Cultivate a positive company culture with performance management

By Jason Binder, CEO Respect Aged Care

Performance management is the most important thing you can do for culture. There’s nothing worse than working in an organisation where people have poor or counterproductive work behaviours or are underperforming, and no one does anything about it. If you allow it, it will become accepted behaviour at the organisation, and it will not only continue, it will snowball.

My approach is to have ongoing conversations with employees. Where I have personally struck difficulty in my past is when I have delayed those conversations, because it ends up turning into a bigger issue that needs to be discussed. Delaying conversations is just kicking the can down the road but the eventual conversation builds up into a big one if you don’t have little ones regularly. And remember to not make those conversations personal. 

One of the things I often see managers struggle with is how to talk to people about performance when there is nothing concrete or any evidence that can be discussed. In those cases, I just simply ask the person “Is everything alright?”. The answer opens a conversation about what you might be concerned about, but it’s important to then not make accusations and genuinely ask the question. 

When I was in Industrial Relations, a mentor told me that when he was a younger manager, one of his staff was underperforming, coming in late, calling in sick a lot, and being absent-minded at work. So he called him to a meeting and started addressing the behaviour when the employee broke down and revealed he had cancer.

It’s important from the outset to ask “Is everything okay? Because I noticed [x] is happening and it doesn’t seem like you”. If even the answer is yes, that’s okay, sometimes the question is enough for the person to realise people are noticing and they change their behaviour. 

Nothing more needs to be said at that point. If they don’t change and repeat the behaviour then you have an opening, because if they do it again, you can say “remember we talked about [x]?” It’s important again if there’s no evidence and it’s not clear-cut that you don’t start accusing them.

Let’s say the person is rolling their eyes and making snide remarks in meetings. You can say, “Hey, I just need to ask again if everything is okay, because it looked like you were rolling your eyes in the meeting. You might not have meant it to come across this way, but it felt like when you said [x] that it was aggressive and there was anger behind it”. You’re not accusing them of anything, you’re just saying what you perceived and how you feel. 

Accusations are where conflict can start. If you’re just asking about your observations, very rarely does anyone get upset. If it keeps happening after that, I’d say to them that “I keep noticing [x] and it doesn’t seem to be resolving. What are we going to do about it?”. Next time it’s not asking what we’re going to do about it, it’s “We need to have a formal meeting about it”.

The best conversations I’ve had is where the employee has changed. I really respect that, and for me the demonstration of responsibility for feedback puts the person higher in my eyes than before the issue occurred. Someone self‑reflecting and growing says a lot about their character and potential. 

One of the things I’ve probably not done well is have clear KPIs and expectations, which suits some people who are driven and self-directed, but others prefer more clarity. That’s something we’re running through the organisation now because the clearer you can be about the standards we’re aiming for, the less obscurity there is about performance. 

One of the issues I see managers have is they find performance conversations uncomfortable. That’s always going to be the case if you’re new to it, because anything new is uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter if it’s the gym or skydiving, it’s going to be uncomfortable at first but if you keep doing it, the uncomfortableness goes away. All successful people sucked at things first and it was uncomfortable for them.

Jerry Seinfeld got boo’d off stage in his first gig, Eminem kept choking, and Oprah Winfrey couldn’t talk well on TV and got fired. The only way to get over the uncomfortableness is to keep doing it. 

The other thing that helped me early on was realising people sack themselves. All I’m doing is bringing up actions and behaviours and giving them the opportunity to change those actions and behaviours, and if they don’t, they’re sacking themselves and that’s completely fair. 

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they attach to an outcome. They think they need to meet with the person and they have to give them a warning or sack them. You can never possibly know that before you actually meet with them unless you have very good evidence that is beyond reasonable doubt.

But when you attach to an outcome, you start visualising the meeting and how it must go and then feel a responsibility to control it just how you imagined. It’s very stressful. 

My advice is to just go into the meeting not knowing what’s going to happen. If it’s formal, provide the accusations and wait to see what they say. If it doesn’t make sense, tell them it’s not making sense to you along the way and point out why.

If, in the end, it wasn’t convincing, say you think the accusations are true. If I’m not 100% sure, I tell them that. I say, “I don’t know 100% but I think [x] on the balance of probability. That’s how it’s presenting to me and so I have to take [x] action”. 

If it’s informal, all I’m after is a conversation about my perceptions and feelings about the person’s actions and that’s usually enough to change them. You’ve just gotta have a conversation to understand what’s going on. And if it’s a formal meeting, explain what decision you’re making and why. 

I don’t see performance management as a conflict. There’s nothing I say in a performance meeting that could be a conflict. I’ve either got evidence of actions and behaviours – which is just talking about the facts and then making a decision after weighing up what they’ve said – or I’m saying what my perception is and how I feel, and asking them what they think. I’ve never had it go pear-shaped doing that.