If you hear “performance review,” it may cause some fear and anxiety—for managers and employees alike. Many people encounter stumbling blocks when performance reviews comes around. Overworked HR managers may handle too much responsibilities with little time to guide employees in the right direction. This is where effective performance management enters the picture.
When people talk about making lateral career moves, the response from friends, family, and mentors is often lukewarm at best. The concept of “up or out” is so deeply ingrained in American workplace culture that continual growth and movement up the corporate ladder are considered to be a universal aspiration.
But as we’ve noted before, not everyone is cut out to manage people. In fact, some of your company’s strongest employees may be the people who have no interest in being promoted to a managerial role.
It would be a mistake to assume that the employees who fall under that umbrella just want to rest on their laurels, however. Managers should be just as interested in developing the careers of lifelong individual contributors as they are in nurturing the upward trajectory of future company leaders.
The workforce is paradoxically both more dispersed and more connected than ever before. A manager in New York can have a video conference with business prospects in Japan, while another employee in that same New York office instant messages a coworker at home in California. The Internet has enabled us to be connected in ways previous generations may have never thought possible.
The ability to communicate from just about anywhere in the world brings many new possibilities for companies. We’re seeing fewer employees commute to offices, choosing instead to work from the comfort of their homes or in collaborative coworking spaces. The idea of expanding a company regionally or nationally—even globally—has become more of a reality today than before.
To many of us, payroll is a blessing—but it’s also an HR professional’s heaviest strain. As exciting as payday is, managing payroll continues far beyond processing paychecks.
We know handling payroll can be extraordinarily complex: it must be accurate, it must be efficient, and it must comply with regulations on a local, national, and international level. On top of coordinating day-to-day business operations, recruiting and hiring candidates, and managing growth, HR leaders must follow compliance, and get the numbers right for various taxes and payments.
