Effectiveness in Improving Employee Performance

Author: Eric Thompson

Eric Thompson discusses the factors that you need to address to ensure that your system for improving employee performance is an effective one.

For most organisations improving employee performance is a key issue, with a direct link between employee performance and business success. Organisations will usually have one or more businesses processes, such as a performance management system, aimed at improving employee performance. To bring most value to the organisation these processes need to be as effective as possible, and it is down to you to develop the systems for your organisation with that in mind.

As you search for effectiveness in improving employee performance there are four aspects to consider.

• Scope
• Unnecessary activity
• The process elements
• Time frames

I will explore these issues in this article. The insight will help you to develop the way in which your organisation improves the performance of its employees.

Employee Performance

Let's begin, however, by exploring the phrase "employee performance". If we are going to try to improve it, we need to know what it is. A dictionary definition suggests that "performance" might have something to do with the "manner or quality of functioning". When we look at the words "manner" and "quality" in the work context it suggests that employee performance will depend on the systems and tools that determine how the work is done, the capability of the individual to do the work and how motivated and committed  they are to doing the work well.

"You will want to be assured that if you are improving performance you will be improving the things that matter to your organisation.”

In other articles we have looked at a number of factors that are relevant as indicators of employee performance. Employee capability, employee engagement, organisational capability, employee availability, employee effectiveness and employee productivity all describe aspects of employee performance. These aspects are not necessarily independent; in fact many of them are interlinked. Some of the definitions may however have more relevance in particular situations, and as a result it is up to you to identify which of them it is that matters to you in the particular situation that you are interested in. You can then select the appropriate target and focus on it.

To be able to work at improving employee performance you will need to be able to identify what it is that you want to improve, you need to be able to measure the performance in a way that is relevant and you need to be able to take action that will lead to improvement. In short you need to define an improvement process. A suitable process has existed in the workplace for many years and mostly it is referred to as employee performance management.

Employee Performance Management

Here we have a process that allows us to address the aspects of performance that are critical to our situation. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) have done a lot of work on performance management systems. In particular they have studied how they are used and how they are evolving. If you are interested in the detail then I suggest you explore further on CIPD. They provide us with a definition for performance management:

"Performance management is a process which contributes to the effective management of individuals and teams in order to achieve high levels of organisational performance."

This confirms that we have a process that helps us to achieve high levels of performance. The question for you is how you can ensure that your employee performance management process is as effective as possible in your context. You will want to be assured that if you are improving performance you will be improving the things that matter to your organisation.

Scope

It is a clear part of making the process effective that you define the scope of the system that you put in place and that you work within that boundary. Once you have decided which aspects of performance are relevant in your situation, you need to check the definitions of your chosen indicators and ensure that your performance management system contains processes which enable you to measure the factors concerned and make decisions based on those results which will create improvement in the future.

Eliminating the Unnecessary

The CIPD make the point that performance management needs to be holistic. You need to see the whole picture and take actions across the board that will lead to performance improvement. You can't just focus on one chosen aspect of performance, ensure that it is addressed and then hope everything else falls into place as well. 

They are right of course, but I believe that there has to be a caveat to that. You need to make sure that you are spending time on issues that are relevant to your organisation. Spending time on a process that is not required is not an effective use of resource. There is no point, for example, in dealing with employee availability if it is not an issue in your organisation. The trick is to consider the whole system, but then only implement those parts that you require.

There are two ways in which you might approach this. You might eliminate the aspect from the scope altogether, or you might choose to go part way and monitor the aspect in question to ensure that is not becoming an issue, but exclude from the scope any decision making process that is based on the information.

Process Elements

It is worth reflecting on the fact that although employee performance management is a process that deals with improving employee performance, it is not a process that has a common description everywhere that it is implemented. There are certain features of performance management, for example the employee performance review, that feature in the majority of performance management implementations, but no feature is ever present.

It is up to you again to design your system in a way that is effective for your organisation by developing a coherent approach and including the features that are going to be relevant to your needs. The structure of your performance management system is for you to define. You can of course do so based on best practice, but it is up to you to select the elements that are going to work for you. There needs to be a process element in place to cover each aspect of employee performance that falls within your chosen scope.

Timeframes

"The structure of your performance management system is for you to define.”

Time is an issue that you need to consider, and in particular the time horizons in which the various factors can be influenced. For example, developing employee capability is a long term process. It takes years to develop significant additional capability. It may take several years to gain a university degree, and other noticeable differences in employee capability are likely to occur in a similar time frame.

At the other end of the scale unless you address issues like employee availability immediately, within days or weeks, you are unlikely to have a significant influence on the outcome.

It is very ineffective to monitor and control everything at a high frequency just because some aspects of the process require that degree of attention. On the other hand if you do not deal with some aspects often enough you may fail to spot emerging trends or even spot erroneous ones.

The best approach is therefore to consider the various aspects of performance management that you want to implement in three separate timeframes. Firstly, you can place together a group of aspects that need to be dealt with in a short time horizon. This can deal with issues such as attendance which need to be recorded and managed on a daily basis.  Secondly, you can place together a group that need to be addressed in a medium term horizon. An example of this might be around employee motivation where we know from experience that while the situation may change over a period of months it is unlikely to change from day to day. Finally, you have a group of aspects, such as with employee capability, which should be addressed in a long term horizon, perhaps annually.

Everything needs to be dealt with; otherwise you do not have the holistic approach, but it is not effective to deal with every aspect at the same frequency.

To some extent you can see this time grouping as separating out of the short term tactical processes from the longer term more strategic ones. In the short term, over a horizon of days and weeks, we need to focus on communicating work needs and priorities, dealing with barriers to performance (including attendance) and making sure that the resources that are required by the employee to complete the work are available. If these short term "house keeping" tasks are not done then effort spent on longer term more strategic issues such as engendering commitment or developing capability is likely to be wasted.

Making Performance Improvement Effective

In this discussion we have examined four issues that you need to consider if you are seeking effectiveness in improving employee performance. How you approach these issues can be summarised as follows:

• Consider which aspects of performance matter and get the scope right.
• Take a holistic approach but make sure that each element is necessary.
• Choose the process elements to match the chosen scope.
• Group together the short, medium and long term aspects of your chosen process and progress them in suitable time frames.

Address these issues and you are likely to be on your way to developing an effective process for improving your employee performance.

 

 

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