VISTIM’s Guide to Effective Performance Management: Tops and Flops

Performance management is a powerful lever for employee engagement and strategic alignment. At VISTIM, the current approach reveals both strong practices and areas with room for improvement. This analysis explores the key success factors — and common pitfalls — that can make or break sustainable individual and organizational performance.

More than just an annual review, performance management is a continuous process that links day-to-day performance with broader business goals.
When well-designed, it fosters meaning, recognition, and motivation — all essential for long-term engagement and growth.

Here are the Tops (best practices) and Flops (pitfalls) to keep in mind when shaping or optimizing your performance management system: 

✅ Top 5: What Works Well

1. Performance Management is the process of defining, communicating and cascading the strategy, priorities and target culture of the company. Managing individual’s performance is therefore essential to achieve the company’s strategy and managers/leaders should be accountable for it within their teams.

Focus on Development of technical AND behavioural skills: Helping people grow builds engagement and retention — performance improves when people feel supported. The conversations should help:

• Identify strengths and areas for improvement
• Agree on development priorities
• Identify development actions
• Review progresses, provide feedback / coaching
  
  

2. Regular Check-ins
   Frequent conversations keep performance on track, build trust and ensure there is no surprises at year-end. Forward-looking, timely and balanced feedback drives improvement and growth. Promote a coaching mindset rather than a top-down approach.
3. Clear, Aligned, and Meaningful Goals
   When goals connect individual work to the company’s mission and strategic objectives, people feel more motivated and focused. They see how their contribution contributes to achieving these objectives, which gives meaning to what they do and therefore motivates them.
   • Evaluate both results (the “what”) and behaviors (the “how”).
   • A regular follow-up also serves to constantly review and adjust objectives and progress, and to set new targets...
4. Training Managers to Have Great Conversations
   A good system lives or dies through your managers. Give them the tools, confidence, and support they need. A Feedback culture has to be build. It takes time and investment.
   

❌ Flop 5: What to Avoid

Focus only on What: giving importance only to business objectives (What) without taking behavioural competencies into account can be dangerous. This sends out the message that it doesn't matter how you behave within the organization, what matters is achieving your objectives, no matter how. In addition, managing leadership, collaboration or customer orientation is key to your business.

1. Underestimate the importance of development, whether it be on the What or the How (what has just been said). It is the development that increases the performance potential of the individual and therefore the company.
2. Actively Manage performance issues : do not accept poor performance and behaviours. Address issues as soon as possible by giving constructive feedback, detailed objectives and targeted support.
3. Link performance to remuneration: recognition does not necessarily means remuneration and successes should be recognized verbally every time it’s possible. Performance is not managed to determine remuneration, but to manage individual performance, and therefore the organization's performance. In order to make a decision on compensation or career, we look at : the overall and continuous performance, the results achieved AND the skills demonstrated, and finally the current compensation VS market and internal compensation ranges.
4. Use Ratings and Rankings
   Performance reviews should always be qualitative. Reducing performance to a number can demotivate people and fuel unhealthy competition.
5. Lack of Transparency in Criteria or Decisions
   If people don’t understand how performance is measured, they’ll assume bias — and disengage.

Learn more about performance management here.