‘What Did You Do Last Week?’ 11 Better Ways to Succeed at Performance Management

“What did you do last week?”

Whether you’ve been HR for a minute or a lifetime, do you think that’s a good way to manage and measure performance?

It’s how the federal government recently decided to handle performance management.

The DOGE Directive

Elon Musk, who oversees the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, told federal employees to detail their accomplishments at work or risk losing their jobs. He even threatened termination if they didn’t comply.

In an email titled “What did you do last week?” Musk’s office gave workers until 11:59 p.m. Monday to respond with a list of “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week.” The email asked employees not to include classified information.

Not surprisingly, the message garnered confusion and pushback.

And if that’s how you plan to manage and measure performance, you’ll likely get pushback, too!

Better Ways to Manage Performance

Of course, there’s no secret to better performance management.

Strategies and techniques for improving individual and team performance evolve and new practices emerge – even Musk’s directive is one tool that has been used effectively – but the overall concepts that make up performance management are well-known and widely implemented.

But there are some secrets to improving performance management results. Here are 11 of the most effective tools and strategies:

1. Never Throw Away a Technique

The most important one is that you can’t just discard techniques that you’ve tried and then set aside because they didn’t work as you hoped.

If you take a fresh look at some of these “failed” approaches, you might find they can work both for individual workers and teams at different points in their career journeys. What didn’t work last year may work next year.

Consider these things: Was the problem that the technique just didn’t fit with your organization’s environment or work style? Or was it how you tried to put it into practice?

Looking back at a technique that didn’t work through this lens can be really helpful in making it work for you now.

2. Managers, Check Yourself

Before any manager can be effective in helping an employee to improve performance, they need to think carefully about themselves.

How might their own personality, work style, likes and dislikes, and unconscious biases and preconceptions color their assessment of a particular employee’s work and how they communicate with them?

Remind your front-line managers that as they work to help employees improve their performance, they are observing how they handle themselves. Give them this list of questions as a self-check on their perspective.

• How quickly do you respond to issues?
• How do you react when faced with adversity?
• How do you interact with others?
• Are you overly formal or informal?
• Are you too blunt or too analytical?

Once managers have a handle on these questions, they’re more ready to start the collaborative process of assessing and improving employees’ performance.

3. Be Aware of the Most Common Performance Issues

While every performance issue is individual at the root, most fall under these areas and come up again and again.

• Individual productivity (or lack of ). Employee’s output of work is less than wanted and expected.
• Attitude. The employee may be consistently negative, won’t speak up, is disrespectful to supervisors and co-workers, or exhibits other negative attitudes that hurt team morale and productivity.
• Inability to work with others. Whether they have interpersonal issues, produce at a different volume than their peers, or don’t understand teamwork, some employees stand out and negatively affect team performance.
• Quality of work. Even where the volume of work meets your standards and expectations, the quality of that work is consistently below expectations for their position, experience level, etc.
• Timeliness and responsiveness. An employee’s work is often behind schedule. They don’t show urgency in responding to requests. Or they don’t meet commitments.
• Refusal to follow instructions. Some employees resist being told how to do their work and fight against necessary changes.

Knowing the most common issues can help managers address the underlying problems.

4. Collaborate with Employees

When you recognize a performance issue and want to help employees see and overcome it too, you want to collaborate – not dictate – on a solution.

Start by getting their perception of what’s going on. Sit down with the employee and explore some key questions together. Ask:

• Why are we here?
• What are your objectives and expectations for the job?
• Why are you here in this role right now?

Then, the manager will want to point some questions back at himself or herself:

• Have I put you in an environment that allows you to enjoy your job?
• Have I made the expectations clear?
• Have I given you the resources you need to succeed?

Successful performance management puts a lot of the work of changing on the manager. If one approach isn’t working with an employee, managers have to keep trying new things and adjusting.

5. Raising Team Performance

A team is only as good as its parts. A poor performer – whether a complainer, someone who doesn’t show up to work on time or leaves early, or is a poor communicator – will bring down a team’s overall results. If colleagues see that they are consistently producing more work or higher quality work than the poorly performing employee, their own commitment to quality work will slide.

