A business is nothing more than an idea without people in place to take action and make the business happen. And how well a business runs is a direct reflection of its employees.
Over time, a practice known as Performance Management has been put in place in most businesses to ensure that employees not only do the jobs they were hired to do, but do them well and are proud of the work they get done.
Performance Management involves planning, monitoring, developing, rating, and rewarding employees. Let’s find out a bit more…
1. Planning Your Business Workload
Planning is just what it sounds like: planning out not only what tasks need to get done, but the ways in which getting them done should happen. Involving employees in this process is critical because by involving them, they feel more a part of the process and less like monkeys who are trained to jump on command.
In other words, involving employees in the planning process improves morale. It also helps to make sure that there aren’t any gaps in communication to keep the plans from coming to fruition. After the planning stage, all employees should have a clear idea of what is expected from them.
2. Monitoring Business And Individual Performance
Monitoring is also self explanatory. Monitoring involves the monitoring of employees by their managers to make sure their tasks are getting done efficiently and takes into consideration how well the employees are able to function.
Monitoring ensures that unrealistic expectations aren’t set by management or the employees and keeps track of not only what is being accomplished but what has yet to be worked on.
3. Individual And Team Performance Development
Developing refers to keeping employees evolving to meet the ever increasing standards of a post millennial workplace. It could involve teaching new skills, implementing new procedures to make the work processes more accessible.
It sometimes means assigning new responsibilities to employees who appear to have outgrown their old ones. Development ensures growth of employees and the business.
4. Rating Individual Performance
Rating is the way by which employee performances are evaluated. It is imperative that employees are given a “report card” on a regular basis. Rating can address areas in which the employee needs to grow as well as the areas in which they excel.
It provides a clear map to where the employee stands at that date and time and is important to make sure the employee keeps up a good rate of Development within the business.
5. Rewarding Great Performance
Rewarding Employees is perhaps the most important part of Performance Management. A happy employee is a productive employee and rewarding an employee whose work is exceptional is a key factor in making sure that their level of work doesn’t deteriorate.
Everybody likes to make sure that they are appreciated. Studies have shown that employees who are rewarded for a job well done are far more motivated to keep performing at a high level than those who are berated or “punished” for being less than satisfactory.
Performance Management is a method by which a business owner can ensure that his or her business is constantly growing and achieving at the level they desire.
It’s an easy system to put in place and is the most effective system in making sure that business goals are achieved.
By: Martin Haworth
Posts Tagged ‘Practice Management’
Performance Management – Five Steps To Success
April 12th, 2010Training KPI and Effective HR Management
March 20th, 2010
The use of KPI’s or key performance indicators is quite a useful concept that has become popular in strategic management. Over the past years, the practice of management has been becoming more and more based on facts and observations, and it became logical to try and define which parameters could determine performance.
Being able to have quantifiable bases with which to measure various aspects of the performance and condition of an employee, group, or company has become one of the basic principles of sound management. After identifying the various measurable quantities available, it then becomes a matter of choosing the most relevant parameters. The most important of these parameters then became known as key performance indicators (KPI).
For instance, a training KPI is the average number of training hours that each employee has undergone within a specified time period, usually a year. This parameter would be able to roughly indicate the amount of training that an employee, on average, is able to get within that time period.
By considering both the magnitude and the rate of change of this parameter, management would be able to get a clearer idea of whether their employees are receiving enough training. Conversely, if this average number is too small, or if the rate of change is negative – that is, if the number of hours show a decreasing trend – then it might be necessary to route more resources to training.
Another training KPI that might prove useful is the average training cost, per employee, over a specified time period. This cost can then be compared against the average increase in productivity, to see if the training regimen that has been implemented actually worked. For example, a high average training cost together with a low average increase in productivity would seem to point towards an ineffective training program. A lower average training cost, on the other hand, together with a high average increase in productivity would mean that the training program implemented was a cost-effective one.
It can be seen from these examples, then, that considering training KPI’s individually would not always yield accurate evaluations. This is because many of these parameters are actually interrelated, and must be considered together to represent a meaningful way of measuring performance.
It is still important, of course, to be able to identify what these most important training KPI’s are, to be able to monitor all of them effectively. Once data has been gathered according to these known key performance indicators, then the data can be evaluated, in light of the relationships between these KPI’s. A proper selection of KPI’s would help to limit the data to be analyzed to those data that would really be relevant.
In today’s world, organizations are more often than not forced to adapt to changing conditions and a dynamic marketplace. This places more importance on being able to evaluate and implement effective training programs. With the use of training KPI’s, managers would be able to judge better and craft good training programs for the betterment of their organization.
By: Sam Miller
