Question

Your HR Manager wants to promote a high-performance culture and improve Communications with line managers in your organization. To contribute to this, he/she has given you the following task:

As part of the revision of the HR Guide for Managers, you are asked to write a section in approximately 1,000 words, on Performance Management which:

* identifies and describes the main stages of the performance management cycle ensuring you include the objective-setting process, interim reviews, and appraisal.

*Evaluates how Performance Management contributes to promoting challenge, improving capability and recognising and rewarding talent.

Answer 1

A performance management cycle can comprise of various stages-

Planning stage

The planning stage mostly involves setting objectives for the employees. Managers and employees go through various meetings and set the objectives which the employees have to meet. These objectives can belong to various fields such as-

1. Financial Objectives- like completing a sales target, reducing some operational costs etc.

2. Customer satisfaction targets- Maintain targets such as - atleast 85% of the customers give excellent rating and similar type of other objectives

3. Learning Targets- Set targets such as employees go a through a new learning or a new training every quarter.

4 Personal Satisfaction targets- maintain targets that keep the personal lives of the employees stay on track and employees do not feel too much in pressure

Monitoring Stage

The managerial team should continuously monitor their progress in the defined objectives. Continuous monitoring helps in-

1. Keeping a regular check on the progress towards achieving objectives

2 Changing the current work pattern accordingly if required to meet the objectives

3. Identify various problems that are occuring in achieving the objectives and discuss the problems and solutions with the other team members

4. Review other objectives as well if they look too far exaggerated

Review and evaluation stage

This stage comprises of reviewing the achievements of the managers on the defined objectives. How can evaluation and review be done-

1. Set various parameters of evaluation- these are the defined objectives that were set in the initial stage. These objectives can be - Customer service, Team work, Communication, Financial Targets, Innovation, Technological upgradation, New learnings etc.

2. Define the importance level to each of the objectives- like Financial goals are of highest priority, then customer satisfaction and then others accordingly. The importance of the objective can depend on the organization, an organization may choose to give certain importance to certain objectives or equal objectives to all of the parameters

3. Use ANALYTICAL HIERARCHY PROCESS to develop a scorecard to measure the employees on

4. Set meeting time period with every manager, and score them on all parameters

5. USE PERCENTILE METHOD to define the top managers, and say the managers in the lower 25 %ile should be taken care off well as they are lagging in their performance.

After the review-

1. Tell the improvement points to all the employees

2. Ask the problems they faced while achieving those objectives and discuss the possible solutions

3. Ask what other sources or resources they require which will help them in improving their performances.

Appraisal Stage

Make sure that the employee gets an appropriate appraisal accorinding to the performance. Benefits of having a good PERFORMANCE BASED APPRAISAL

.1. Employees feel that there is enough transparency in the organization

2. Meritocracy is promoted in the organization culture

3. Attrition Rates are highly reduced

4. Employees feel motivated towards doing theri jobs effectively

Negative effects of a bad appraisal system

1. A lot of time is wasted

2. Attrition rates increase

3. Employees do their work half-heartedly

4. There is negativity around in the organization

Evaluating how performance management contributes

Firstly we can identify the benefits of a PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN THE ORGANIZATION

Organizational Benefits

1. Higher employee retention and loyality

2. Improved productivity of employees

3. Improve communication between the employees

4. Bring certain cost advantages

Managerial Benefits-

1. Saves time

Employee Benefits

1. Provides Job Satisfaction

2. Provides a well defined career path

3. Helps employee in maintaining a healthy relationship with the firm

HR- ANALYTICS is a wonderful tool which can be used to that can be used to evaluate performance management

What is HR ANALYTICS first?

HR Analytics is the science of using the data generated by the employees of the company and analysing it to make employees perform better, and make them stay longer in the organization. HR analytics uses FACTOR ANALYSIS to measure the most important factors that make the employees stay or leave a company. These factors can be-

1. Regular time to time appraisal

2. Good work culture

3. Meritocracy in the organization

4. The good-will of the firm in the market

5. Business expansion strategies of the organization; and several other such factors

A similar HR ANALYITCS model can be develop to test if the performance management is contributing to bring a positive change in the company.

Step 1-

Create a questionnaire for the employees with questions such as

1. How would you rate your capability or accept a challenge before the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

2. 1. How would you rate your capability or accept a challenge after the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

3. How would you rate your capabilities or expertise in your work before the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

4. How would you rate your capabilities or expertise in your work after the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

5. How would you rate the rewarding culture of the firm before the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

6. How would you rate the rewarding culture of the firm after the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

7. How would you rate the meritocracy culture of the firm before the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

8. How would you rate the meritocracy culture of the firm after the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

9. How would you rate the communication ability of the firm before the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

10 How would you rate the communication ability of the firm after the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

11. How would you rate the resources provided by the firm before the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

12. How would you rate the resources provided by the firm after the performance management system was in place. Rate between 1-100 points

You can think of several other factors which the perfromance management system would have affected and ask the employees to rate on them

Step 2

Measure the scores given by the employees for both -BEFORE AND AFTER THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Step 3

Evaluate each factor, for factors where the scores have improved for AFTER THE IMPLEMENTATION, the system is working well, and see how you can further improve the scores

For the factors where the scores of AFTER THE IMPLEMENTATION are lower, check what went wrong there, ask the employees for improvement and implement them in the next year or quarter.

This way, we can evaluate our PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM