Home >> Motivation Initiatives >> Performance Management

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 will not 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 currently 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 on-going management tool.

In order to escape the bureaucratic process, 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 on-going process, not an annual ritual. It is a logical and natural managerial process that effective managers figure out for themselves, even when there is no HR department around to mandate a seven-part form. For these effective managers, it is the way they get things done and stay in business. Or, in the public sector, it is 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 needs and to legislative mandates - 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. However, 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 to make it more results focused. We offer some ways to do this in Streamlined Performance Management.

The Special Case of "Routine" Jobs

There are some job 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 of these types of classifications.

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. Following the Checklists for Managing Performance guidelines, you can define a set of uniform expectations for the entire job 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. 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, and 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.

Readings

Want to read more about performance management? There are lots of online resources. These include: white papers, research, ready-made forms, consulting services, promotions for books, advice about "best practices", debates, and commands to throw your performance management system in the trashcan. Of course, not all the advice is sound. Beware!

In Readings in Performance Management we list a few links that are worth a look.

Statutes and Policies

Aside from being a core management function, performance management is mandated by N.C. state law. General Statute 126-7 requires agencies to have operative performance management systems in order to "further outstanding performance" and to ensure that merit increases and bonuses are distributed fairly, based on performance. It also mandates that performance appraisals use a five-point rating scale.

Administrative Code Subchapter O codifies the requirements of a performance management system. It lays out the six purposes of performance management and identifies the components of an "operative performance management system."

The performance management section of the State Personnel Policies sets standards for policies that each agency is required to meet. The state policy also includes a definition of the state rating scale.

Each agency is required to have its own performance management process, tailored specifically to its performance management needs based on its mission, the nature of the work performed and its desired culture. Check out your agency's specific policies and procedures concerning performance management. Some agency policies are posted at their public websites.

reports

The Office of State Personnel prepares and submits to the State Personnel Commission a Performance Management Report each year. These reports include an analysis of the distribution of performance ratings for state employees, the relationship between performance ratings and important demographic characteristics (e.g., race, sex, age), a comparison of performance rating distributions across agencies and universities, and other analyses.

Performance Management Report No. 16 (2004)
Performance Management Report No. 17 (2005)
Performance Management Report No. 18 (2006)
Performance Management Report No. 19 (2007)
Performance Management Report No. 20 (2008)
Performance Management Report No. 21 (2009)
Performance Management Report No. 22 (2010)