Defining Performance Management Process
Juke Enterprise is a manufacturing organization in Detroit, Michigan, that believes in performance management. The organization has three subsidiaries located in different parts of the nation, headquartered in Detroit. Juke employs above two thousand workers, and a majority of the employees work in the production and sales departments. Juke’s performance management mainly focuses on revenue generation because of the entity’s emphasis on financial returns. Sales workers registering high sales revenues get excellent performance ratings and quickly climb the career ladder. However, workers exhibiting reduced sales revenue get a poor rating and often receive termination threats to improve. The appraisal activity happens at the end of the financial year, mainly in December.
Managers at Juke fill forms gauging specific workers’ performance and escalate them to the organization’s headquarter for reward verdict by the top management. The company hires its employees centrally, offers basic training based on the department where one will work, and then places the worker on the task. The availability of performance execution, review, and rewarding practices in Juke’s performance management scheme makes it significantly similar to that suggested by Smither and London (2009). Nonetheless, the model lacks the prerequisite, performance planning, assessment, and renewal stages, making it substantially different from Smither and London’s (2009) system. Consequently, a significant takeaway from week one reading concerns the need to make performance management a continuous and transparent process to promote real productivity.
Assessing Performance under a Results-Oriented Approach
Performance management is a comprehensive process that assumes different approaches. The result-oriented method focuses mainly on employees’ behavior, promoting productivity and aligning with the set organizational strategies. On the other hand, the result-oriented slant seeks to tie workers’ performance to the corporate strategy through a well-established continuous process. Assessing performance under the outcome-leaning system involves at least six steps, according to Smither and London (2009). Prerequisites, performance planning, performance execution, performance assessment, performance review, and performance renewal are the six primary phases of performance management under the results-based system (Smither & London, 2009). The prerequisites stage involves amalgamating the organizational mission to a specific job to clarify expectations.
During the prerequisite phase, new employees work together with the immediate manager to understand how the job’s tasks relate to the set organizational mission and vision statements. In the performance planning phase, the manager and the employee define success or measurable results concerning the worker’s position. Additionally, the performance execution stage is where the employee performs job responsibilities under the supervisor’s continued observation, encouragement, and support. At this stage, the worker strives to deliver the agreed results, with the supervisor providing the necessary resources and feedback to ensure the best results possible. The manager assesses the employee while the worker undertakes a self-assessment during the valuation stage, after which performance review and re-contracting occur.
Dealing with Disagreements when Different Sources Are Evaluating an Employee’s Performance
Disagreements occur in performance management due to gaps in the process. Organizations implementing Smither and London’s (2009) performance management scheme hardly face such disputes. That is because the approach provides an excellent flow of processes that ensure workers understand their work and how it relates to the entity’s mission. Smither and London’s (2009) model also allows employees to undertake self-assessment based on the earlier agreed results or behaviors, creating room for the staff to acknowledge failures and the available improvement strategies. Accordingly, applying Smither and London’s (2009) performance management system provides the best solution for handling disagreements caused by employees’ evaluations by more than one source. Each step in the model is crucial to finding an answer.
Conflicts in employees’ performance evaluations result from the lack of a precise definition of issues. The matter is solvable by introducing the performance planning aspect, where the worker and the immediate manager define the results and behaviors that amount to success (Smither & London, 2009). Moreover, incorporating the performance assessment phase in the performance management system ensures that only the employee and the immediate manager, who established performance standards together, are involved in the review (Mone & London, 2018). Lastly, the performance review stage ensures that the worker meets and discusses continuous assessment results, including observations made during the employee’s working process, with the immediate supervisor and not someone else.
Best Practice for Performance Management and the Application in Juke Enterprises
An effective performance management scheme promotes individual, team, and organizational productivity. However, the model needs some fundamental best practice traits to perform as intended. Fairness and acceptability, inclusivity, openness, standardization, and ethicalness are examples of the best practices necessary for effectiveness in performance management systems (Smither & London, 2009). Acceptability and fairness are crucial features missing in Juke Enterprises’ performance supervision structure. The practice ensures that all employees in an organization perceive the scheme correctly. For example, a fair system eliminates supervisors’ biases and favoritism among some workers. Performance management arrangements further need to meet the needs of all the employees and the employer to be accepted (Tseng & Levy, 2019). Such is possible when a model creates room for a wide-scope definition of success and outcomes to cover all the workers in different sections.
