Why performance management is needed in HR
Every office environment is a unique setting in which a team of employees work together towards a company’s goal.
And while each company will have their own company culture and way of doing things, there will always be a human resources (HR) department who are required to stick to the rules.
Performance management (PM) on the other hand, isn’t exactly a department or, sadly, a priority for most companies. But there is a way in which the two can go together for the good of the company.
We’ll talk about exactly what it is that HR and PM are, respectively, responsible for. Then we will be able to discuss why performance management is needed in the human resources department.
What are human resources all about?
Human resources are concerned about the wellbeing of all the human assets within a company. So, the employers and employees. They are responsible for all the processes involved in recruiting, interviewing and hiring of employees as well as managing the internal interactions between members of the company. Where there’s conflict, there’s an HR manager. When changes need to be made within the structuring of the company, HR is behind the scenes to sort it out.
In human resources, you are responsible for sticking to the legal responsibilities that companies need to have towards their employees. This means being fair in all employer to employee meetings, management changes and the fair and respectable treatment of every person in the building. If there are difficult conversation to have or accusations to clear, human resources are involved in the resolution side of things.
And to add to these responsibilities are the concerns of employee performance and satisfaction. Which leads us to…
What is performance management all about?
Performance management is focused around, well, the performance aspects of an organisation. And it’s more than just the performance of the company as a whole, but the performance of the company’s people too. You see where the connections are building, don’t you?
As a performance manager, you would be required to have a variety of skills to encourage and improve performance within the company. This is usually done by implementing a range of performance management practices such as goal-setting, employee assessments and reviews, acknowledging and rewarding employee success and investing in company training for all employers and employees alike.
PM results in more motivated employees who do better at their job which, ultimately, makes the company do better as well. It helps with fair decision making in terms of earned rewards and takes care of employees so that they can focus on being more productive.
How do the two meet?
The connections are pretty easy to see between human resources and performance management. HR’s concerns about the wellbeing of employees can be achieved through PM practices. Performance management is all about improving an individual’s ability to do better and that will lead to human resources not having to worry about employee satisfaction as it will already be taken care of.
They also meet when it comes to assigning bonuses, salary increases and even letting go of employees. By basing these decisions on performance management system results, human resource managers are making informed, backed-up and fair decisions.
HR is the centre of communication in an office because that is where employees go to vent, complain or disclose personal information. As an HR manager, you need to be effective in communication and for PM you need to be able to communicate as well. How else are employees going to know where they stand performance-wise and find out how they can improve?
Why PM should be in HR
Before we talk about “why”, we need to be clear on the fact that performance management should be in every company and implemented across all departments. Managers should also undertake the role of a performance manager. It just makes sense to incorporate PM with HR first because they’re already in the know about all things “employee”.
Performance management in human resources reinforces the responsibilities HR has to the company. And it’s an easy responsibility to add to their duties because of the similarities. It also means that there is still one voice and one “safe place” of communication between company and employee. It will make employees feel more at ease because of the consistency in relevant messages being reinforced by the appropriate department. There’s no need to completely rearrange the system, just incorporate PM with HR and you’re good to go.
If you look at the performance management course outline, you’ll see that they even cover when to call on HR support. So, it makes even more sense to have HR be the performance managers as well. It also covers many modules that HR managers would have completed along with their HR degree. They were created to work together.