Performance Management is a topic of focus at this time of year for many organisations as they close out the year and look forward to aligning their strategic plans with performance goals for 2013. Many will start to develop and deploy key performance indicator’s (KPI’s) through their organisations and will believe that performance management is working towards having engaged employees who understand the company’s direction and what they need to do as individuals to achieve them. However, this identifies a large gap of understanding within organisations and line managers who are defining performance management as the process of setting KPI’s and conducting performance reviews.
Performance management though is so much more than setting key performance indicators and conducting performance reviews (Millmore, Lewis, Saunders, Thornhill and Morrow 2007). Defining performance management and its success is an ability to improve the performance of employees through developing teams and individuals, through an inclusive and planned approach.
Human resource departments will be developing practices & tools for leaders to deploy to the business. How these practises & tools are deployed by line managers is the most important factor in employee engagement and satisfaction within the company, even more so than the creation and design of HR practices by human resource management (Purcell & Hutchinson 2007). The way HR practices are implemented by line managers determines the satisfaction of employees to understand the practices and take them on board. Therefore, line managers have a crucial role in communicating the organisations direction, values and desired behaviours to employees (Purcell & Hutchinson 2007).
Active engagement by line managers in the performance management process is required to ensure success. Employees today are expecting more from their employers than just a job. They are seeking a career and they want to understand what you as an employer will do to listen to their goals, help them build skills through different work experiences and allow them some freedom to discover and create choices.
1. Engaging employees in the strategic direction through a team planning workshop with outcomes of how the team will work together to achieve results, as well how innovation initiatives can work towards the strategic direction i.e. look at what we do and how we do it, allowing the team some freedom to discover and create choices.
2. Ask employees to draft individual goals and development plans and work with them on how they can best achieve these towards the company goals as well as meeting their individual needs.
3. Regular and open dialogue around performance is required. Performance Management is not a yearly one sided discussion about the employees’ performance.
4. Help employees build skills through different work experiences and allow them some freedom to discover and create choices that are aligned to the company strategic direction.
Ensuring the effectiveness of line manager’s role in the implementation of HR strategies requires all key stakeholders to clearly understand their role. For line managers to succeed in their objectives, they need to understand the expectations upon them (Rappe & Zwick 2006). Line managers need to understand that when there is no role clarity; job satisfaction suffers and can lead to intrapersonal tensions between HR, line managers and employees. In order for HR activities to be embedded into the line manager responsibilities, a partnership ‘triad’ approach needs to exist between employees, line managers and HR, ensuring that there is a shared understanding of the different roles and responsibilities (Maxwell and Watson 2006).
What’s your company doing around performance management? How will you keep your employees engaged in 2013?
Maxwell G.A and Watson S, 2006, ‘Perspectives on line managers in human resource management: Hilton International’s UK hotels’. International Journal of Human Resource Management 17:6 June 2006 http//www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Millmore M, Lewis P, Saunders M, Thornhill A and Morrow T 2007,’Strategic Human Resource Management Contemporary Issues’ Pearson Education Limited
Purcell, J. & Hutchinson, S. (2007), ‘Front-line managers as agents in the HRM-peformance causal chain: theory, analysis and evidence’ Human Resource Management Journal, 17 (1), 3-20
Rappe C & Zwick T 2006, ‘Developing leadership competence of production unit managers’ Journal of Management Development, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 312-330 Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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