Employee Performance Management – Delivering Employee Effectiveness
Author: Eric Thompson
Eric Thompson examines how to define and implement your employee performance management system to ensure improving employee effectiveness
Making each employee as effective as possible has to be a key goal for any organisation that employs a number of people. Effectiveness does not happen by chance and there needs to be a defined process within every organisation that will encourage it. Employee performance management is a key process whether it is defined formally and explicitly as it is normally in larger organisations or whether it is informal and implicit in the way that the manger deals with their staff as it may be in a smaller organisation.
In this article I explore the two key issues of design and implementation of an effective employee performance management system that will help you to achieve your goal of developing effective employees.
Employee Effectiveness
In my article; "Understanding Employee Effectiveness" I have explored what employee effectiveness is all about. We discover that there are many factors that contribute towards the effective employee including employee capability, employee engagement and organisational capability. There are in addition topics which are closely related to employee effectiveness like employee productivity.
The key issue for you as the manager is to determine which aspect or aspects of employee effectiveness are the ones that matter to you in your particular organisation. Having identified them, you can then turn your attention to designing and implementing an employee performance management process that will deliver the desired outcomes.
The Employee Performance Management System
Employee performance management is a process that delivers employee effectiveness and other aspects of improving employee performance. Although it is a process that is widely used, it is not a process that can be replicated identically in every organisation. Employee performance management is actually a concept that needs to be developed and defined and implemented to meet the needs of your specific organisation.
As a result of their own experience, many people will be familiar with specific aspects of performance management systems including setting employee performance objectives and the employee performance review. If clarifying work objectives and giving feedback based on observation of individual delivery is your performance focus that may be the extent of your system. However if you are seeking to address the broader range of issues that impact on employee effectiveness, the system needs to be broadened and designed to match the required scope.
An employee performance management system can deal with the full range of short term, medium term and long term issues that affect employee performance and employee effectiveness, but the system components need to be selected and appropriate processes designed in to make it happen.
Designing Your Employee Performance Management System
Any performance improvement system needs to embrace a number of phases of activity during which we gather information to inform our decisions, plan what we are going to do and then implement those decisions. To do this effectively for employee performance management, we need to define the whole issue that we want to deal with (the scope) and then break it down into constituent parts that we can deal with effectively.
"Employee performance management is actually a concept that needs to be developed...”
In the example of "delivery performance" that we alluded to earlier, we need to gather information about performance, perhaps through 360 degree feedback, we need to plan together as to what to do in response (the performance review), then we need to take a series of actions including perhaps resetting performance objectives for the next period and adjusting the individual development plan to take account of any new skills that are to be developed. In this example 360 degree feedback, the performance review, setting objectives and creating a development plan are key process steps that need to be included within the scope of our employee performance management system if we want to improve delivery performance.
Even a performance management system with a restricted scope, such as we have just described, will have actions that need to be implemented in different time horizons. In this case some decisions about workload may need to be implemented in a time scale of days, whereas actions around developing individual capability may be part medium term and part long term.
Deciding when you need to take action in a specific piece of the process determines the timescales in which you need to gather the data and make decisions. If action is expected in the short term then we need to be gathering information about what has happened and conducting the next review in a short time horizon, perhaps days. Leaving a long interval may make it too late to provide any effective monitoring or control over what is happening. Conversely, if we can't expect to see any change until a longer time period has elapsed, as for example is the case with a long term development plan, then is no point in checking every few days to see whether any improvement can be observed and trying to refine the action as a result. Gathering information and holding a review when nothing can have changed is simply ineffective. This part of the process needs to be implemented with a much longer time horizon.
A system definition matrix may be helpful tool...”
However things are never that straightforward. Even a component of employee performance management which is essentially long term in nature such as personal development or talent management may have some short term actions such as gaining a specific piece of experience which needs to be planned and reviewed in the short term. Similarly, aspects of the process which essentially have a short term focus, such as is the case with employee availability, may have long term actions such as, for example, monitoring the long term trend of availability.
An employee performance management system needs to be described and its scope defined in a number of dimensions. The system needs to contain component parts which address the separate aspects of effectiveness that are important to your organisation, such as engagement and capability. System elements need to be defined to address each required component; to gather information, review, plan and so forth. For each component we need to identify the time horizon over which we need to gather data and take action. In summary, to define the system effectively you need to define which components are to be addressed with which systems over which time period.
A system definition matrix may be helpful tool here to make sure that you address each component of effectiveness, each system element and be clear about the action timeframe. Our example matrix below shows how it might be used to create better understanding in the example that we have been discussing.
|
|
|
|
Delivery
|
Communicate changes to workload and priorities |
Gather informal evidence as to progress. |
Obtain formal 360 degree feedback. |
Availability |
Gather attendance data |
... |
Review long term trends… |
Implementing Your Employee Performance Management System
Once you have designed your system by deciding which components are in scope, and grouped them by time frame, it is possible to take a simplified approach when it come to developing and implementing the process steps. We can aggregate all of the required process steps in each of the three time horizons to create a single unified process in that time domain. Information can be gathered, review held when required and further actions taken in the appropriate planning horizons. This will allow a more effective and efficient process to be developed and enables clearer focus about what is to be achieved in the various time horizons.
"Roles need to be defined and individuals trained if the process is to run effectively.”
A short term process, such as when considering availability, might require a weekly review of certain data by a manager, but would only trigger a face to face meeting with the individual if certain events have occurred which require attention. A medium term process might take place quarterly, such as an interim progress review, picking up those aspects of the process for which data is available and medium term action is appropriate. The long term aspects might be reviewed annually and concentrate on, for example, updating the various long term plans.
Part of the implementation process needs to be to clarify the roles of the people who will be involved in the process, both those that are reviewing and those that are being reviewed. Roles need to be defined and individuals trained if the process is to run effectively.
Employee Performance Management
We have examined aspects of the design and implementation of employee performance management systems.
You need to design the system to ensure that each component of employee effectiveness that matters to you is addressed, that you have specified the process elements that needs to be put in place and that you have identified the timeframes in which you want to address the various issues.
When you implement the systems you need to group together the aspects that occur in the same timeframes and make sure that the process is effective by developing an integrated approach. Roles need to be defined and people trained.
If you follow this approach to employee performance management you will be well on the way to improving employee effectiveness.
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