Juke Enterprises hires and trains new employees centrally to save on costs and ensure uniformity. Staffs begin working for Juke with significantly high motivation due to the attractive remunerations and the promise that one’s career growth is dependent on performance. However, many employees receive hurting appraisal results at the end of the year despite giving their best to their jobs. The issue exists because the employer never engages employees in defining success in the organization. Therefore, workers work without knowing what is expected of them, only to face frustrations due to the utilized system’s lack of fairness and acceptability.
Management Skills for Effective Performance Administration
Many organizations with sound performance management structures fail to realize the anticipated results due to their managers’ skill gaps. Integrity, reliability, collaboration, and thoroughness are examples of the necessary skills an entity’s management team should possess to successfully implement and sustain functional performance administration structures. Integrity concerns fairness and honesty and ensures that managers treat all employees equally. Tseng and Levy (2019) describe managers as the best people to implement workers’ appraisal initiatives. The managers receive new staff and take them through the prerequisites stage until the last phase. According to Smither and London (2009), managers help employees set personal goals that rhyme with the organization’s mission for effective performance.
Together with the individual workers, managers set working plans that allow employees to understand the particular results amounting to success. Managers with integrity undertake all these activities without fear or favor. Therefore, integrity plays a crucial role in promoting fairness, openness, and collaboration, making the process lean and agile. Reliability further connotes the managers’ consistency and trustworthiness when dealing with performance management. Tahiri et al. (2020) say that many managers get committed to their daily activities to take performance management as an unnecessary activity that wastes time. Such leaders often spend the least time filling their junior staff’s appraisal forms, frequently giving all the workers high ratings to please them. Collaboration and thoroughness aid the manager in establishing functional relationships with employees to offer the necessary support for growth.
Challenges Involved in Performance Management
Many organizations have excellent performance management systems that do not work effectively due to challenges. Armstrong (2019) provides high implementation costs, unsupportive organizational culture, and managerial skills gaps as the most frequent issues affecting performance administration systems in organizations. Many schemes for performance management come from research and do not fit well with the organizational implementers. Companies adopting such strategies have to undertake costly changes, including changing corporate systems and training workers. The changes involved require money, one of the scarce resources in many entities. Consequently, the inability to forego some basic activities to cater to the costly system forces many businesses to abandon the performance management structure after adoption.
Moreover, businesses with organizational cultures that view performance management schemes as a waste of time never implement them as required. Conservative results-oriented entities provide excellent such settings. For Instance, Juke Enterprises attach the sales team’s success to revenue generation potential. Workers registering the highest sales revenue at the end of the year get recognition awards as the best-performing employees. However, the department’s management team hardly applies thoroughness and diligence in rating the workers. The division’s busy schedules see many managers hurriedly fill out the staff’s appraisal forms to get back to work. The point that the sales team works remotely also makes it hard for the team to monitor gradual progress. Such issues result from the organization’s culture, making it hard for the business to implement the system appropriately.
References
Armstrong, R. (2019). Critical realism and performance measurement and management: addressing challenges for knowledge creation. Management Research Review, 42(5), 568–585. Web.
Mone, E. M., & London, M. (2018). Employee engagement through effective performance management: A practical guide for managers. Routledge.
Smither, J. W., & London, M. (Eds.). (2009). Performance management: Putting research into action (Vol. 21). John Wiley & Sons.
Tahiri, A., Kovaçi, I., & Krasniqi, A. (2020). Human resource management, performance management and employee performance appraisal by SME managers in Kosovo. Human Resource Management, 8(4), 288-298. Web.
Tseng, S. T., & Levy, P. E. (2019). A multilevel leadership process framework of performance management. Human Resource Management Review, 29(4), 100668. Web.