Does poor employee performance impact your business’s profitability?

Leadership should not underestimate the impact of poor employee performance on a business’s bottom line, services and products, and clients. This lack of performance affects profits as well as the business’s vision, mission, values, culture and operations negatively. In short, it alters every aspect of the company.

Poor employee performance has three dimensions:

The Individual

  • Are your employees working to their best potential?
  • Do they feel motivated?
  • Do they feel a sense of ownership and belonging to the business?
  • Do they feel allowed to fulfil a purpose that aligns with the business’s vision?
  • Are you motivated, showing ownership and working to your purpose and potential?

The Team

  • Do your teams collaborate effectively?
  • Do they communicate appropriately?
  • Do they show good discernment and decision-making?
  • Do they have an effective team dynamic?
  • Do your employees feel that they have what they need for optimal performance?

The Business

  • Does your leadership play a key role in ensuring excellence in your business?
  • Does your business culture set employees up for success?
  • Are your business strategies translated into goals at all levels?
  • Is your entire business system set up to ensure profitability by harnessing your employees’ purpose and potential?

Maximize your Potential

Our internationally accredited Gallup Global Strengths Coaches provide individual strengths assessments and coaching to support personal and career development. For high-performers and employees targeted for succession planning, this is an opportunity to refine their excellence. Where employees need extra support, identifying strengths helps target the most effective training and development interventions. This added dimension of self-awareness is mapped back to performance goals to optimize the value to the business while fulfilling the employee’s sense of purpose.

Taken one step further this information about each team member’s strengths can further be leveraged in setting the remote work environment up for success. Too often the impact of personal preference is overlooked when planning workspaces and workplaces. Using 15 years worth of remote working, both locally and globally into account, and adding the CliftonStrengths profiles we can assist clients in creating a successful remote-working environment.

Maximize your Team

Focusing on harnessing and developing strengths in teams increases engagement and performance. Our Strengths-based Team Dynamics workshops shift away from traditional team-building to focus on maximizing collaboration between team members by leveraging each member’s optimal strengths and contributions. This proves that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It also provides a common language and understanding which team members can use to avoid or resolve conflict.

Teams are only as engaged as their leaders, both formal and informal. Our Inspired Leadership®, Emerging Leaders, and Manager to Leader programs take leaders, both future and current, through a journey from self-awareness to leading others and leading the business, using practical action and critical reflection. The goal is to create leaders who know what to do and how to behave to create a team climate that fosters performance, productivity and retention as well as increased personal engagement and commitment to the organisation.

Maximize your Business

Our strategic service offerings cover strategy (scenario planning), organizational culture and performance development (performance management). Aligning these factors enhances the ability of the business to maximize the outputs of employees. Given our background in Strengths, all these elements can be aligned to any strengths-based initiatives in your organization to assist you in building an entire strengths-based company.
The factors above need to be supported at leadership level. There is a saying, “The fish rots from the head”, and in business this is true because leadership sets the tone and holds much of the power. Your leadership team needs to focus on relaying and ensuring alignment to strategy by making it accessible to all employees. Your business needs to have a strong culture, which leadership needs to understand, embody and promote. Only once these three align can you set expectations, and measure, results and behaviour for employees and teams.

Context-specific Solutions:

According to Statista (April 2021) only 17% of workers in the US were working remotely before the COVID epidemic, where currently around 44% of workers are working from home. This trend is seen across a variety of continents as the COVID virus and its permutations continue to wreak havoc with the concept of getting “back to the office” in the traditional sense. Add to this the pressure brought on by the pandemic and the constant concern over the health of employees, managers and their families and we see well-being becoming a major focus for businesses. We strive to provide support to businesses with the following solutions:

Remote Working

Now more than ever, it is necessary for companies to re-look remote work as an employment option as continuing lockdowns have shown that this may be a feasible approach. In South Africa, over 40% of employees expressed interest in working from home, and 38% of businesses reported that they would be allowing remote work to continue even after lockdowns have ended.

While businesses have remained relatively optimistic about remote working, many got off to a rocky start. The implementation of remote working, the infrastructure, processes and procedures needed to make it work, was rushed. Businesses did not have time to plan appropriately.

Our two workshops address these issues.

In Managing Remote Teams, we look at the business aspects of including remote working as an option, such as remote working strategies, HR policies and procedures, IT, performance management and more. In Onboarding Remote Teams, we look at the practicalities of setting up a remote workspace, from the employee’s perspective, daily considerations for working remotely, and managing motivation in self and others.

Even if an organization has already implemented remote work, there is ample to learn and the course is expertly led by facilitators with a long history of remote work as employees and  contractors, both in the employee and manager roles.

The two sets of training speak to each other. Therefore managers who complete the Managing Remote Teams also complete the Onboarding Remote Employees training with their team members to ensure consistency and transparency of expectations. This approach also leads to very fruitful discussions which customize the implementation to meet the needs of individual teams.

