Question

“What, in your opinion, is the importance of a performance management system and how would the knowledge and skills you have acquired about the performance management system in this course help you in your career as an effective manager? Use your personal examples to illustrate your reflections.”

Answer 1

Importance of performance management system-

1. Encourage development of employees and managers

2. Increase the productivity and quality

3. It benefits everyone within the organization

4. Evaluate an employee’s work against the expectations set out by their managers

5. It helps to ensure that the company’s goals are met in an efficient, timely and successful manner.

6. It helps to keep everyone focused on the same set of long-term goals for the company

7. It is used because it is important for a business to have some kind of metric of acceptable performance

8. It helps in taking correct decision while promoting a good employee or fire an unsuccessful employee.

9. It takes time to connect with all employees and reassure them their contributions are noticed and valued.

Knowledge and skills about performance management that help in career as an effective manager-

1. Understanding and vision- behind every successful performance management strategy there is team who understand the value of performance management and buy into the process. Company should involve managers in the discussion of the organizational goals and success measures for performance management. For example- if manager if understanding and has definite and clear vision then it can easily make his or her team understand about the importance of performance management system.

2. Managers need to be able to plan effectively using SMART objectives- there should be coordination between organization’s overall vision and goals and then manager broke down into smaller objectives for individual employees to work. Vague plans which do not have actionable steps and targets are rarely achieved. For example- as a manager it is their duty to make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, reliable and within time frame) objectives. So, it they can be easily measured when ever manager wants and manager can easily make employees understandable about objectives.

3. Feedback effectively and coach employees- managers should give immediate and accurate feedbacks to employees and this will lead to increase in employees motivation and loyalty. For example- if a manager fails to provide immediate feedback then feedbacks can lose its relevance and de-motivate employees. This can we usually see in the organizations that managers tend to make a note and bundle all of their feedbacks about employees into performance review, and when the time come then they become irrelevant.

4. Ability to look forward, not backward- when it comes to performance appraisals, the focus should be on what can be achieved moving forward. For example- generally managers try to dwell on pas performance or past accomplishment or problems. It will de-motivate employees, because criticism would not help employees to gain better results in the future.

5. Communicative and open to discussion- managers who are dedicated to successful performance management can hold regular weekly one-to-one meetings with employees rather than waiting for a quarterly or annual review to roll around. For example- if manager not communicate properly with employees and not open to discussions then it will not be an effective manager because it will not lead to growth and development of both employees and an organization.