HR’s Role in an Integrated Performance Management Process

Businesses implement integrated performance management processes to build capabilities for future growth. These processes break down silos and eliminate barriers between departments. The goal is to reduce conflicting agendas or redundant processes, helping the company work more efficiently.

Talent strategy is a common thread powering all departments, making HR essential to the process. “Living in silos isn’t going to advance your business strategy,” says Shelly Holt, SPHR, chief people officer at PayScale. “People, processes and initiatives all have to work together if we’re going to be successful as a business.”

HR is a crucial partner to the business and drives value at all levels. HR can facilitate strategy, trim waste in operational processes and manage employee performance data to inform decisions. Here’s how HR departments support an integrated performance management process.

Facilitate Strategic Integrated Performance Management

HR plays a vital role as a facilitator at the strategic level. This begins with an agreement on common objectives. Before an integrated performance management process can be implemented, business leaders must align on what creates value at the company.

Since leaders come and go, says Donna Rogers Skowronski, SPHR, founder and CEO of Rogers HR Consulting, this process needs clear ownership from one department. HR is in a good position to lead the conversation and tie together the loose pieces. Better information sharing in the C-suite improves transparency for more integration and fewer silos.

Integrated performance management processes support continuous improvement. Since the HR team owns performance data, it can take responsibility for tracking performance and identifying opportunities for improvement.

Define Metrics for Operational Efficiency

HR should be responsible for executing strategies, processes and approaches related to integrated performance management. This goes back to integrated talent strategy, which stems from the underlying business strategy and aligns the workforce to business priorities. HR can work across functions to proactively identify talent gaps and make plans to overcome them.

Providing standard metrics across the company keeps each department aligned. Holt notes HR must, for example, define what the business means by high performance and help leaders identify the most critical roles.

HR can tie all of the pieces together by linking performance measurement to KPIs to track growth and progress over time.

Track Employee Performance Management Systems

HR will continue to embrace a more strategic role. That includes monitoring people data and mining it for business value. People data, especially performance management data, provides an important metric for business performance. Track data in your HRIS to measure success. The data can also be monitored for talent calibration and consistency.

The more data you track, the more transparent your processes can become. Data allows a company to better understand its workers, but it should work the other way as well. Well-informed employees gain a better appreciation of their role in the business strategy, which supports more purposeful engagement. “If they understand how their job impacts the bigger picture, the work is so much more rewarding,” Rogers Skowronski says.

Understanding the context and purpose of their work encourages stronger performances, just as direction by an integrated performance management process drives better business results.