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Your employees may not be saying it exactly in those words, but those are the three things they ought to be thinking at the beginning of a performance cycle.

It is through performance planning that you orchestrate the skills, experience and energy that your employees bring to their work. Your agency has a mission. As a supervisor, you have certain things that you are accountable for achieving in order to support your agency's efforts to fulfill its mission. And you, in turn, rely on your employees to help you achieve the things for which you are accountable. So, it is through performance planning that you get your employee's skills, experience and energy aligned toward delivering the results expected of your unit.

Results Expectations

The main purpose of performance planning is to define and agree upon the results the employee will be held accountable for achieving and define how the achievement of those results will be measured.

Some examples of results expectations:

• Services provided to 17 clients per month
• Costs maintained at or below $215 per transaction
• 90% client satisfaction with services provided
• 80% of transactions completed within 48 hours
• 95% literacy rate achieved in defined population
• System up 99.5% of time during peak usage hours

Figuring Out What Your Results Expectations Should Be

The results expectations for a particular job can be derived from a number of sources. To figure out the results that are expected of you, you can look at your job from any one or more of the following perspectives:

• The higher-level goals of your agency
• Your "customers'" expectations of you
• The key responsibilities of your job
• Opportunities to improve processes

Use the checklist Figure Out Your Results Expectations to help you to identify the results expectations for your job, or to work through goal identification with your employees.

Often employees will say that their jobs are not the kind that can be measured, so results expectations of the sort described here do not apply to them. On the contrary, every job has results expectations. The contribution of every job can be measured. It is not always obvious or easily identified. And it is not always a numeric measure. But think of it this way: If a job's expected results cannot be defined or measured, then it is likely the job is not necessary.

It is often easier to look at examples of results expectations and modify them to fit your own job than to start from scratch with a blank sheet of paper. Even looking at results expectations for jobs very different from your own can be helpful. The Directory of Results Expectations includes examples from a variety of jobs. These examples may help you define your own results expectations or to work with your employees to help them define theirs.

Behavioral Expectations

Once results expectations have been established, employees also need to know what competencies they will be expected to apply, or the values the agency expects them to adhere to, as they work toward achieving their results expectations. These are the behavioral expectations.

Examples of behavioral expectations:

• Work collaboratively with fellow team members
• Act ethically
• Solve problems by determining root cause
• Anticipate consequences of decisions
• Communicate clearly
• Innovate in order to continuously improve work processes
• Work with your own, your coworkers', and the public's safety in mind

Competencies and values are alternative ways of specifying behavioral expectations. Agencies may choose one or the other of these two approaches for performance management purposes.

Competencies

Terminology may be a bit confusing here. Some agencies use the term "competencies," others refer to "dimensions," and yet others talk about "knowledge, skills, and abilities." Let's simplify: All of these terms refer to the same things. For simplicity's sake, we refer to them as competencies, as that is the currently fashionable term in professional HR circles.

Competencies are clusters of knowledge, skills, abilities and other attributes that employees bring with them to their jobs every day, and take with them when they go home. To perform a job effectively, employees need certain competencies and, by applying these competencies, they are able to meet their results expectations.

If your agency includes competencies on employees' work plans, consider the reasons competencies are there:

• Competencies are the attributes employees need in order to perform their jobs effectively, that is, to deliver the results expected. For example, in your job it may be very important that you anticipate the consequences of the decisions you make. This is one of the behavioral markers for the "decision making" competency and therefore "decision making" would be included as a competency in your behavioral expectations.
• Employees will be assessed at the end of the performance cycle on how well they demonstrated these competencies. The assessment may contribute to their overall performance appraisal rating.
• Competencies may be used to identify developmental needs. If employees are falling short of some of their results expectations, or if they wish to raise their performance to a higher level, they can focus on the competency most likely to affect certain results and work on building that competency.

Values

Values define "the way we do things around here." Well, maybe a better way to put that would be that values are "the way we ought to do things around here." Agencies define their values so that employees have a clear understanding of how things are supposed to be done. Values, such as "Teamwork" and "Customer Focus," are defined in very broad, behavioral terms so that they are easy to apply in day-to-day situations.

If your agency incorporates values on employees' work plans, the likely reasons are:

• The values lay out the principles to be followed by employees to get the work done. For example: Work with the safety of yourself, your co-workers and the public in mind.
• Values, if clearly and concisely defined, provide employees with a useful template for making day-to-day decisions and ensuring that those decisions are congruent with the agency's desired way of operating. Ideally, they enable employees to make decisions themselves, without having to wait for the decision to be made at a higher level and without having to publish extensive policies to try to address every possible decision situation employees might encounter.
• Values are built into the performance appraisal process to hold employees accountable for adhering to them. For example, if you meet or exceed your results expectations but do so in ways that run counter to your agency's values, your evaluation will be downgraded accordingly.

The Performance Planning Discussion

You can have a great performance plan worked out for your employee on paper, but unless you discuss the plan with the employee face-to-face, do not expect enthusiastic performance or great results. Interaction is what makes the process work. Without interaction, it's merely an exercise in shuffling papers.

Two Approaches

Points to Cover in the Performance Planning Discussion

What Well-Written Work Plans Look Like

What emerges from a work planning discussion and appears on an employee's work plan should meet the following criteria ¹:

• Results expectations describe outcomes - They should focus on the outputs of the job, not just the activities necessary to produce those outputs.
• Results expectations are verifiable - They should not be vague. There should be a way to verify whether or not they have been achieved.
• There are no more than ten results expectations - Too many goals will dilute the employee's focus.
• Results expectations align with higher-level goals or customer requirements - The employee's individual success should visibly contribute to achievement of these higher-level goals.
• Behavioral expectations support the results expectations - The competencies or values required to be successful should be as clear to the employee as the results expectations themselves.

References

¹ These guidelines are adapted from the work of Jack Zigon, http://www.zigonperf.com/index.html