today. HRMS today facilitate employee feedback collection from managers, streamline trainings for employees, keeps track of their attendance and helps the HR teams to accounting & payroll functions. As a result, HRMS plays a significant role in the performance management activities within an organization. Lastly, having a clear line of communication among all employees for hassle-free collaboration among various teams has a broad impact on employee performance, and in turn, the overall organizational growth. Latest communication tools and technologies have been true enablers in this regard by facilitating hassle-free communication across the entire organizations irrespective of the geographical location of the employees.