FAQs: Employee Performance Improvement

Employee performance becomes a problem when an employee does not meet the standards and expectations of their role or organizational culture.

Performance consulting leads to improved employee behavior within an organization in alignment with business goals. Initiatives often result in reduced training costs and increased alignment between organizational learning and business strategy. It’s a process of identifying gaps, making recommendations, and implementing solutions that achieve sustained results.

A performance consultant uses a systems-thinking approach to analyze and identify a variety of workplace environmental factors that influence job performance. These may include: knowledge, skills, structures, management, processes, tools, incentives, support, etc. Once gaps are identified, performance issues can be addressed proactively, such as through employee learning and development, or reactively, such as putting an employee on a performance improvement plan (or PIP).

Performance is the process (the how), while productivity is the result (the what). Performance is measured in terms of goal achievement. Productivity is measured in terms of return on investment (ROI). By assessing and improving employee performance, it is possible to influence and increase employee productivity.

Although training and learning intersect, they are not the same. Training focuses on the trainers and the knowledge, skills, and abilities they impart. Learning is about the participant’s experience with the material; how they discover and work with it and by making mistakes. Both play an integral role in the development and performance of your employees.

Culture is a silent code of conduct. In an organization, it's an implicit system that drives employee motivations and behaviors. A learning culture values and encourages learning and development to grow employees as individuals, leaders, and teams, which in turn grows the business.

A learning culture improves employee retention and engagement while making an organization more adaptable to change.

To create a learning culture, your organization needs to weave learning into the fabric of the company, rather than thinking of it as checking boxes. It must value learning as a strategic pillar across the organization, supporting active and independent learning all the time. In a learning culture, employees not only want to learn, and apply what they’ve learned, but also want to share their knowledge with others.

It's popular to invest in career development. Yet, to support a learning culture, your challenge is to go deeper to discover what your employees need to learn to truly excel. For example, what indirectly helps them be more effective in their roles? What are they actually interested in learning? What's relevant to them? A performance consultant can help you answer these questions.

LMS stands for Learning Management System. It’s a software application that provides the framework that handles critical elements of the learning process – it’s where you house, deliver, and track your training content. An LMS is designed to make management easier for those in charge of employee learning and development.

SCORM stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model. It's a set of technical standards used in eLearning development tools (such as Articulate 360). SCORM governs how eLearning courses and LMSs communicate with each other. The SCORM standard makes it possible for you to move eLearning from one LMS to another without needing to re-engineer it.