Performance Management and Theory Best Practices Review

Introduction

Performance management is the regulatory business method resulting in the maximum utilization of the potential of the human resources of a company to accomplish its goals and missions. Performance management can be regarding a certain process in a specific department, a specific department on a whole or the whole company. H20 pays a special attention to human resources and training of employees, high level of professionalism and responsibilities of the staff. H20 uses a best practice approach in order to gain and retail top talents. In general, best practices involve effective methods and techniques used in recruiting and employment processes. These and other programs will improve and bring advantages in recruiting and retaining employees. In order to attract employees, companies propose unique career opportunities and sound salary and benefit programs. Effective communication requires a knowledge of what the “audience” wants to hear. Therefore, the opinions of the people who comprise the organization, and more particularly the environmental forces that shape those opinions, must be intimately understood if management is to guide the organization effectively toward its goals.

Discussion Section

Theory and Research

Following Bacal (1999O, in order to retain employees, companies introduce employee bonus programs and support continuing education programs for all of its employees. Organizations fighting for top talents, remove irritants, make jobs tolerable, and provide an occasional temporary glow; or to put it another way they protect the individual from the dangers of demoralization. But they are not ordinarily able to spark the kind of all-out concentrated effort of which most people are capable. Traditional motivators, when properly used, make employees placid but not fully productive, compliant but not creative. The pity of it is that this tepid state of affairs is often aimed for quite deliberately and accepted gratefully when it is achieved. It is almost as if the whole purpose of motivation was to prevent subordinates from obstructing the intentions of their superiors. Sensitive and appropriate supervisory methods, two-way communication systems motivate employees and help them to fulfill career goals. In three levels (attracting, recruiting and retaining) rewards play a crucial role for both the company and applicants (Tyson and York, 2000).

Baron and Kreps (1999) suggest that employee counseling, no matter how it is done, plays a crucial role in motivating the young. This is simply because the future is so important to the young person that he will draw conclusions from a lack of evidence about it just as readily as he will from actual evidence. When the job brings with it no clues about what the future may be like, the young worker is likely to conclude that the future will be no different from the present; therefore, his “future” is already upon him, and he may as well quit hoping. There are, of course, many kinds of evidence about the future other than a conference with a manager that is deliberately focused on it. The rate at which promotions occur, whether on the basis of merit or seniority; the company’s own growth prospects; and the rate and caliber of new hires all provide grist for speculating about one’s own future. But in most organizations an individual’s future is heavily affected by the opinions of managers who are most familiar with his work; therefore, an exposure to those opinions in direct discussion is the most potent of all the clues by which the young employee attempts to foretell what lies ahead for him (Schuler, 1998).

According to Cardy (2004), since best practices generally brings greater responsibilities, prestige follows as a sort of corollary. It is worth noting that sometimes people are promoted for the sake of prestige alone without any corresponding increase in the scope of their duties. That is, they are promoted as a way of thanking them for devoted service or as an acknowledgment that they have acquired more value to the organization by virtue of their lengthening experience. In any case, promotion calls attention to the man who receives it and indicates quite clearly that the organization looks with favor upon him, whether for his demonstrated ability or for his continuation in its employ. This kind of favorable attention may be highly prized, either as an indication that the future is increasingly rosy or that the past is appreciated and not forgotten. Advances in prestige serve the advantage of both the rising, mobile young man who needs periodic proof that he is still rising and the relatively immobile man who needs proof that the time he has contributed is appreciated by his employers. Second, promotion often takes the individual into a higher salary classification, thereby increasing the upper limit of earnings to which he may eventually rise, or it may introduce new forms of income such as stock options. Consequently, the increase in income entailed in promotion may be much more than the usual addition of a relatively small percentage of the previous income. It could result in a sharply higher standard of living (Schuler, 1998).

Recommendations for H20

To improve its best practices, H20 should apply a concept of psychological advantage to all levels of HR management (Cardy, 2004). It means the individual’s private notions about what constitutes his own best interests — is a product of the way he perceives his environment and his ability to affect it. Advantage depends first of all on what seems to be possible — on what the environment can be reasonably expected to yield — and secondly on which of these possible outcomes, if any, is desirable (Reed, 2001). H0 can therefore expect that a man’s ideas about his own best interests will be strongly influenced by whether he feels that he has much power over the events that affect him and on which he regards as worthwhile. This is the phenomenon on which so many well-intentioned and carefully prepared incentive programs have foundered. Management cannot assume that its view of the environment is shared by the people it manages. H20 shall have more to say on this point later; for the moment it should be noted that effective planning for incentives requires a first-hand knowledge of how employees perceive their job environment (Briscoe and Schuler, 2004).

