If you feel like you are managing a zoo then maybe its time you begin building a system.  Performance management can help you do that.  Performance management techniques are for more powerful than most senior leaders realize.  Many believe that these techniques simply allow you to measure performance but when they are applied within a larger framework that identifies core, organizational criteria, such as used by NIST in the administration of the Malcolm Baldrige award program, performance management techniques can help you achieve key organizational goals including the following, fifteen goals that are fundamental to managing any organization.

1. Support Workforce Development

Workforce development addresses the workforce needs of the organization.  Managing based on performance allows for tighter control between workforce capacity and actual operational needs.  Best practices in performance management also tie workforce development to other critical factors including employee engagement, financial goals, and even customer satisfaction.

2. Respect Workforce Capabilities and Requirements

Workforce capabilities address individual skills and capacities.  Keeping a close eye on operational metrics allows for closer alignment between individual capabilities and personal capacity to perform.  Managing performance requires can be better supported when capabilities are well aligned with tasks and workforce requirements are provided as necessary even down to the individual worker.

3. Create Open Communication

Nothing can impact organizational performance more than good, open communication.  If everyone understands the purpose, goals and operational objectives and organization can run effectively.  Rarely is over communication a problem.   Be sure you take the time to communicate the vision, values, and operational objectives to maximize employee engagement and improve performance.

4. Align Vision with Goals and Objectives and Results

Objectives and results are the outcomes that flow from specific action plans that are designed to help achieve organizational goals.  If these action plans are not well aligned with the vision and goals of the organization they will fall short of producing the kinds of outcomes that you expect.  Take the time to think through how well action plan objections are designed to produce the kinds of outcomes you really want.

5. Create Workforce Engagement & Loyalty

Workforce engagement grows out of a healthy organizational culture that recognizes individual effort and personal achievement.   Performance metrics provide the perfect way for both manager and employees to understand exactly what tasks are required for organizational success.  Such clarity aligns persona effort and operational outcomes.  That in turns creates strong motivation on a personal level which leads to high levels of engagement and loyalty.  When workers know exactly what is expected of them and they have been given the training and resources to perform successfully on the job they will respond accordingly.  When compensation and recognition are tied to clearly defined metrics performance will naturally be maximized with minimal management effort.

6. Better Manage Risk Taking

Risks are often difficult to manage.  Building performance metrics around actions that are tied to good risk management is one of the best ways to minimize any risk in any form, including both financial and physical risks.  Award programs focused on increasing risk awareness and risk abatement strategies can go a long way to improving behaviors that could otherwise produce unwanted and dangerous outcomes.

7. Improve Decision Making at all Levels

Some decisions must be made at the senior level but a lot of responsibility can be pushed throughout the organization as long as employees are properly supported with good training and are clear about overall organizational goals.  This leader/leader model fits nicely into a performance management system as it increases many key metrics such as employee engagement, improved operations, customer satisfaction and improved risk management.

8. Improve your Leadership Process

Leadership processes focus first on good communication but an organizational culture that embraces learning and encourages employees to assume responsibility will support better decision making at every level in the organization.

9. Increase Customer and Stakeholder Value

Performance management theory puts customer and stakeholder value a top priority and can help ensure the successful fulfillment of the organization’s vision.  A customer centric organization always keeps a keen focus on customer value which in turn drives the overall value of the organization and thereby increases stakeholder value as well.

10. Increase Long Term Sustainability

Long term sustainability is often overlooked and even sacrificed for the sake of short term gain.  Good performance management practice includes sustainability as a key goal in the organization.  Sustainability should rarely be sacrificed for short term gain but it is easy for senior leaders to drop the ball when they focus only on short term metrics.  Long term metrics should be defined and tied to key sustainability issues so that they do not get lost when making strategic calculations.

11. Improve Market Awareness & Understanding

Customer value can only be fulfilled when the organization understands the market in which it operates.  Business ecosystems are growing increasingly complex and opportunities for creating customer value evolve rapidly.  Understanding the market and the entire business ecosystem is the best way to ensure that opportunities for increasing customer value are not overlooked.

12. Improve Workforce Capabilities and Capacities

Performance management is the best way to tie current operational needs to workforce capabilities.  Measuring performance both at the process level and the individual employee level allows for better alignment and prediction of both current and future needs.

13.Apply Lessons Learned

A performance management system is designed to create learning, based on the collection and analysis of performance data.  Applying those lessons is the key to creating a mature organization that is continuously improving.

14. Achieve better Integration and Harmonization

Integration is the process of applying lessons learned into organizational and operational processes.  As an organization learns and matures, better performance is measured not only in immediate outcomes tied to specific processes, but also in terms of how different processes work together.  Improvement in the harmony of interrelated processes can result in significant improvement in measured outcomes.

15. Discover and Apply Innovative Breakthroughs

A good performance management system results in continuous improvement in all processes but not at the expense of innovation.  An organization that perfects its process will ultimately become bureaucratic and moribund, incapable of adapting to changing conditions.  Innovative breakthroughs demand change management which can be highly disruptive to an organization but a  mature organization will always be open to making significant and even painful changes when innovative breakthroughs promise great rewards.

Contact Bruce May at www.eighthcc.com to learn more about how performance management can improve your organization.

Learn more about the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.