Work-Life Balance Is Easier When Managers Know How to Assess Performance

Not long ago, a manager asked me to name the most important work-life benefit for employees. I answered that the most essential benefit isn’t a benefit at all. Of course, child care, flexible scheduling and family leave policies are important, but the best thing managers can do to support working parents (and all employees) is to get better at one of their most basic functions: performance appraisals.

This means doing the hard work of actually evaluating performance, not chair or face time. When managers do so, they free employees to arrange their work lives so that they can be the most effective. Surprise, surprise: When you focus on measuring face time, you get … face time. When you focus on performance, you get superior performance.

Refocusing your evaluation efforts in this way doesn’t require the complete overhaul of your company’s performance management system. It involves relatively small actions that many managers can make on their own.

— Define performance in terms of customer satisfaction, core activities or project completion.

— Regularly hold goal-setting and feedback sessions with employees, and make goal attainment the core of performance evaluation.

— Understand which aspects of employees’ jobs lend themselves to flexible work and which need to be performed at set times in the office.

— Allow more flexibility in how, when and where work gets done, while ensuring that enough time is spent at the office to promote communication, collaboration and innovation.

— Gradually allow more freedom and flexibility to well-performing employees.

— Recognize that we can maintain and increase performance standards in professional environments even as we let go of exactly how work gets done.

A fitness wristband can track how long you sit in your desk chair. It takes a leader to understand how work really gets done, and by whom.

Scott Behson

(Scott Behson is a professor of management at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the author of “The Working Dad’s Survival Guide: How to Succeed at Work and at Home.”)