WANT BETTER PERFORMANCE? DECOUPLE GOALS AND BONUSES

It might sound unintuitive, but in fact pegging compensation to pre-set metrics is counterproductive, says Stuart Robertson, Chief People Officer at AvePoint. He tells People Matters why

- Mint Kang

The HR team at SaaS solutions firm AvePoint is done with the old-school performance management approach of bonuses and pre-calculated goals. Instead, they're implementing an OKR framework based on 90-day increments and aligning teams to shared goals at the executive level – turning productivity and performance into a live, moving framework that's much more conducive to teamwork and business agility.

“Today, companies are more interested in setting stretch goals that can yield disruptive growth rather than incremental growth and focusing the performance discussion on enabling this future growth in the context of a team, rather than as individuals,” says Stuart Robertson, AvePoint's Chief People Officer. “With collaboration and diversity being key factors in a thriving workforce, it is impossible to measure one’s performance without the consideration of a broader picture.”

ONLY BY DECOUPLING THE HARD-CODED LINK BETWEEN GOALS AND BONUS PAYMENTS CAN WE TRULY SET ASPIRATIONAL GOALS AND DRIVE GREATER PERFORMANCE

Robertson is not fond of the incremental style that was prevalent just 10 years ago – overly bureaucratic and time-consuming, he calls it, involving thousands of hours of management time and providing little differentiation between actual performance. “Furthermore, it was heavily metric-based, pre-negotiated at the start of the performance year and solely focused on the individual employees’ ability to exceed the targets they had agreed on,” he says.

“Only by decoupling the hard-coded link between goals and bonus payments can we truly set aspirational goals and drive greater performance.”