Are You a Manager? Then It’s Time to Define Performance Expectations

Clear performance expectations have a huge impact on your employees’ satisfaction. When employees know what’s expected of them, they perform better and they think more highly of you, because they’re not dwelling in uncertainty.

Defining performance expectations is one of the most difficult jobs for many managers, because rarely are they taught how to do it. Still, clear performance expectations can help employees:

• Understand what is important and why
• Understand where to focus their time and efforts
• Know how they are doing and when to ask for assistance
• Recognize areas of performance improvement

Poorly defined performance expectations leave employees questioning how to achieve job performance goals, thus having no way to track their efforts to meet job expectations. The result is frustration on all sides.

Rely on these steps to help define clear performance expectations for an employee:

Assess Performance (by asking yourself 3 questions):

• What are the objectives of the job at hand?
• What are the key performance benchmarks?
• How will results be measured?

Define Expectations:

• Identify the sources of accountabilities
• Put together an expectation list with examples

Write Job Expectations (to get what you want):

• Focus on specific results
• State your expectations directly

Meet with the Employee (to discuss expectations):

• Make it a positive conversation with two-way dialogue
• Communicate expectations clearly and concisely
• Be specific and clarify or answer any questions

When your employees know what’s expected of them, you can expect better results and a results-oriented workforce.