Performance (mis)management Posted by Reward Blogger

Performance (mis)management

Posted by Reward Blogger, 18 July 2013 at 15:48

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Tags: Reward

By Mark Goodlake, Astellas Pharma Europe Ltd

For my sins I’ve been leading a project to harmonise my company’s performance management across 20 countries. An interesting experience and not quite how it’s shown in the text books! Anyway I’ve certainly learned a few things along the way on how to develop an effective (or non effective) process so I hope you’ll allow me to share them with you.

1. Make the business case clear – don’t assume that all staff share your enthusiasm for the subject, or that managers have unlimited time to spare. Think about what’s in it for different stakeholders – for example emphasise the development aspects for staff.
2. Make the roles and responsibilities clear – performance management is often seen as another HR process. It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. It’s a vital business process to align organisation to individual performance. Employees, managers and senior managers all have their part to play.
3. Keep it as simple as you can – some people want to measure everything –technical competencies, core competencies, objectives, day job etc with weightings and formulae. That confuses everyone.
4. It’s a change process , not a technical project – expect resistance and anxiety – rating someone’s performance is sensitive and people need to feel they are going to treated fairly...
5. It won’t work perfectly in year 1 – getting performance management right is like painting the famous Scottish bridge – continuous improvement is more realistic than short term perfection. 
6. Let managers manage – the more we use forced ranking, formulaic assessment and the like, the less empowered managers become to make an assessment. Some discretion, with suitable consistency checking, is a good thing.
7. Technology can help – especially in tracking compliance and reducing the paperwork – but it doesn’t mean the quality of the appraisal discussion is necessarily better, of course.
8. Provide consequences for non compliance – it’s amazing how objectives suddenly get signed off quickly if you say bonuses will be reduced for late submission...
9. 3, 4 or 5 ratings – it doesn’t matter that much – people spend more time discussing rating scales than whether the performance dialogue is effective. There are pluses and minuses with all rating scales, and they are a necessary evil in many ways.
10. Fairness (or perceived fairness) is important – human nature is that some managers will assess more harshly or generously than others. A well run calibration process can help.

That’s my tips so far – if others have more to add I’d be glad to hear from you.