Employee Wellbeing

Too often, employee wellbeing has been relegated to a “non-work issue”, however, wellbeing influences employee engagement, productivity and performance – therefore, it impacts the bottom line. Poor wellbeing impacts not only individual employees but also team members and those working in related functions. Along with so many trends, the COVID epidemic has highlighted the need for employers to take care of employees as a whole person and not only focus on them within the business context. Building on more than a decade’s worth of research, Gallup has identified five interrelated and interdependent essential elements of wellbeing:

  • purpose: liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals
  • social: having supportive relationships and love in your life
  • financial: managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security
  • community: liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community
  • physical: having good health and enough energy to get things done daily

Wellbeing is more than just mental health – it encompasses employee mental health, physical health and more. In our workshops, we introduce you to the Gallup Wellbeing at Work methodology. These workshops use self-reflection and group coaching, with each participant reviewing their wellbeing and actions to move closer to their desired state. While the content of these sessions is confidential, the team does run a high-level quiz in each to identify whether participants feel they are thriving, surviving or suffering. This feedback is shared with management to indicate where wellbeing within the organization lies.

Our core purpose is to help businesses of all sizes understand how they can unleash their employees’ potential by reimagining their working eco-system.

– Innocente Burger, Founder and Director, PerformForward.

CONTACT US

Testimonials

“Innocente is an incredible manager who uses a coaching methodology to encourage growth, different thinking patterns, self-motivation and solutions for specified areas of development. Innocente leads by example, explains things effectively and always makes herself available for guidance, further coaching and mentorship.”

“I had the pleasure of working with Innocente during my tenure at VentureWeb and even though she worked in a different division to me, I was always inspired by her consistently high levels of positive energy. I worked closely with Innocente on a specific project at VentureWeb and it was there that I experienced first-hand just how Innocente is a ‘go-getter’ and a determined vision-centric achiever. She places the client first and aligns her interactions carefully with the goals of the business. Maintaining a focus on quality and understanding of what her clients require, Innocente balances her service delivery with the experience and specialist acumen she has in her field. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Innocente for the positive impact she has had on me and I do not hesitate to recommend Innocente.”

“I attend a business coaching session presented by Innocente (PerformForward), to be frank I assumed it would be just another one of those long winded meetings you can’t wait to get out of.

Innocente however was amazing, really made it worth attending, actively engaging with all who attended and challenged us on various levels. I personally learnt not only about myself but about managing various people, situations and cultures all in one half morning session.

I was extremely impressed and if offered the opportunity would definitely attend again.”

“Innocente’s role at VentureWeb was focused on learning, of which an offshoot was performance management. We worked collaboratively to overhaul performance management throughout the organization, across all levels, all departments and all geographies. This required changing mindsets around performance management, shedding old and traditional performance systems which were no longer relevant to our organization, and ensuring the new program was underpinned by a strong foundation which drove the right behaviors and values. Innocente was integral to supporting the change management globally, and worked hard to ensure new ideologies were practically supported with the right technology. Innocente was a key contributor in this initiative, and nurtured its success from beginning to end.”

“Before I met Innocente, 2 years ago, the only way I knew how to articulate who I was, and who the people around me were, was in reference to personalities. Having worked with her in a personal and professional capacity for over a year, I have found that her method of communication and her strengths coaching techniques allow for insight beyond what I am able to find on my own. I would recommend Innocente for anyone who is looking to understand themselves better with the aim of being an effective leader, empathic listener and energised performer. Emotional Intelligence is her forte!”

“I am continuously impressed by how much Innocente cares about company culture and the happiness of employees. With her no-nonsense approach, Innocente maximizes the ROI of human capital in business. Innocente excels at engaging and energizing her audiences during facilitation and presentations.”

“Innocente is an excellent professional who is passionate about organisational performance and culture. She brings great value to business in her areas of expertise.”

“In 2018 we made a decision to engage with Innocente, wow! what a stroke of luck. Her positive approach energized our management team and workforce. For once our employees felt they belonged and started to ‘care’ about our business. This increased productivity reduced wastage and resulted in better relationships in the company, improved margins, and happy shareholders. We were stuck in the past and would have not been in a position to survive the devastating state of our economy if we didn’t follow the advice from Innocent and accept more current HR approaches.”

“We contracted Innocente to work with our organisation in defining and implementing our company culture. Innocente came with great enthusiasm, she worked alongside our MANCO team in defining our culture by reinforcing and defining our organisation’s core values and supported us in the implementation thereof.

Innocente’s invaluable ability to entrust our people to open up to her which in turn created the required and valued feedback to formalise our culture.

This program led by Innocente brought a new energy Interfile. Our values now form a part of a common language at Interfile, ensuring we go about our daily tasks with passion, enthusiasm and with our mission statement in mind “To make a Difference”.

Interfile culture program has continued to evolve and develop around our company values, environment and expectations.

So when defining the key attributes to a “Coach” they include, positive, enthusiastic, supportive, trusting, focused, goad-orientated, knowledgeable, observant, respectful, patient and a clear communicator, Innocente ticks each and every one of those boxes.

Thank you for “Making a Difference””

“I had the privilege of getting to know Innocente during her Gallup Strengths Coaches training. From the start, it was clear that she is extremely passionate about helping her clients become the best they can be. Her commitment to understanding how people think, feel and behave, is beyond impressive. It is inspiring. I have no doubt that she is a great coach to have.”