Performance management is what we usually call it when organisations take measures to deal with employee capability issues. By capability issues, I mean an employee’s (or manager’s) failure to perform all aspects of their job satisfactorily. This could mean working too slowly, making errors, misjudgements, having insufficient skill, not knowing essential stuff… you get the picture. This might be picked up during probation or it may emerge later in someone’s employment.

For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not specifically talking about misconduct in this blog. That would be when someone deliberately or negligently fails in their duties. Instead, I’m talking about generally well-meaning employees who, for whatever reason, just aren’t meeting the standards expected.

The exact process you’d use to manage someone’s capability/performance varies depending on the situation – for example, whether they’re still on probation, whether concerns are connected to a disability and so on. I might talk about these processes in more detail in another blog, but for now, if you’re interested, see Practice Index’s template policies  on Performance Management [PLUS] and Probation [PLUS]. You should also check out my previous blog about giving effective negative feedback about performance.

What I’m going to discuss here are ways in which employees might react to being performance managed. This, in my experience, is what usually makes performance management such a challenging (and nerve-wracking) thing for managers to do.

Between all the Practice Index members, we could probably come up with several thousand individual examples of the ways employees have reacted to being performance managed. However, in my opinion, almost all of them will fall into the following five categories. Sometimes an employee’s response will move from one category to another during different parts of the process, or they might display behaviour that meets the definition of more than one category simultaneously, but there’s not a great deal that employees do that falls outside these categories. So, what are they?

1. Try harder (i.e., active engagement with the performance management process)

Here, the employee takes on board the feedback, reflects on it, puts extra effort in, makes suggestions, tries new things and learns stuff. They’re really trying to improve. Wouldn’t it be lovely if this was always the default response when we started performance managing someone?

Sadly, it’s not – and for that reason, these ‘try harder’ people are our superstars. They’re the ones who have a serious chance of achieving their performance targets and going on to be reliable, perhaps even brilliant, team members.

Some, of course, won’t manage this, despite the effort put in. But whatever the outcome, everyone in this category deserves our respect and recognition because trying harder when under pressure for a prolonged period is hard. Going into work, day in, day out, with a nagging feeling of failure easily leads to mental and emotional stress. Few people can sustain being in this place for very long.

How do we support our ‘try harder’ people? With encouragement, empathy, training, coaching, flexibility, continuous feedback and good leadership. We also need to listen lots, and recognise the pressure that individuals are under. If this pressure gets too much, they may shift into some of the other responses below.

2. Just keep nodding (i.e., passive participation with the performance management process)

In this scenario, the employee accepts feedback without argument, says they’ll try to improve, turns up to meetings and training courses, but nothing’s really changing. They’re not trying harder. They’re just complying with management in the hope that this process will eventually go away.

There can be many reasons why people do this. Perhaps they don’t understand what’s required of them in terms of improvement? Perhaps they’re trying to keep a lid on big emotions such as anger or fear? Perhaps they’re feeling burned out at this point and have nothing else to give?

Working with someone in this state can be an infuriating experience. My advice is to keep engaging with them. Keep listening and seek out clues as to what’s really going on. Be mindful that the individual’s behaviour may be masking emotion or confusion, which will eventually manifest itself in other, more openly negative ways. Or it might be that this is one of our ‘trying harder’ people who’s hit a temporary barrier along the way and needs our support to remove it.

Whatever the underlying factors at play, don’t let the performance management process collapse here through inertia. When an employee is behaving passively, managers probably need to be more active.

3. Fly away home (i.e., absence from work)

Most of us will be familiar with the concept of a fight-or-flight response. It’s a physiological reaction that any of us can have to stressful situations. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the employee is weak, or faking it, or untrustworthy, or anything like that. But it does create some challenges for us as employers.

Absence from work is one of the most common ways in which a fight-or-flight response can make itself known. These situations are complicated and usually require good HR support, but, in summary, employers should:

• Pause the performance management process
• Engage with the employee ASAP via a good absence management process
• Use tools such as Occupational Health referrals and stress risk assessments to find ways of supporting the employee back to work

4. Fly further away (i.e., they’ve resigned)

This is another way in which the fight-or-flight response might manifest itself. For managers, it often feels quite satisfactory. The pain of performance management is over, hooray!

But such temporary feelings of relief shouldn’t blind us to the fact that this isn’t a satisfactory situation in all respects. It’s not satisfactory for the employee (whose concerns and thoughts should still be listened to, if you want to limit potential tribunal claims) and it means your practice now has the costs of recruitment and training to undertake. Are there any ways in which situations like this could be avoided in future?

5. Fight! (i.e., resistance to the performance management process)

There are so, so many ways in which an employee might show resistance towards a performance management process. I’ve seen arguments, appeals, grievances, discrimination/bullying/harassment allegations, whistleblowing, manipulation… and even sabotage.

Some of the above actions are very valid and contribute towards a healthy working environment for your practice in the longer term. At other times, the employee’s resistance to performance management is well, erm, not so valid! Whatever the situation, your HR policies, as well as professional advisors such as lawyers and HR people, are your best friends.

It’s important to keep a cool head, avoid making emotional judgements yourself and follow written processes to the letter. If I’m in a situation like this and finding it frustrating, I always remind myself that, ultimately, I’m experiencing everything from a far better position than the employee is, who’s potentially facing the loss of their job as well as a lot of stress. Whatever their efforts, as a manager, I have more control over the situation than they do and I should wield that power wisely.

Final thoughts

To summarise, there are many, many ways that employees can respond to performance management, but I think almost all of them fall within one or more of the categories I’ve mentioned above.

Being ready for any or all of these responses helps us to feel grounded and prepared when we deal with performance management processes. Whatever the situation, the golden rules remain:

• Act consistently and fairly
• Follow internal policies
• Keep your head clear – don’t be intimidated, but likewise, but don’t make rash judgements
• Listen to what the employee is communicating – both through their words and their behaviour
• Stay aware of the whole picture – both big and small

Ultimately, one of the biggest influences on an employee’s response to a performance management process is the way we implement it as managers. That’s always food for thought!

Susi O’Brien

Useful resources

• Performance Management – Capability Procedure [PLUS]
• Performance Management letter templates [PLUS]
• Probation review policy and procedure [PLUS]
• Probation review letter templates [PLUS]
• HR Masterclass – Module 2 (Performance Management)
• Practice Index Training – Managing Poor Performance
• HR Clinic – Performance Management (Tuesday 16th July at 12.30pm)