Organizations understand the importance of managing employee performance for success, but not many realize what it means to enable employee performance. Just like with sales enablement, performance enablement (or performance support) means to provide employees with the tools and capabilities needed to perform a given task, meet objectives and improve productivity. It’s how managers can set up their teams to perform at their very best.
Julia Babij, expert trainer at Cenlar FSB, explains that performance enablement should not be confused with performance management. “[Performance management] carries a connotation of hierarchy: Leaders evaluate employee performance, deliver feedback to the employee [and] employee goals for growth are considered but often that focus is lost within the need to accomplish organizational goals.” Babij explains that performance enablement is instead a collaboration between leader and employee on how they can achieve organizational goals as well as fulfill their own individual goals. “The result is a balanced, productive and purposeful relationship between employee, leader and the organization.”
Performance enablement goes beyond delivering training and extends to making certain tools, resources and technologies available to improve how your employees complete a task. “Enablement to the learner means going beyond the finish line of being taught and transferring it to the job to perform better,” says Bob Mosher, co-founder and chief learning evangelist of APPLY Synergies. It surpasses learning something new to enact a behavior change, but instead, involves providing employees with actionable resources and initiatives that enhance how they perform. “This is done by moving away from acting as training providers and toward being performance consultants,” Beth Montag-Schmaltz, a partner in West Monroe’s people and productivity practice, says.
This can include weekly check-ins to evaluate specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound (SMART) goals or a mobile learning application that allows employees to learn on the go. However an organization decides to enable their employees’ performance, they should ensure that it not only helps the business satisfy its goals, but also the goals of the employee. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to successfully enable employee performance in the workplace.
Defining Performance Enablement
To properly enable employee performance, an organization must first be in alignment of what that looks like to them. Carrie Berg, vice president of learning and development at Teladoc Health, explains that the first step to helping employees achieve their full potential is aligning the definition of performance enablement with career development. “There needs to be real alignment on what the company means by career growth and what they mean by performance enablement,” Berg says.
Berg further explains that to define performance enablement, leaders must identify the specific skill sets and capabilities that make up each individual talent profile and administer the right tools for each role. “Organizations need to be aligned to where their employees are and meet them where they are at with the right tools,” Berg shares.
Business leaders should define what performance enablement means to their organization and then align this with how the organization can develop their employees’ careers. This can provide clarity on the employee’s current skill level and what tools they need to provide better results. Thus, the organization can give their employees what they need not only to improve performance and meet business goals, but also to further their professional development. So, it becomes a win-win situation.
By defining what performance enablement means to their company, business leaders can work toward building an enablement strategy. Leaders should have a set enablement strategy in place that aligns the needs and goals of the business with that of their employees while taking in to account the organization’s constraints and ecosystem. Mosher explains that an enablement strategy can help learning leaders understand the context of performance in the flow of work in regard to their specific company and the special tools designed for each of their job roles.
Establishing a Learning Culture
Even if you provide employees with all the tools and resources they need to perform better, if the work environment doesn’t promote continuous learning and development (L&D), you won’t get too far. The second key to enabling employee performance is to foster a learning culture that prioritizes the employee experience. This means putting your organization’s people in the center of all decision making. Let’s take a look at some best practices to establishing a human-centric learning culture that enables performance.
1. A defined learning culture.
To create this type of environment, Berg advises for business leaders to first come to an agreed upon definition of what a learning culture should look like in their organization. “I could have six executives sitting in a room and ask them to define a learning culture, and I’d get six different answers,” she says.
Mosher explains that to establish a learning culture, we also must understand what our current culture looks like. “Every organization has a learning culture but the question is whether it’s effective. For instance, is failing a part of our culture or not? Do we allow it? We have to be honest about our current learning culture and then understand where we want to take it,” he advises.
2. Diagnosing individual performance needs.
Berg explains that many times when learning leaders deploy training it’s to fix something the employee isn’t doing or does not know. However, more time should be spent focusing on diagnosing the employee’s actual performance needs.
“Are they getting feedback? Do they understand what they’re doing? Do they have enough context of their job and are they empowered to [work] and develop themselves?” Berg shares, “In order for an employee to perform at their job, L&D and a learning culture should be at the forefront.”
3. Ability to take risks and innovate.
An effective learning culture is an environment where employees feel safe to take risks, make mistakes and admit failure. Montag-Schmaltz shares that, “A culture of continuous learning and growth is fostered by organizations that reward and recognize reasonable risk-taking, innovating and learning from mistakes.”
To enable performance, employees must feel psychologically safe to stretch their abilities without fear of repercussion. “They have to feel like they’re allowed to be enabled in their performance — that they have some freedom to fail,” Mosher says. Failing forward is a part of the discovery and learning process.
4. Assign accountability.
When establishing a learning culture, it’s important to assign accountability. Much of an employee’s development depends on leadership. “There needs to be a push in agreement that managers not only have to spend time developing themselves, but create space for their employees to develop, too,” Berg says. She suggests for managers to block time on the calendar to give learners time to complete an online course or read an article/book. And to further their own development, managers should be required to complete leadership training.
Measuring the Business Impact
An effective strategy produces measurable results. When measuring the impact of your enablement strategy, it’s important to identify the right metrics. As you put together the programs or initiatives, Berg advises learning leaders to build out what success looks like, whether it’s a change in behavior or a net promoter score (NPS).
This means that the metrics should be more specific than “how many people participated in the program,” or “how many people logged into the learning management system (LMS).” Berg explains that those metrics fail to move the business forward. “It doesn’t tell you anything about the effectiveness of the training [or tools] nor how it impacted the employee or the business.”
Instead, business leaders should use metrics that target business objectives like, “how many people are staying in the company after completing the program,” or “how many people are getting promoted after completing the program.” That way you can visibly see whether your efforts to enable employee performance has paid off.
The Bottom Line
When enabling employee performance, it’s important to understand that enabling performance and managing it are two different approaches. Enablement is about giving employees the tools and resources they need beyond training to help them perform better. By performing better, employees cannot only help achieve business goals, but also develop their career.
Additionally, performance enablement is dependent on a learning culture. Fostering a learning culture that prioritizes the employee experience can help leaders adopt the right mindset to diagnosing their employees’ performance needs. Strong performance enablement, coupled with a culture of learning and growth, will help organizations ensure that all employees have the tools they need to performance at their very best — now and in the future.
