👋 Welcome to this doc!

Hi! Thank you for the opportunity to present this proposal for ACME’s Performance Management System overhaul. In this document you will find my overall performance philosophy, assumptions for this project, and a strategic roadmap that takes into consideration an evolving and cross-functional approach. There’s a handy table of contents outline to the right if you need help getting oriented. Just hover over those pretty little lines that look like a ruler. 👍

Your vision is to balance operational efficiency with employee engagement and development, ensuring a culture of continuous improvement and high performance.

Me too. Let’s go.

💭 Philosophy

Before we get started, you should know that I hold a few core beliefs:

1. Employees own their career growth, but Managers own the conversations. It is a Manager’s responsibility to proactively create space to discuss current skills/performance and growth opportunities. It is an Employee’s responsibility to share their career goals and take active accountability for their growth. This is a conversation that should happen monthly at a minimum, not because promotions happen frequently, but because growth should happen continuously.
2. Continuous (Documented!) Feedback means no surprises, which means scalable, consistent, timely performance management. The more that performance management can be an ongoing conversation, the better employees are set up to course-correct when things aren’t going well, and take advantage of opportunities to level up when they are.
3. Performance Improvement Plans must be used in a genuine effort to improve performance. Both parties must enter the agreement in good faith, and mutually commit to actions that allow the employee a chance to succeed. The goal is to make both the employee and the company successful by documenting and communicating clear expectations and actionable feedback!

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Continuous Feedback = Continuous Growth

In order to enable a high-performance culture where employees are able to learn, experiment, and grow, you have to build a space that is psychologically safe for managers and employees alike to offer and receive feedback.

We do this with simple and accessible tools to stay organized, equitable training to set a baseline expectation, and frequent check-ins to gather feedback.

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🗺️ Strategic Roadmap: 6 month plan

If we want to go from “loosey goosey” to “lasting impact”, we need a strategic but practical roadmap. It’s important to take the time to understand not just our desired final destination, but the reality of our current surroundings, existing construction zones in the org, and potential roadblocks that could risk or delay our success.

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Assumptions: In this plan, I am assuming

• All employees are currently leveled for their roles, to align with company compensation bands
• Hierarchy is relatively flat, with Managers, Department Heads, Leadership, and C-Suite as the only supervisory roles
• There is no current standard for documenting, giving, or receiving performance feedback (in terms of cadence, quality/content expectations, systems/tooling, or impact on promotions and career growth)
• We have a range of experience and tenure, with an accompanying range of enthusiasm for a project like this. </aside>

Humans are gonna human, and for many people, their natural reaction to a new policy or program is to resist change. With the knowledge that it is impossible to build a truly neutral product, and that the concept of performance management carries a ton of baggage for most companies, we want to approach this with a plan that is: