Combining the power of employee performance and development

In today’s ever-changing business environment, companies are looking for easy and adaptable ways to increase performance and stay competitive. With a recession still a possibility in 2024 and ongoing global geopolitical instability, leaders will need to be both strategic and flexible in the coming year. Specifically, Gartner research has found that executives and investors are particularly focused on productivity, efficiency, and margin as profitability drivers in 2024.

Driving impactful business outcomes, however, calls for more than just prioritization and focus. It will require real investment, as improving business productivity, efficiency, and margin requires improving the capabilities and impact of your people. This poses a significant challenge for many organizations, as inspiring employee behavior change is difficult without the right systems and processes.

Enter the combined power of employee performance management and development tools. By tapping into the synergy inherent in those two tools, you can drive high, organization-wide performance at scale.

How performance and development go hand-in-hand

People often regard performance management and employee development as two separate processes when, in reality, the two are intrinsically linked.

At Culture Amp, our people scientists recommend “continuous performance management,” which describes a more holistic approach focusing on continuous improvement via regular pulse checks, coaching, and employee development conversations.

This approach leverages both performance management and employee development tools, allowing you to tap into numerous benefits, including:

1. Helping people understand where to develop with people-centric performance management

Continuous performance management is, at its heart, a more people-centric approach to the performance cycle. Building touchpoints for performance and development throughout the year ensures employees know how they’re tracking toward their goals, creating trust and consistency.

On top of that, adopting continuous performance empowers organizations to help their employees determine the right growth areas, which drives ongoing improvement. For example, managers can use regular 1-on-1 meetings to discuss performance feedback and growth. Managers can also share feedback from peers using 360° feedback capabilities to help their team accurately identify their strengths and areas of improvement. The team can then use this feedback to mold their performance and development goals.

2. Building intrinsic motivation with clear development plans and career paths

Deloitte research has shown that growth opportunities are a powerful driver of motivation – which means they directly affect individual and business performance. There’s ample opportunity here for forward-looking organizations: Gartner found that less than one in three employees knows how to progress their career over the next five years.

By leveraging an employee development tool like Develop by Culture Amp, you can motivate employees to make behavioral changes and improve performance with clear, readily accessible career paths and development plans. As a matter of fact, our people scientists have found that lack of development opportunities is the #1 reason an employee leaves or stays with an organization.

Our built-in Career Paths tool helps you build clarity and drive motivation with competency frameworks and role descriptions that paint a motivating future at your company. You can create career paths in and between teams, effectively empowering employees to take both upward and lateral moves – ultimately driving internal mobility and creating multiple ways for employees to grow within your company.

3. Help employees action their development plans to reach both their development and business goals

Employees who don’t feel they have access to clear development opportunities are 41% more likely to leave their current company, according to research from Culture Amp’s people science team.

To prevent this from happening, encourage your employees to build personalized development plans. Then, prepare them to take action on their plan by providing learning resources and goal-setting tools that help them align their individual goals with business needs. Our people scientists recommend linking learning resources to competencies to improve uptake and proficiency.

Then, encourage managers to make development a key topic during their 1-on-1s with their direct reports. With the right guidance and tools, managers can better drive development conversations and improve the employee experience as a whole. Consider upskilling tools like Skills Coach, which uses the magic of spaced repetition to help managers develop key leadership and management skills for the modern world of work.

The benefit of actionable development plans is two-fold: employees get the growth they crave, and the organization experiences higher business outcomes. The latter point is backed by data – Culture Amp data has shown that employees who use development plans see a 30% average performance rating increase.

The key to unlocking synergistic development and performance

While most organizations leverage some form of performance management or employee development tools, not many can tap into the full potential of these two tools working together.

Why is that the case? The most common reason is that companies utilize siloed tools – one for performance and another for development. If the two tools were not designed to work in tandem, it could be time-consuming and difficult to maximize their impact.

Stay ahead of your competitors by investing in an all-in-one employee experience platform with engagement, development, and performance tools that work seamlessly together. Equip your employees to perform at their best, scale productivity, and accelerate growth today.

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