Foster Accountability in the Workplace by Rewarding, Coaching, or Eliminating

So, what happens when you have defined clear roles and responsibilities, expectations, compensation structures, performance tracking, and your efforts to develop a culture of accountability begin to take hold? It is time to act.

The Outcome of a Performance Review Process Requires Rewarding, Coaching, or Elimination Actions
Here at CommandHound we have written a lot of articles about how to drive and enable accountability in the workplace. Some of the most interesting ones cover things like how to tie compensation to accountability, trends in accountability in the workplace, how to build a culture of accountability, the required business framework for a culture of accountability to thrive, and also, the ultimate guide to accountability in the workplace.

Full Cycle Feedback Loop

We have not, however, talked much about what should be done when you finally have access to all the performance tracking information that enables a culture of accountability to take hold.
So, now that you have developed, communicated, and rolled out a full-cycle feedback-loop that clearly …

• Defines and communicates what needs to be done,
• Tracks completion performance by individual and/or teams, and
• Ties all this information to a well-defined performance review process

… it is time to define what the expected outcomes should be from the performance review process so a culture of accountability ensues.

Performance Review Outcomes

Simply put, the final outcomes of a performance review process fall in 3 categories:

1. Rewards

When employees meet or exceed expectations (which have been clearly defined by now), they should be recognized and/or rewarded. This creates positive feedback and incentives to continue to excel.
Reward and Incentivize Results to Continue to Drive Excellence

2. Coach

When performance is below expectations, then it becomes an issue of how severe the employee’s shortcomings are and whether they are addressable with either time, coaching, or training. If they are, it is time to dedicate those resources towards improving the employee’s performance.

3. Eliminate

Identifying whether an employee performing below expectations is able to correct course or not is critical. Employees in the non-correctable category are often easy to identify because their contributions are net negatives to the team or business and there is no clear or reasonable path to correct. Companies that recognize these employees and use the “Fail-Fast-And-Move-On” strategy are frequently the type of high-performance organizations (HPOs) that most businesses aim to be.

Making sure that the right behavior is rewarded and the wrong behavior is addressed on a timely basis is a key enabler of accountability in the workplace.

Performance Tracking

A full-cycle accountability tool like CommandHound not only tracks and escalates milestones but it also keeps completion performance information at the individual or team levels. This type of performance tracking is what enables a performance review process to close the loop by enabling the rewarding, coaching, or eliminating responses.

Next Steps

Would you like to learn more about how CommandHound keeps track of actual milestone completion performance to drive a meaningful performance review process?