How to Improve Employee Organizational Performance

Employee organizational performance aligns individual performance goals with the company's overall objectives, ensuring that each employee’s contributions support the organization’s mission. To cultivate stellar performance among your employees, proactively address any questions employees may have or challenges they may face in their roles. Encourage open communication, create a culture of trust, discuss job expectations, offer conflict resolution training, and make yourself available to support your team members.

With strategies in place to help your team feel supported, you can inspire them to perform their best every day. This can mean fewer mistakes, higher sales, and better customer service. Read on to discover ways to drive employee organizational performance. 

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Defining employee organizational performance

Employee organizational performance brings together individual employee performance goals with the broader aims of the company to ensure that every person’s work is aligned with organizational purposes.

Individual high-performance employees can play a significant role in organizational success by increasing productivity and profitability. These employees also make fewer mistakes, making quality issues less likely to arise. You can help your organization accomplish its goals by maximizing employee productivity and motivation and meaningfully addressing any challenges they may face. 

Understanding the dynamics of employee organizational performance

The dynamics among employees play an integral role in the success of an organization, and you can be transparent about this with your employees. Consider using performance reviews to show them how their work within their teams affects the overall company performance.

Effective teams include members whose skills complement each other, who respect one another, and who communicate clearly with each other. Managers need to understand how to curate effective teams and how the dynamics within and among teams shape the success and productivity of the entire workplace. An effective manager will know how to support healthy workplace dynamics to help employees thrive for the organization's sake and the staff's well-being.

Read more: Improve Teamwork with These Simple Steps

The role of employee performance in business success

When employees are properly motivated, the workplace runs more efficiently, encouraging employee retention. Motivation has a big impact on overall company success. By using every employee’s strengths, motivating contributions, and leading by example, you can create an environment where employees want to do their best to achieve organizational goals. 

Key strategies to improve employee organizational performance

Giving your employees the tools they need to succeed can increase employee performance and boost employee satisfaction. Reviewing employee performance regularly can help you spot improvement areas and indicate what learning opportunities would benefit your teams most.

Key strategies to support and improve employee organizational performance include understanding why an employee’s performance isn’t up to par and working together to improve it, reminding workers of your expectations and offering feedback on any questions, and providing more training or mentoring to get all teams on the right track.

Setting clear expectations and goals

Employees often do a better job when they feel comfortable in their work environment and can talk openly with higher-ups, so it’s helpful for managers to be approachable and supportive. For example, you can take the time to provide details when you assign an employee a task. By clearly explaining your expectations and how they pertain to larger organizational ends, your employees can feel well-equipped to take on projects. 

Providing regular feedback and recognition 

Offering positive feedback and support to employees who perform well and constructive criticism to those workers whose performance is lacking is greatly beneficial. This communication can help employees improve their work and encourage better productivity. When necessary, managers might suggest specific, actionable improvements so that employees feel informed and prepared for their roles. Comprehensive feedback can improve company performance by encouraging underperformers to take greater ownership of their roles and by reinforcing strong performers so that they feel valued. 

Investing in employee development and training

For employees struggling in certain areas of their jobs, training sessions offer a forum for them to ask questions and clarify their challenges. These training sessions can refresh your employees’ current knowledge of what your company expects of them and help them gain valuable new skills. Training may take the form of formal education, mentoring, learning experiences, or assessments, and targeted training offers employees personalized learning activities designed to upskill them in certain crucial areas for your business. By providing training programs, you can elevate employee performance and confidence and foster a knowledge-sharing culture.

Creating a positive work environment

A positive work environment can go a long way in supporting employee organizational performance, primarily when you work to ensure that employees feel a sense of belonging within your company. One essential component to creating a positive work environment is diversity and inclusion. A company that cultivates a diverse workplace and welcomes the cultures and ideas that make its employees unique is better able to encourage employee engagement, creativity, and performance. This kind of setting instills trust and openness, which is crucial to achieving effective team dynamics.

Read more: Company Culture: Why It Matters

A positive environment that is inclusive of diverse employees sets up your organization for more innovation and varied problem-solving and prepares you to serve a broader, more global customer base. In this way, you can further drive employee retention and organizational performance.

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Addressing challenges in employee organizational performance

Employees’ performance affects many aspects of your organization. Employees who are satisfied in the workplace are more likely to contribute their best work. Conversely, their confidence may plummet if they don’t feel appreciated or like part of a team.

