Employee Performance Management: An Interview with Mike Carden

It's really easy to make fun of big businesses. With all their bureaucracy, they tend to move slowly. And they tend to be difficult to work with.

But there's one thing that big businesses typically do much better than smaller companies. And that is conducting employee performance reviews.

In fact, many smaller businesses focus so much on solving day to day crises, that conducting employee reviews falls by the wayside.

Which leads to problems. Lots of problems.

Here's why:

Companies that succeed have strategic plans.

And, when you conduct periodic employee performance reviews, you ensure that your employees have objectives that are congruent with your company's strategic plan.

So rather than employees focusing on tasks that they think are right, you ensure that they accomplish the tasks that really allow your company to grow and profit.

Without performance reviews, you get lots of problems. Management gets frustrated because employees are not achieving key objectives. And employees get frustrated because they don't know if they're doing a good job or not.

Interestingly, when I recently interviewed Mike Carden, co-founder of performance management review company Sonar6, he told me that most employees really like performance reviews, even when they are underperforming.

He said, "It's sort of like playing golf. Even if you don't play great, you want to know your score at the end."

Carden gave me some other great tips on conducting performance reviews to ensure that you get the most out of your employees and your company achieves its objectives.

Among other things, Carden mentioned that reviews should typically be done monthly and should take no more than 20-30 minutes per employee.

By getting into the habit of conducting monthly performance reviews, you ensure that your employees remain focused on the RIGHT objectives and that you reward them and/or improve their performance more quickly.

To hear a short clip of the interview, click the blue triangle on the player below:




Growthink University members can download the full interview here: http://www.growthinkuniversity.com/members/384.cfm