If managers leave poor performers interacting only with other “C-team” folks – or have them working only with the middle group while the stars are off working by themselves – the performance of your C team group will stay below standards, and the B teamers will tend to slide backwards. The key is to find ways to flip that script, where the examples set by your high-performing A team brings up the work of the whole group.

That means managers want their highest performers interacting with the least productive employees. That could mean just putting a cheerful, upbeat A-teamer with a consistently disgruntled colleague or mixing them together on a project. And that’s assuming it doesn’t interfere with the stars’ performance or personality.

If stars are working and interacting regularly with the bottom 10% of the team, managers will likely see improvements in those employees’ work and the team’s results.

6. Create a Development Opportunity

And there’s another benefit as well: When top employees work to help others, they gain valuable development opportunities.

Still, you want to offer the opportunity rather than dictate it. Say, “Based on your performance, I expect that you will take on more official or unofficial leadership roles, whether as manager or a team lead. For anyone in that position, one of the most challenging things is dealing with difficult people.

“Because I think you are ready for that challenge, I’d like to put you and Frank together on a project. He can be a little tough to deal with. I think that creates a good opportunity for you to build your leadership skill set.”

By expressing your confidence and explaining your intentions, you’ve set up your A-teamer for success.

Frank is likely to grumble no matter who you pair him with or how you explain things, but you will have at least given him a reason to make an effort and indicated how you’ll measure success. And if it works, Frank will stop being a drag on the overall team’s performance and show other marginal employees a path to grow if they want it.

7. Consider All Influences

It’s also important for managers to look at what outside issues they’re not aware of that might impact employees’ performance.

For instance, some employees have progressed in their own careers despite puzzling but real gaps in their skills and capabilities. Other employees have experienced haphazard training, without a formal structure for making sure that employees are learning what they should.

It’s the manager’s job to explore whether they really have been trained properly, if they have gone through training but don’t show that they’ve absorbed it, or if they learn differently from other workers. Find out:

• How do they see their role? Is it aligned with their training?
• Do they have the resources and time needed to perform up to the expectations?
• Are employees content in their current role? Anyone doing a job that they simply don’t like is never going to produce really good work.
• Are there underlying personal issues involved?

In most cases, taking the time to understand why issues are arising and being clear-eyed about helping employees learn and grow is worth the investment in time and money.

8. Coaching Employees

Successful performance management includes coaching employees on how they can achieve success in specific areas.

When managers coach an employee, they want to start from a positive place. Be open. Explain that you are working to help them improve their work.

Keep it specific and ask them to come to the session prepared to share their own impression of how they are doing.

Include attitude and productivity as performance expectations.

As with every other aspect of people management, of course, it’s critical that they document and share proof of relevant performance issues at the start of the coaching process.

Follow up through the W x W x W (W³ formula). What will be done by Who by When? Effective coaching requires that both you and the employee make solid commitments to each step in the process.

9. Inspire Employees to Take Action

Next, managers want to inspire employees to make sustained efforts.

If employees are just showing up for the paycheck, you’ll likely never see performance improvement from them.

When they look forward to showing up and creating value each day, you’re likely to see continuous individual improvement and team members who boost each other up.

10. Empower Employees to Achieve More

Giving an employee responsibility without also giving them the authority needed to make decisions, get resources, and guide others’ work as necessary is a recipe for failure.

Empower employees by giving them authority that matches their responsibilities.

The key is, as always, communication. While discussing an assignment, ask the employee what authority THEY think they’ll need.

That wish list is usually going to be more than you can fulfill completely, but working together, you can make sure that they are empowered to do what is needed to get the job done.

11. Motive Employees to Higher Performance

Building and sustaining an energized workforce that takes initiative and is positive requires creating an inspiring atmosphere. Some of the key features of such a workplace are:

• A creative work environment where employees are able to express themselves openly.
• A work environment not stifled by unnecessary process and policy hurdles.
• A challenging and constructive work environment featuring constant feedback.
• Leadership that listens and responds to employees.
• A collaborative and cross-functional workforce where diversity is cherished.

Employees recognize the difference between empty slogans and real commitment and will respond to an organization that walks the walk in creating a great place to work.