Need help maintaining employee performance? The best place to start may be with your managers. The Association for Talent Development’s Enric Gili Fort shares his advice in a new blog post, and he has some suggestions that would shake up many current practices.

“When it comes to assessing prior contributions, most HR teams ask managers to check in with employees once, maybe twice a year,” Fort writes. “At that time, managers and employees fill out standardized forms and are forced to reflect on a large period of time. It has become increasingly clear that this is not the most effective way to improve performance and engagement.”

But Fort isn’t willing to let performance reviews go entirely by the wayside. At their core, they still provide important benefits to managers looking to develop talent and to employees looking for a forum for feedback.

“Employee goals may lose alignment with business objectives, productivity can suffer, and frustrations may grow,” in the absence of reviews, Fort notes.

What Fort reccomends instead of performance reviews that focus on what employees have done is reviewing what employees can do in the future.

“Performance management doesn’t have to be only retrospective; it can also be proactive in driving employee development to meet specific business needs,” he writes. “The right balance between evaluation and development ensures continuous performance improvement.”

Check out Fort’s full post here for more details on how to build and sustain an environment of continuous performance management.

Graphic of the Day:

If you Google “social media” on any given day, you’re sure to find a plethora of articles about the latest trends and advice for navigating the web. But to save you the time of going through countless posts, John Delaney and the editors of Socially Aware Blog have condensed crucial information into a new infographic, focusing specifically on social media for marketers.

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