Performance Management and Employee Engagement: A Winning Formula for Frontline Teams

This blog explains how synergy between performance management and employee engagement strategies is a winning formula for frontline teams. It covers practical strategies and dos and don'ts to help you maximize this dynamic duo's transformative impact. Ready to discover how to combine performance management and employee engagement for motivated, high-performing teams?

The business world has become super dynamic, and success is difficult without a high-performing and engaged team. Research confirms this and reveals that engaged employees perform better by up to 150%. Moreover, organizations in the top quartile of employee engagement scores have 18% higher productivity. But we hear you if you feel ensuring high performance and engagement simultaneously for your frontline team is quite challenging compared to your in-office workforce. After all,  they tend to work away from direct supervision and often navigate tasks alone in isolation from peers. Yet, you must get this balancing act right. Frontline workers are the face of your company and directly influence customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and business success. What’s the way out? 

A strategy prioritizing performance management and employee engagement. Combining and pursuing these two for your frontline workers is precisely what you need to unlock business success. 

This blog explains how synergy between performance management and employee engagement strategies is a winning formula for frontline teams. It covers practical strategies and dos and don'ts to help you maximize this dynamic duo's transformative impact.

What is performance management?

Performance management is the process of ensuring employees are motivated and meet organizational goals and targets efficiently. It involves different protocols for setting objectives, assessing processes, providing feedback, coaching for improvements, and rewarding achievements.

4 phases of performance management

Implementing employee performance management is possible in four phases:

1. Planning: During this stage, you need to plan and implement goal-setting. Use traditional goal-setting frameworks like SMART goals or objectives and key results (OKRs). Alongside that, brainstorm with your team. Make sure that you also involve your frontline employees in these discussions. They’ll have valuable insights regarding their working conditions and help you better set individualized goals. 
2. Monitoring: Once you set goals, start monitoring your employees’ tasks and outcomes. Track various performance metrics, such as the number of completed tasks, time management, average time per task, and customer service scores. The metrics can vary depending on the nature of your company’s products and services, so choose them accordingly.
3. Reviewing: Once you have all the relevant data, review your employees’ performance. Study key insights and compare them with past benchmarks. Also, provide timely feedback while getting your frontline workers to share their experiences. This will help you further prime your performance management approach for success.
4. Rewarding: The final phase of performance management is to make employees feel valued and validated. Make sure that you have a plan and process to reward positive performance. Also, keep adjusting your plans and providing the impetus necessary for employees to keep going.

Now, you may wonder - where does the correlation of performance management with employee engagement arise? 

How is employee engagement related to performance management?

Employee engagement and performance management are closely linked concepts that reinforce one another. Both aim to optimize employee performance and effectiveness.

As you know, employee engagement is essentially concerned with how motivated and committed employees are to going the extra mile for the organization. Performance management helps foster employee engagement. It influences engagement by setting clear expectations and providing feedback, recognition, and opportunities for growth and development. 

For example, consider performance management processes such as performance reviews and development planning. These help identify areas for improvement and provide employees with opportunities for training, learning, and career development. By investing in their development, you can demonstrate a commitment to their employees' growth and success, which boosts employee engagement and loyalty.

Bottom line: You can quickly enhance engagement levels by implementing performance management strategies that reward your employees. But there are some aspects you must keep in mind. 

The detrimental disconnect: traditional performance management vs. engagement

Traditional performance management systems are associated with rigid hierarchical structures, top-down communication approaches, and infrequent annual performance appraisals. These can become relatively meaningless for frontline staff, reduce engagement, and hamper performance.

Suppose your frontline workforce is at the forefront of customer interactions in high-traffic environments. For example, customer-facing hospitality staff at a quick service restaurant chain. In that case, going for lengthy feedback intervals can lead to a disconnect from the day-to-day reality of operations. You may lose track of any grassroot level problems that your workers are facing. Further, with rigid top-down communication and no avenue for open dialogue and collaboration, these workers may start feeling frustrated. Moreover, you also need to acknowledge that frontline workers usually desire and need autonomy. If you follow traditional performance management frameworks, they may not feel that freedom adequately and also miss your regular reassurance. With all this combined, their motivation and morale can fall. The net result will be a disengagement spiral that can be damaging as your service quality ultimately depends on them!  

