Without talent and a dedicated team, a business stands as nothing more than a good idea. Although it should be a given, in the past, many companies didn’t focus on performance management trends as a means to promote growth and satisfaction among team members.

The constantly growing need for tech skills has created an incredibly high demand for talent. This has also led to a war amongst companies over who can recruit top-notch performers in their areas of expertise.

Because of this, companies must ensure that their current employees are being developed to maintain their best performances over the long term. It’s also important to do this while maintaining the employee’s sense of belonging and purpose within a company.

Over the last couple of years, employee engagement and performance management trends have become the biggest factors in terms of PMS. What does the future look like in terms of developing trends for current platforms?

Performance Management Trends

    1. Finding Leverage to Develop Trust

Companies like Apple and Google have been found to be 40% more productive than average companies because of the way they construct their teams and focus on trust. You would think with huge companies like this, you would spread your top talent as far throughout the company as you could.

However, 95% of their top talent is involved in the primary operations of these businesses instead of being spread out across many areas. Consider the following fact regarding Apple’s production of the iPhone 10. It took 600 engineers at Apple less than two years to brainstorm, develop, debug, and redeploy the iPhone 10. It took 10,000 engineers five years at Microsoft to develop, and ultimately scrap Windows Vista.

The difference between these two organizations is the way their teams were constructed. Extending trust to employees increases productivity tenfold.

    2. Continuing to Increase Employee Support

No longer are performance assessments looked at in terms of, “how well are you doing your job for this company to benefit us?” Instead, the overall theme is, “what changes can we make to make this team dynamic more mutually beneficial to everyone involved?” The “help me help you” approach seems to be working much better.

Talent is in such high demand these days that organizations can’t afford to just terminate an employee and easily find someone to fill their job the next day. It doesn’t work like that anymore. Substantial funding goes into recruiting team members to perform highly technical roles within an organization.

The chances are a company that does let go of employees like that will witness those same employees get scooped up by a more efficient organization and turned into powerhouses. This is what quality LMS and PMS platforms do.

Instead of focusing on whipping employees into shape and forcing them to bend to the will of a company, organizations are taking a more proactive approach when it comes to grooming team members. More attention and focus are placed on the personal and business goals of each employee at an individual level.

By using a PMS as a means to focus on employee retention rather than replacement, organizations are saving themselves significant amounts of money on recruiting and onboarding a new hire. Additionally, using performance assessments to turn your workforce into a revolving door because of poor performance does nothing for your corporate culture.

Employees want to be a part of something that has meaning. There’s no meaning to a company that has a high turnover rate; there’s no culture, there’s no future, there’s no hope. The modern corporate workforce is more interested in taking part in something special and becoming a voice in an organization’s daily activities and success.

By aligning an employee’s goals with those of the company, the chances for retention and a long future of mutually beneficial collaboration exist at a much higher rate. We don’t see this model going anywhere anytime soon.

    3. Rethinking Job Roles

When employees can do what they do best, it makes your entire organization more efficient and productive. The majority of employees want the opportunity to perform the role they do best, regardless of what their job title may be.

There will be a continuing trend toward “job crafting” as opposed to outright hiring for static jobs. Job crafting started to become popular during the last couple of years and is said to increase productivity significantly.

Instead of employees applying for specific positions, companies will hire qualified applicants and create their position based on skill and areas of efficiency. This relies heavily on analytics, but with a strong PMS and LMS system, accomplishing an efficient job crafting process is no problem.

Now more than ever, companies have specific assignments that require a designated set of skills and areas of expertise. Because of the constantly changing scope of projects and vast array of clients, there’s a constant need for these skill sets and specialty areas of expertise.

It makes more sense for companies to recruit from the inside in a manner that displays a constantly changing set of job duties. However, the model makes sense, and companies report much higher productivity rates and customer satisfaction because of it.

Does this mean we could see the end of the static job? We don’t think so, at least not yet. However, it does mean the current corporate landscape is evolving, and companies will be required to keep up with these changes and trends.

In a corporate world that’s constantly making changes and speed-of-light technology updates, the current corporate employee must have the ability to keep up with these dynamics. Changes to PMS platforms, allowing them to bend and become more suitable for the changes being made, will ultimately lead to more efficient team members who have a wide variety of roles in their job descriptions.

This will lead to a continuing trend of a competitive workforce and recruiting process. To keep up, companies must maintain cutting-edge performance management software to assess and retain high-quality team members.