Top 7 Fast Emerging Performance Management Trends Of 2020

The ‘future of workplace’ is not in the future anymore. Ode to the millennials taking over the majority of the working population, it is already here and will likely grow faster than expected. With every old generation employee retiring, a millennial is added to the global workforce. This has led to a dramatic change in the way organizations work, treat employees, and manage processes.

According to a study conducted by Mark Emmons & Millennial Branding, the millennials occupy 27% of managerial space, 5% are already at senior management levels, 2% cover the executive level space. Complementing this data, in the next 10 years, 47% aspire to be managers, 7% aim at being executives and 15% have a vision of owning businesses. How does an organization align with these young-minded professionals?

To comply with this, one of the aspects that changed rapidly is performance management. How organizations perceive performance, and how employees respond to them are evolving evidently. There is an urgent need to bring both of them to a healthy alignment. While some of the performance management trends have already been in the talks, many new trends have emerged in 2019 itself. Here are the top 10 performance management trends which will become abundant globally in 2020.

Earlier, annual performance feedback was in place for almost every organization worldwide, let it be of any industry, size or age. But, this process is being pushed out of the HR space for the last few years. Instead, the ongoing feedback is now being implemented everywhere.

• According to Gartner, 81% of HR leaders are exploring ways to change their organization’s performance management systems.
• Less than 1/5th of them believe that their current system is successful.

Chucking the annual performance feedback process which interacted with an employee’s pros and cons once in a year, many organizations are introducing ongoing feedback which is effective for 365 days of the year. Managers are now checking in with their team members’ performance on a regular basis.

Additionally, everyone in the staff will provide feedback on his/her colleague’s performance which will double-check the manager’s report too. Not only is this effective in removing bias, but it is also useful in providing higher transparency and accuracy.

The performance management software market is rising fast, especially in the HR spectrum. The main reason behind this is the rapid shift in performance management practices. Organizations are enabling next-gen technologies that are integrated with traditional platforms like Outlook, Excel, etc.

Software as a service (SaaS) is one of the newest inclusions in the performance management wing of businesses that take care of up to 70% of the day-to-day mundane tasks, enabling HR to focus more on important tasks like employee engagement, happiness index and productivity concerns. They are cloud-based online management softwares that allow easy accessibility and faster communication in terms of analyzing performance, providing feedback, and recording the response too. HRMS (Human Resource Management System) tools are already available and are gaining popularity worldwide because of their capability to enhance performance management readily by 40%.

Mobile phones have transformed the way we spend our daily lives, let it be at home or at the office. On an average, a person picks up his/her phone twice every hour either to check notifications or just for scrolling something. With smartphones in almost every employee’s hand, making performance management accessible over mobiles is quite beneficial to increase productivity.

46% of employees say that using mobile devices for task management reduces the time to do the job by an average of 30 minutes. Mobile task management tools are also gaining popularity in performance management tasks globally due to their capability to communicate, manage and access anywhere, in real-time. Whether a person is standing in a bank queue or is flying overseas, mobile phones can easily keep him/her connected with the tasks.

Long gone are the days when compiling data and creating reports was done through multiple offline softwares. The hassle of such tasks is not anymore a concern for new-age organizations as they are switching to single-window online dashboards to perform, analyze, send, receive and manage tasks. These dashboards are not only easy to use but are also beneficial in terms of buying offline softwares. Businesses switching to such dashboards are not only using but are also recommending them to their peers because of the ready benefits they bring in.

In an era where every individual gives optimum priority to personal growth, organizations need to make sure that their goals are aligned with their employees’. While hiring a talent, expressing the organizational goals clearly will ensure that the employee on-boards with synergy.

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is one of the latest methodologies which global companies like Google and Facebook are using to enhance their compatibility with employees’ individual growth aspects. Many other organizations are quickly switching to OKR tools to help managers set goals, connect their personal growth, and track their progression too.

Employees of today’s generation appreciate transparency in their organization, which they treat as the primary aspect of long-term retention. 52% of Gen Z report that the most important qualities of a leader are honesty and transparency. With such a leader, they stay loyal, connected and in-turn engaged for longer periods.

Two companies that set the bar high in enabling true transparency are Whole Foods and Buffer. These companies, in order to enable transparency also implemented an open salary system. While this may be too extreme for growing markets like India, making weekly progress, plans and concerns publicly open is readily being accepted by many organizations. These organizations believe that when the team gets the opportunity to explore other’s progress and problems, they can get inspired to work on their own better.

With a change in the way employees look at their time in an organization, the number of job hoppers is also increasing fast. On an average, the new generation stays 2 years in an organization before switching to another one for either higher pay or a better environment. In 2020, this trend is expected to increase by 36%. So, the focus for companies to make the environment and increment better to ensure more retention. Out of those who leave a company, a high amount of professionals are rather switching to freelance and short-term contracts too, also known as the Gig Economy.

With the rise of the Gig Economy, the number of freelancers will also increase. This trend is growing so fast that by 2019, 34% of the entire workforce in U.S.A included freelancers. 69% of freelancers say that technology has actually made freelance projects much easier to grab, making portfolio career a comfortable and highly paying option rather than a full-time job. This rising trend will need organizations worldwide to improvise their policies into more freelance-friendly to gain benefits in return.

With the fast pace of changing work environment and culture, organizations will need to stay adept at the latest trends to ensure that the best quality talent comes to them. Apart from these above trends, other concepts like the remote employee are also in the making and may see a great rise in the coming years. The best way to comply with such trends is to partner with an updated and expert talent acquisition company like Pacific, which can help not only in completing tasks but also enabling higher profits.