Are employees becoming less career focused since the pandemic hit? Seems that way…
A recent Aviva poll of 1,000 employees found that since the pandemic, 47% of respondents admit that their career is less of a priority to them. The same survey found that 44% had trouble switching off from their jobs and 40% were concerned about work-related burnout.
When looking at the biggest sources of workplace stress and burnout, one of the most common is pressure to perform to meet rising expectations. Although it may seem like a paradox that people are experiencing burnout without benefit to their careers, this could be a clear indication that personal growth should be tied to performance. With further education, an employee may find that previously onerous tasks are now much more easily understood and accomplished.
To re-engage your employees and help avoid burnout, now could be the perfect time to re-evaluate both your company culture and how you measure performance.
Growth Culture vs. Performance Culture: What’s the Difference?
The paradigm has long been that growth and performance in business are opposite entities: growth gives precedence to the process of ongoing learning and development opportunities, continuous feedback, and building upon employees’ skills. On the other hand, performance is more concerned with business goals, results, and measurable targets.
However, in the mission to re-engage employees and further avoid workplace stress, it could be time to bridge the gap. KPIs represent a current snapshot of the workforce mapped against goals, but it’s becoming more apparent that to fully succeed, companies need to look to the future. To do this, growth and performance need to be seen as partners, not rivals.
Why Is Blending Performance and Growth Important for Employee Engagement?
Linking performance and growth means creating an environment where your people will be encouraged to learn and develop as part of their role. By linking this to company goals and objectives, it becomes a business priority and not a second thought. Encouraging ongoing learning is an effective way to improve business performance, as, according to Deloitte data, companies with a growth mindset are three times more profitable and have up to four times better retention than those who don’t. This equates to an increase in your performance and a generally happier team.
How to Inspire a Culture of Growth and Performance
Here are five ideas to link growth and performance in your team’s strategy:
- Encourage Continuous Learning and Development: Support your employees to play an active role in their careers, their progression and their learning opportunities. Giving your people the time to devote to growth and development will increase the value of continuous learning and help to bridge any skill gaps, which can help to improve performance targets in the long term.
- Adapt Goals in Real Time: Instead of setting your goals at the beginning of the year and casting them to the back of your mind until appraisals loom, they should be reviewed and benchmarked regularly. An employee 1:1 or a team meeting could be the ideal opportunity to discuss progress and adjust goals where necessary as business priorities change. This will encourage you to align your goals more closely with growth and see them as ongoing, rather than something fixed.
- Align Performance Objectives: Goal alignment across the business is a good way to ensure everyone’s working towards a common goal. If performance targets are supported by L&D–be that with certifications, courses, or skills development–it helps employees work towards a performance objective whilst being underpinned by their positive learning efforts.
- Check in With Your Team Regularly: More than ever, it’s important for employers to actively engage with their workforce to ensure their success. Set regular 1:1s with employees to discuss progress, whether they have any concerns and to see how aligned they are with the rest of the company’s goals. This will give you a better understanding of any gaps you need to address and areas for improvement.
- Invest in the Right Tools: The key to effectively building a positive culture lies in having the right tool. Investing in a learning management system allows you to easily track your learning in one place, to communicate with your employees and regularly track and update goal progress. This means, in turn, that it will be easier to align growth and performance as you’ll have full information about educational progress and current KPIs at your fingertips.
About Bridge
Bridge believes that learning and performance belong together and that’s exactly what our Performance Management System does.
Our functionality enables your organization to manage and track company-wide 1:1s, performance conversations, and year-end annual reviews, all in one place. Best of all, the Bridge LMS integrates with every piece of the performance module, bringing rich context to your learning strategy.
With Bridge, your people are at the heart of all you do: you can seamlessly align individual goals with company goals, track, measure your employee’s skills and deliver targeted learning programs to integrate learning and skill development into your performance.
