Kicking Performance Management Against The Wall

Performance Management is a hot, even burning, topic for many organisations throughout Europe.  HR functions are charged with finding, designing or adapting a system which will be perfect for their business context.

Unfortunately it’s not always that simple, where do you start?

• Designing the ideal process?
• Drawing up the faultless form?
• Writing the perfect paperwork?
• Engineering the ultimate link to reward?
• Creating the flawless training and communication programme?

It’s not surprising that so many well intentioned performance management projects stall or end up as unusable fudges.

The stumbling block seems to be the perceived need to get everything up and running perfectly in one neat project.  Performance management just doesn’t work that way in organisations that have been used to working in previously different ways.

If you wanted to teach a group of people to play football, and to continue to do so because they found it worthwhile and rewarding after the class, you wouldn’t sit them down to learn the 17 laws of the game, and master the intricacies of the offside rule before they had a chance to kick a ball.

Effective performance management implementation takes time, and just as the objective for getting people to play sports is to let them have a go, enjoy it, benefit from it and then improve, the first objective of a performance management change programme is to get people thinking and talking about performance.

When people know how to set objectives well, they’ll do it, working with employees to ensure they’re relevant and meaningful.  Once they understand how to assess and rate performance they’ll do so, having regular conversations about it to make sure that nothing comes as a surprise.

There will be tough points along the way where individuals do need to call in the coach from HR or L&D to help them out of a sticky situation, or to guide them through new and untried territory.  A consistent viewpoint about what the organisation’s performance management values are will always be important.

So if waiting for the world beating performance management solution has frozen your organisation into inertia, talk to Predaptive about how we can help you get your people back into the game.

If you would like to pick up on any of the themes in this article, please contact:

Claudine McClean
T: +44 (0) 1789 734333
E: claudinem@predaptive.com