As a manager, sometimes simply listening can help you better understand and address employees' challenges, and the employees may have useful suggestions to offer. Talk to your workers one-on-one and understand how these performance issues arose. Discuss how the performance issues impact the rest of the employee’s team and the overall business, and establish clear expectations and objectives for moving forward. Remain available and approachable so that you can provide feedback and resources when necessary. 

Identifying common performance challenges

When an employee is underperforming, many factors may be at play other than a lack of experience and skills. Some situations managers can look for include insufficient growth opportunities, inadequate or absent performance reviews, miscommunication among workers, or a lack of shared vision within the company.

You can help mitigate these challenges by creating a workplace that encourages high performers. To do this, share strategies about business decisions, encourage employee wellness by giving them a sustainable workload, and recognize their successes in real time. You can also help prevent performance lapses through regular check-ins with your employees and by providing clear feedback, support, and resources.

Overcoming resistance to change

While change can be good, it can also be difficult, and a good manager will attend closely to the effects of organizational change on employees. To help avoid employee resistance to new initiatives, consider incorporating your team members in any new rollouts and process improvement initiatives. Allowing your teams to participate in proposed changes can help them to adapt to and embrace new business procedures, and a smoothly executed transition can have positive impacts on employee performance in several ways, such as:

• Heightened motivation. Organizational change can increase motivation when employees can provide feedback and insights. Drawing from employee knowledge during times of change shows them that their opinions matter.

• Increased job satisfaction. When you design organizational changes to benefit employees, they often feel more valued. This can lead to greater job satisfaction and an increase in productivity.

• Better teamwork. When an organization changes, employees must come together to adapt to new systems and learn new processes. Collaboration allows employees to share their ideas, challenges, and suggestions with a team. Discussing workplace issues with other team members can help discover innovations and problem-solving techniques. 

The most successful leaders are those who anticipate changes and understand the impact change has on employees. 

Measuring and evaluating employee organizational performance

Managers must explore evaluation methods to find better, more effective ways to review an employee’s performance. When measuring and evaluating performance, you can choose a variety of methodical approaches to collect qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Methods you might consider include graphic rating scales to measure performance; 360-degree feedback that takes into account reviews from other coworkers and managers; self-evaluation; management by objective, in which employees and managers agree on objectives and how to measure them; a simple yes/no checklist to answer basic questions; and a reliable ranking method. Take a look at some key methods below in more detail.

Utilizing key performance indicators (KPIs)

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a data-driven way to gain insights about what is and is not working for your company by tracking your employees’ organizational performance. KPI tools offer various templates you can use to quantify employee performance and ensure team members are working toward meeting company objectives.

Ensure your KPIs are clearly defined and doable for employees so they can work as a team toward a single goal and feel satisfaction when they achieve it together. Each department should have a specific set of KPIs for the performance of that particular team. By utilizing KPIs, you can quickly identify and solve any issues, leading to more informed decision-making and, ultimately, a more successful organization.

Conducting performance reviews and development plans

Performance reviews are beneficial because they allow you to refresh employees on their current responsibilities and get their feedback. Over the last decade, employee performance reviews have become more dynamic and proactive than a simple yearly interview to determine whether an employee receives a raise.

Instead, managers are beginning to realize the benefits of continuous reviews. When businesses observe employee performance regularly, they can discover areas that need improvement, offer training options, and ensure alignment with company goals. Offering constructive criticism confirms that all employees understand your expectations and are actively engaged in their roles.

Leveraging technology for performance analytics 

While some employee performance measurement systems are less than accurate due to human bias, technology can help conduct performance evaluations that rely on data to reduce the influence of bias and create more paths to career development.

A learning management system (LMS) is a great software tool to help avoid biases during employee reviews by monitoring an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and observing their performance objectively. The right LMS for your business allows employees and their managers to create custom training programs that promote individual career growth and ultimately encourage employee retention. Using new or different technology specific to your business needs can also lead to more engaged workers.

Getting started on Coursera

The main goal for improving employee organizational performance is to develop productive, satisfied employees who contribute to a successful business. Knowledge of relevant software and programs, and the skills you need to lead your team toward success, are available on Coursera.

Attract frontline talent, support internal mobility, and prepare workers for in-demand, digital jobs with Career Academy from Coursera. Featuring a curated catalog of guided tutorials and projects focused on high-value digital skills and tools, Career Academy offers competitive career development opportunities with training programs from industry leaders like Google, Salesforce, Intuit, Meta, and Ashok Leyland, among many others. Explore Coursera for Business to learn how to provide the technology training your business needs to be competitive.