As organisations continue to embrace hybrid work environments, leaders face new challenges in managing and improving employee performance. It can be difficult to maintain consistency and ensure that remote and in-office workers have the necessary skills and knowledge to perform their jobs effectively.
However, there are several pro-active steps leaders can take to maintain and improve team performance in a hybrid work environment.
Setting clear expectations and goals helps ensure everyone is on the same page. These expectations and goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This not only helps everyone understand what is expected of them; it provides a roadmap for achieving agreed objectives.
Regular feedback is crucial to improving employee performance. Leaders should provide feedback on a regular basis to help their team identify areas for improvement and take action. Feedback should be specific, timely, and actionable. It's important to remember feedback shouldn't only focus on where there is room for improvement; it should also include positive feedback to reinforce good performance and motivate the team.
Leaders should provide training and development opportunities to help employees develop new skills and knowledge. It's important to consider the 70:20:10 model when looking at these opportunities — with 70% of learning from experiential learning, 20% from social learning (such as coaching, mentoring, and job shadowing), and 10% from formal training (such as online courses, webinars, and workshops). By incorporating a mixture of these approaches, leaders can help employees develop new skills and knowledge in a more holistic way.
Fostering a culture of continuous improvement can help encourage team members to strive for excellence. This includes celebrating successes, learning from failures, and encouraging team members to share best practices. Leaders should also encourage employees to provide feedback on how to improve processes and procedures.
Despite these proactive measures, sometimes leaders may need to get outside of their comfort zone and raise their concerns if someone in their team is not performing or behaving as expected. These conversations might be less structured and address minor performance issues as they arise, or more structured in a formal process where leaders work with employees to identity the issues and develop a plan to address them.
Developing the skill to improve performance is crucial, but it may not be regularly practiced. If you need a reminder, check out our performance improvement micro-learning package and discover how you can upskill in the flow of your work and support your team to thrive.