09 August 2014, Singapore: This is an article worth reading. It is written by Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith. It is not my usual "short & sweet" but a bit lengthy. Happy reading!
Click the hyperlink if you want to read it from the source: 3 Reason Performance Management will Change in 2013
Three Reasons
Performance Management will Change in 2013
By Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith
Is
there any organizational practice more broken than performance management? Not
if you concur with Marc Effron & Miriam Ort who state “perhaps no talent
management process is more important or more reviled than performance
management.” In fact, it draws universal agreement on several fronts:
- everyone hates it – employees and
managers alike
- nobody does it well – it’s a skill
that seemingly fails to be acquired despite exhaustive training efforts, and
- it fails the test of construct
validity – it doesn't do what it was designed to do, i.e. increase performance
Traditional
performance management programs have become organization wallpaper. They exist
in the background with little or no expectations for impact. Yet despite its
poor popularity, the concept of performance (at an individual and
organizational level) is critical to business success. It can’t just be
ignored.
Why is it so broken?
In a
large survey conducted by WorldatWork, 58% of organizations rated their
performance management systems as “C Grade or below.” That gets a giggle. The
performance management process itself gets subjected to its own methods of
setting criteria and rating performance against them – and fails.
I
believe there are three reasons almost all current performance management
systems are broken:
- People have changed
- Technology has changed
- People’s relationship with their
technology has changed
Repairing
the damage? In order to compete in
today’s market, companies must move to adopt a much more agile performance
management approach.
People HAVE CHANGED
Employee
expectations have changed. It’s not just Gen Y – employees everywhere and of
every generation expect more. More involvement, more accountability, and more
transparency. When it comes to managing their performance, employees have
shifted from being passive recipients to active agents. Not satisfied with a
one-way download of performance feedback, employees want to participate in the
performance data collection process. And they liken the ‘annual event’ of a
performance review to arriving at the pearly gates on Judgment Day.
Managers
have changed too. Command and control is no longer cutting it – managers are
expected to guide and coach, provide balanced constructive feedback and
inspire, rather than enforce, performance.
Add
to that what science is now telling us about what really drives human
motivation. Like, goal pursuit motivates performance much more than goal
achievement, peak performance is best achieved in states of flow, and
multi-tasking only dilutes performance on all tasks undertaken concurrently.
Key Changes for High Performance?
Paradigm
shift. What used to work no longer does. Managers need to:
1) be real – communicate openly and
often.
2) set stretch goals and inspire
individuals to work to their potential.
3) get out of the way – trust their teams and
empower employees with accountability.
Technology HAS CHANGED
We’re
reaching a tipping point for technology in the talent management arena. It
began with simple automation: take the paper processes and put them on a
computer. Fine, but that left us with so many spreadsheets, Word templates,
proprietary systems and disconnected point solutions that we were drowning in
complexity and data overload. It also highlighted that many of the processes we
were automating actually needed to be revised, simplified or eliminated
altogether.
Baffled
by the complexity we created, focus in recent years has been on process
simplification, user-friendliness and redirecting attention to what actually
matters. A good step forward, but we still suffer from too much data, too
little meaningful information.
The
“big data & analytics movement” has now really raised the bar – not just in
terms of what data can be gathered, aggregated and analyzed but also how it is
filtered and presented to audiences to provide immediate management insights.
Activity lists are being replaced by composite dashboards, lengthy reports by
simple performance heat maps – yes, pictures, literally replacing thousands of
words.
Key Change for High Performance?
A
shift in focus from process to outcomes. Burn the forms. With technology
finally up to the task of producing meaningful information, managers can turn
their attention to driving performance outcomes rather than being bogged down
in laborious processes.
The relationship between people and
their technology
On
demand. Ubiquitous. Better, faster, cheaper.
It’s
really not so long ago that your only likely encounter with a computer was when
you went to work, laptops were expensive and rare, and mobile devices were
pagers and Walkmans. Today, can you even imagine getting past 10:00 a.m.
without having accessed a myriad of your online applications? We work online,
shop online, socialize online, we are connected 24/7 – online.
Enterprise
technologies are not far behind. Perhaps you are still in a workplace that
restricts or bans social media, but they are in decline. Perhaps your
organization refuses cloud-based applications for privacy or security reasons,
but they are in decline. The fact is: organizations that try to block out the
world simply ostracize themselves. And they are in decline.
Key Change for High Performance?
An
agile, social and mobile work environment. You will set dynamic goals and
adjust them in response to change; your manager will provide just-in-time
coaching wherever you are; skills and knowledge you need will be recommended
and streamed to you; your performance journal will continuously capture and
cluster feedback, ideas and suggestions from your peers and customers; your
formal annual performance review will be permanently deleted from your
calendar…and you will finally be in a position to manage your own career.
-- The End --