In sum, best practices help companies like H20 to improve their HR management and attract top talent. Best practices should be a philosophy of the company which tries to achieve fast growth and maintain positive morale and climate. Employees’ behavior is related to a meaningful situation within a business world, and not to physical stimuli as such. The tasks of the company is to find the best possible approaches to meet organizational needs and satisfy employees (Armstrong, 2000). Performance Management is about an ongoing interpersonal communication between the employer and the employee regarding the ultimate exploitation of the available resources. It includes:

1. Communication of what the employee is expected to perform
2. How the optimum performance of the employee benefits the company
3. How the optimum performance of the employee benefits the employee
4. How the performance is evaluated
5. What poor quality performance refers to
6. How the employer and the employee is going to interact with each other
7. Specific issues with stagnant performing employees in the company (Bacal, 1999).

Best practices do only regard their performance of the specific employees but also to the performance of any particular process, department or the company as a whole. It can involve processes like billings, financial management, budgeting, product development, marketing, etc or it can be about working on the computer department or the administration department. It can be about projects like billing process automation while it can also regard to programs like introducing a new policy for the company. Best practices are all about managing the performance of the company, whether taking a single part at a time or dealing with the whole structure at once (Armstrong, 2000). The best part of quality performance management is that it is an investment on the part of the employer. It will let him get involved in the petty daily tasks of the company and focus more on the development of the company in the market. It will aid in educating his employees in the common pattern of emerging business-specific situations curbing down the possibilities of repeated errors in the future and thus, helping the employees to focus their best efforts on the specific outcomes desired by the company. Ultimately, it saves one of the two most important capitals looked-for in a company: time. It elucidates the overall picture and the basic projected role of the employee in the company, assisting him in taking the necessary steps to his and the company’s improvement and satisfaction (Reed, 2001).

H20 should take into account that performance management asks for a personal ongoing communicative ongoing networking relationship between the employer and the employee, the managers and the employees, the supervisors and the departments, the executives and the processes. If proper measures are being taken for regular market research and an open relationship is maintained between the top-level, medium-level and low-level management, including the other employees, then it becomes quite less challenging to speculate the upcoming changes and thus, take necessary actions to respond to that (Bacal, 1999).

Conclusion

To summarize it, best practices are all about regulating the overall performance of the whole company including its various domains and sub-domains. Performance Management looks to ensure that proper actions are being taken on the basis of suitably researched data at the right time in the right way. It tries to synergize the various branches and sections in a way that enhances company growth and ensures long-term sustainability in the company. It must be remembered by the manager and employers alike that though it might sound to be a very critical and difficult process, it is ultimately an investment towards the company. Whether the employer puts in time or money, it sure is going to reap him benefits in the future and he would be able to assure yourselves of the stability of your company. After all, you have already tried the useless performance promotions, conferences and training sessions and it just doesn’t work. Performance Management is the order of the day and most of the companies, figuring it out, are including it as a part of their operations nowadays. Managers find performance management to be a very complex process and getting the right personnel to work on that is sure an issue. Moreover, a business depends on the specific market trends and the market goes through nonstop and frequent variations. Keeping in tune with these changes and then, regulating the performance of the employees sure can not only be a hectic affair but sometimes, seem to be just impossible. Performance management tries to create a non-personal working environment where employees are rewarded on the basis of their merits and achievements. It provides a regular performance review that lets the employee know how much contribution they are making to the company and what changes need to be done.

References

Armstrong, M. (2000). ‘Conducting Performance Reviews’, ‘Performance management: key strategies and practical guidelines’, Edition: 2, Kogan Page Publishers,

Bacal, R. (1999). Performance Management – A briefcase book’. McGraw-Hill Professional.

Baron, J., Kreps, K. 1999. Strategic Human Resources; Frameworks for General Managers. Wiley; 1 edition.

Briscoe, D.R., Schuler, R.S. (2004). International Human Resource Management: Policies & Practices for the Global Enterprise. New York: Routledge.

Cardy, R. L. (2004). Performance Management: concepts, skills, and exercises’, M. E. Sharpe.

Reed, A. (2001). Innovation in Human Resource Management. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Schuler, R. (1998). Managing Human Resources. Cincinnati, Ohio: South-Western College Publishing,

Tyson, Sh., York, A. (2000). Essentials of HRM. Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd.