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How to transform Your Performance Management Process

Tired of the same old routine? At the beginning of a performance cycle, you go through the motion of dusting off last year's work plans, changing the dates, and getting employees' signatures. At the end of the cycle, you fill in some innocuous comments about your employees' sparkling personalities, assign ratings that won't upset anyone, and submit the appraisal forms before HR gets on your back for being late.

Exaggeration? Perhaps. But this is probably not too far from reality for many managers and supervisors. However, if this even faintly resembles what you are doing, you are not doing performance management. You are merely playing out a bureaucratic game, enacting a yearly ritual that serves little purpose and eats up your valuable time.

There is a way out of this rut, a way to breathe fresh life into your performance management process, a way to transform an annual administrative ceremony into a valuable ongoing management tool.

To escape the bureaucratic grip you can adopt a results-focused approach. In this approach, performance management is about getting the right things done well while encouraging employee growth. It is an ongoing process, not an annual ritual. It is a logical and natural managerial process that effective managers figure out for themselves, even when there's no HR department around to impose a seven-part form on them. For these effective managers, it's the way they get things done and stay in business. Or, in public sector, it's the way they help their agencies achieve their missions.

The key is to focus on results: What needs to be achieved in order for the agency to be successful? What does each employee need to achieve in order to contribute to the agency's effectiveness?

In Build a Results-Focused Performance Management Process, we offer a general approach to creating a results-focused process. Agencies have the flexibility to build performance management processes that best suit their missions and the work they do.

There is pressure on most government organizations to become more accountable, more productive, and more responsive to citizen's needs and to legislative mandates. In other words, they need to do what they are supposed to do and do it better, faster, cheaper. If you choose to face up to this challenge, your performance management process will play a central role in carrying out the transformation. But if you are stuck with a traditional, bureaucratic performance management process, it will do nothing but get in the way.

Not quite ready for a total transformation? There are steps you can take to both simplify your traditional performance management process and make it more results-focused. We offer some ways to do this in Streamlined Performance Management.

The Special Case of "Routine" Jobs

There are certain classifications in which there are many employees who perform the same or very similar tasks. The jobs may be challenging and demanding, yet the expectations remain stable from year to year, if not from day to day. Transportation Worker, Correctional Officer and Information Processing Technician are examples.

Jobs such as these lend themselves to a "checklist" method of managing performance. It is not necessary to work out results expectations with each employee in one of these classifications. Results expectations are more or less the same for every employee. By following the Checklists for Managing Performance guidelines, you can define a set of uniform expectations for the entire class. This checklist can then be used as the work plan and appraisal form for all employees in the class.

Is It Working? Evaluating Performance Management

In a performance culture, if something is important, you need to measure it, and if there is anything that is getting in the way of delivering results, you need to eliminate it.

So, how do you know if your performance management process is effective, contributing toward building and maintaining a performance culture, enabling the right things to get done well? Performance management needs to be put under the bright lights of measurement just like any other activity that consumes resources and purports to do good.

A number of metrics are suggested in Evaluate Your Performance Management Process.