I recently had a meeting with one of my clients- OfficePCs who provide awesome IT support of hardware and software to businesses within the ACT region. Some work was being completed on improving some structured processes around the people management in the business.

For this task, I was fortunate to be able to leverage the resources of my HR guru (and wife) Stacey to help with the process, so instead of just one Small Fish, they got the help of ‘school’ (sorry for the fish pun)! This got me thinking about the performance management process for businesses and although my Canberra Small Fish colleague Richard Everson recently posted a blog on Performance Management I thought a few ideas on the topic were still appropriate.

In my free coaching sessions, it is apparent that the area of process around managing people is often missing. Businesses start with a small team-usually the owner, and as they grow to employ people, quite often the system to implement a structured and detailed process to manage good and not so good performance is overlooked until an issue arises.

So what should you do?

My HR consultant recommends the following simple process loop to implement and manage this from a start-up standpoint:

1. Understand the overall business goals and objectives (Your Vision)
2. Establish individual performance goals linked to the vision, and identify the key skills needed to achieve the vision (this should be a collaborative process with those involved)
3. Improve the performance with ongoing performance coaching and feedback (and document all discussions)
4. Evaluate the performance based on the objectives and targets (so you need to track them)
5. Reward the performance (this can be financially, verbally, or whatever your organisational culture dictates). The old adage of what get measured improves, and what gets rewarded gets repeated is true, we all love positive recognition.

The key message is the same as with most aspects of business. You need to have a process and a system for all aspects, and due to the fact that people are your biggest cost (usually) and your biggest asset as they grow $$ for you, you must establish one now if you don’t have it in place.

The time is right now to review your process in this area and ensure your staff is your number one asset. Should you need any help, of course feel free to contact me for a free coaching session, and who knows you may be able to get the awesome support from Stacey too!

Tony Ozanne
Small Fish Business Coaching Canberra
www.smallfish.com.au