Architecting Performance

In many organisations people performance review has become an annual management exercise in compliance or an exercise to justify people decisions, rather than an on-going organisation process of people, resource and outcome alignment. Few organisations spend time and effort sharing & communicating the critical success factors & the performance expectations map so all can understand the linkages between their work efforts & outcomes and the achievement of business goals. A quick survey of employee performance areas can throw light on the strength of the People Performance Architecture in your organisation. Take a random sample of your employees and their Managers (preferably customer facing departments where performance requirements are usually relatively clearer and more transparent) and do a short survey to evaluate how strongly employee performance areas link with the overall business goal.

Identify gaps and inconsistencies in Architecture
An analysis of the data collected through the survey may throw up interesting insights on what strengthens/ ails performance in your organisation and where the linkages are strong or weak/missing. Typical areas of disconnect are

1. Unclear priorities:
Match the top three performance areas listed by the employee and his/her Manager.
You will find that at least one out of three areas does not match and priorities often don’t align. The alignment in performance areas is often strong at the senior levels but weakens as one goes through the ranks of the organisation structure so it is almost tenuous at the more junior levels and in most organizations, they are the folks an average customer experiences. In divisions where alignment in performance areas is strong you will find stronger teams and good performance.

2. Unclear measurements
Map the measures (metrics) listed by the employee with that listed by his Manager. See if they match in terms of importance of measure and source of performance data. Evaluate the strength of the measure in terms of clarity and its consistency with business objectives and/or divergence from the organisation strategic map & performance measure (metric) cascade.
You will find that where the measure is not clearly defined performance is also not strong; in such cases you will also find that there is little consistency in how the measure is tracked; it may be captured in different parts of the organisation in different ways depending on each ones convenience.

3. Absent 360:
We are all familiar with conducting a 360 for performance evaluation, but have we considered a 360 to assess understanding of performance goals of peers & Managers? More often than not you will find an employee uninterested in his peer or team members or key interface peoples goals. There is a high chance, a serious ‘none of my business’ look will also happen. Don’t be surprised if they are unclear about organization goals! The point is that if an employee does not have an idea of priorities of people around him how can he contribute to the larger business goal and be an effective team player?

Build performance confidence
Oftentimes organisations focus on the implementation of sophisticated performance management processes and tools without first establishing the strength of its performance framework, priorities, linkages, measures and the cascade through the organisation. What makes it worse is communications are focussed on the understanding of the process or use of tool and less on comprehension of performance map, priorities, linkages and the individual role within this context.

In order to build people performance confidence and create more effective and dynamic work places it is important that organisations spend time and effort in ensuring that everyone understands what they have to do and how what they do contributes in achieving business goals.