Brian Kropp, executive director at CEB (now Gartner), talks about how the top companies organise their performance management systems.
“A lot of the arguments about companies changing their performance review process and approach to performance scores is that it just takes too much time,” Kropp says. “But two thoughts. One: providing feedback doesn’t have to be a structured one-hour conversation, it can be a ten minute conversation – you can break it up into smaller pieces, you can provide just-in-time feedback and you can provide incremental feedback.
“And the second point is that if you’re managing people, the most important thing that you can possibly do is improve the performance of the people that you’re managing. And if a company is making a decision to save an hour or two here or there at the expense of the performance of their employees, that’s just a bad allocation of resources.”
(Read our article on the eight performance myths that need to die.)
Kropp goes on to explain how HR can make the case for better performance management to a reluctant executive, and provides a case study of an HR manager that did just that.
Watch the full interview, and let us know your thoughts.
The article makes great sense in advising replacing rating and formal reviews with more regular feedback and linking performance to a business case. I still argue performance management is also about dealing with toxic employees (I call them the 2%-ers) in a time and cost effect manner. Failure to do so creates a significant drag on the performance of the overall team and the wider business (to quote Brian’s example – less beer delivered). I recommend people approach performance management as two sides of the same coin; forward-looking feedback for the good employees and problem solving conversations for the 2%-ers.
This article and video moves on marginally from the old Performance Appraisal days but continues to view performance management (PM) as a separate program rather than a strategically driven, integrated organisational and HR program. Accenture undertook a survey on performance management systems (PMS) late in 2016 found that 94% of the managers believe in PMS’s but only 34% believe their current approach supports the objectives of the business. I am sure most of the 66% ‘non-believer’ managers have accepted the results and taken their “bonuses”. The article by Dr Kropp, I am afraid, reinforces the concept of a separate PMS… Read more »