Employee Performance Management: Why Bother?

This is the first in a series of blog posts about the power of effective Employee Performance Management to deliver superior results for customers. This series, in addition to supporting a vital tool for effective management, accompanies our release of our new web-based automated Employee Performance Management software, MFR People. Watch for more info coming soon!

Employee Performance Management is like .... well, it's kind of like brussels sprouts.

We know it's supposed to be good for us, and we know we should eat/use it more ... but maybe in the past it left a not-so-great taste in our mouth, and we're just not sure how to approach it, or if we even want to. Um, can you just pass the french fries instead?

A lot of the "bad taste" that Employee Performance Management has associated with it is because leaders and managers believe that the cost of doing EPM -- the time, the effort, the challenge -- greatly outweighs the benefits of doing it. And so everyone gets the same score, or last year's assessment has the date changed and gets used again for this year, or otherwise performance is managed as little as possible.

Our experience from working with some of the nation's best managed governments is clear:

• EPM can be an extremely effective management tool to maintain and improve performance;
• to align effort around the priorities of an organization, accelerating success in achieving those priorities;
• and in improving employee satisfaction, as everyone understands better how they contribute to the organization's success.

We like this definition of Employee Performance Management from Herman Aquinis:

“A continuous process of identifying, measuring and developing the performance of individuals and teams and aligning performance with the strategic goals of the organization.”

We're clear that organizations should implement strong EPM systems for one reason only: to help the organization achieve its results. How it is done can (and should) help managers and employees at all levels - but the result has to be improved organizational performance.

So does it work? We've quoted Dick Grote, one of the nation's leading experts in EPM, here before, but it's worth citing him again: systems like EPM, when backed by top leadership and focused on the organization's priorities, can improve productivity by nearly 60 percent.

We'll take that ROI all day long - and we look forward to sharing more of our "lessons learned" in blog entries to come.

We're also doing a series of free webinars on Employee Performance Management - if you'd like to get notices for those, sign up for our e-newsletter by clicking here.