Therefore, prioritize frequent and meaningful feedback within your performance management approach while fostering open communication and collaboration. Also, ensure you implement real-time feedback mechanisms and promote team-based performance evaluations. Finally, encourage frontline workers to participate in decision-making processes. With that, you’ll be able to build a more motivated, empowered, and productive workforce. Ready to explore how you can get there?

How to combine engagement and performance management

Combining employee engagement and performance management is easy when you take into consideration the following 3 aspects.

1. Build communication and trust by using seamless communication channels

• Schedule regular check-ins and performance reviews. Doing so will ensure employees feel that help is available whenever required and that they don't lose touch. Dominos took this seriously and dedicated a team member to regularly check in and look at employees' pain points, including any red flags. The individual also determined how to tackle them, which helped them avoid frustration. 
• Encourage two-way feedback and communication by getting everyone on the team involved. If there’s seamless dialogue and constructive feedback, it’ll resolve doubts and reduce feelings of disconnectedness and isolation. NS Retail understood from feedback that their top-down messaging approach was getting monotonous for employees. They swapped their one-sided communication to focus on the daily experience of store employees with a video series along stations. When employees started getting involved and sharing unique stories about their experiences with travelers, their engagement rose, and employee retention improved.
• Be transparent about performance-related hurdles, letting them know what you’ll do to help them solve them. Urge your workers to do the same. Rituals, for example, encouraged employees to share best practices instead of reinventing the wheel each time. This encouraged a culture of help-seeking, boosting efficiency.
• Give feedback as often as possible and track metrics such as the number of resolved cases, customer reviews, etc, to provide ongoing feedback and performance appraisal. This helps quantify various performance indicators.

2. Recognition and appreciation

Frontline workers often feel isolated and disconnected from peers who can appreciate their hard work. Hence, make recognition and appreciation a part of your performance management and employee engagement, as they help validate their unseen and unacknowledged efforts. 

• Recognize achievements and efforts: Track small and significant milestones. You can use pin-up boards, newsletters, social media, or even your internal communications hub to shout out your employees’ efforts and achievements actively.
• Check-in often and show that you care about their well-being to emphasize social cohesion among frontline workers. This will boost their morale and mental health and encourage them to pay attention to their physical health. Basic Fit, for example, has started empowering workers to choose pronouns they want to be addressed with. This ensures every individual feels included, represented, and heard regardless of their identity. This boosts their employee well-being, engagement, and, thus, performance.

3. Growth and development matter to employees significantly

If you help them by providing learning development plans for professional and personal growth, they’ll be more engaged, and the knowledge will also show results in their work. 

• Set clear goals and expectations to prevent deskless workers from losing focus. Monitor how they achieve goals and address bottlenecks when they arise. 
• Set and track OKRs by picking a single clear objective and anywhere between 3 and 5 key results. This helps ensure that your growth and development-related OKRs are achievable. 
• Implement training programs and up-skilling opportunities to nurture employee development. This will help prevent frontline workers from feeling disillusioned. 

Up your performance management & engagement game using technology 

Employee engagement and performance management are closely linked. Approaching them together is a great way to optimize employee performance and improve business success. This is particularly significant for the out-and-about frontline workforce that often gets disoriented in fast-paced environments without two-way communication, recognition and development opportunities.

Using mobile-first technology that’s easily accessible to frontline workers is a simple way to establish the right processes and implement engagement and performance management strategies. 

Speakap was named the Easiest to Use Frontline Worker Communication Platform in the G2 Spring 2024 Report. It connects your frontline and office workforce with a mobile-first employee app, a single source for all your company information. It’s user-friendly and designed for high adoption, helping you distribute content and measure your impact easily. It’s the easiest bet to introduce seamless communication, recognize employees, and aid their growth and development. S

Speak to our experts to learn how to leverage it for performance management and employee engagement.