By Dr Rabindra Karna

To know the role of Performance Management, it’s essential to agree on the objective of management. If we collate different views of different management scientists, we can come to a consensus that the objective of management is: to achieve the intended business destination through effective, efficient and economic utilization of people, material, time, information and fund.”

It covers all four key elements – job improvement, skills enhancement, task management and internal relationship. It is through the combination of these that achievement of intended destination is ensured. Thus to manage a business effectively, there must be a close link between the work planning, proceeding and review procedure because factors affecting business and people performance interact on each other.

The management needs to institutionalize and demonstrate latest management techniques, approaches/principles and philosophies to synergize cumulative human endeavour. This can be achieved only through a dynamic change agent driving the change process embodying these qualities for common growth and actualization of the organisation’s potentials.

In the total management philosophies, there has been unanimous alignment about people resources and it is all agreed that without proper people organization blocks, it would not only be difficult but impossible to eye on any intended achievement without people engagement. Scientific management theory describes 5 key block builders of Human Organization:

1.     Work Cycle: Assignments should be specialized and set to smallest possible work cycle.

2.    Process: Same process be used whilst performing same task in repetition

3.    Leadership: Effective leadership should be demonstrated in decision making

4.    Uniformity: In view of equity and consistency, policies must be uniform across the business.

5.    Exclusivity: Duplication of functions is widely discouraged and thus assignment exclusivity becomes a must in view of task ownership.   

With the understanding that the people are important, it’s obvious that we need to relate our efforts to achieve with the social perception within organization.  It’s obvious that social behavior is learnt in the form of acceptability within a work environment and we continue to learn and adapt through comparing one another.  Being social animals, the humans make comprehensive arrangements for living and performing with one another and managing the environment. We could perceive most social situations as a negotiation, an interview, a presentation/workshop, an attempt to leadership, etc. Organizations or their people recognise the existence of a problem when they perceive that their goals are inconsistent with one another or when discrepancies between want/desire and expectations are experienced.

However, to have consistency in business results as well as in people’s productivity and social acknowledgement, we need to pay special attention to Performance Management and that requires serious attention to meet expectations or achieve desired results.

In the light of the above, there cannot be a disagreement, if we say that Performance Management is thus one of the most essential elements of Management and most desired to be in place for institution and/or investments.

The article is not intended to describe the steps or process of performance management. Rather it is intended to discuss various elements and/or contributing factors of performance management in day to day work life. Various research works suggest:

1.     Regular Communication at work: Employees mostly show concerns pertaining to the quality and quantity of communication at work.  Inadequate and ineffective communication results in loss of cooperation and coordination, decreased productivity, undesired pressure, increased human turnover, absenteeism, rumors etc and there won’t be any disagreement that all these have huge impact on both personal and organizational performance. Hence, it would be wise to have two way clear, effective and regular communication within the organization to attain the desired performance.

2.    Build Trust: It has been widely experienced in daily work life that lack of trust among the members of the work team is very damaging. HR practitioners must accept that the performance management tools should not be considered as the only HR tools. Research works suggest that HUMILITY is one of the best to generate trust within organization. Managers or HR practitioners who are ready to acknowledge mistakes have been considered as highly competent. Even mediocre people are accepted easily saying, “You are trustworthy because you have courage to admit a mistake”. One must be seen by other members not as a competitor but as a collaborator. Trust encourages people to focus on productivity instead of remaining suspicious for every action of Management.

3.    Satisfy Customers: Customer service must be improved starting from the office of the top management (e.g. Managing Director, CEO, GM etc.). Commitment must be communicated to all the levels (internal & external). An awareness drive can be launched for improvement on customer service. Customers also want to feel that you value them and their business. Loyal customers market the company. This way, the customer satisfaction becomes an important key in driving performance.

4.    Get Along: Relationship, conflict, resentment etc. have a big negative impact on performance. Evaluate and encourage change process by allowing a fostering team spirit. Encourage discussions that lead to pointing out inconsistencies in the actions and outcomes against the agreed goals and priorities. Changes in behaviour, generating better understanding across the business, creating common goal and priority and showing concerns about one another’s personal constraints as well as providing support in the hours of need will foster the team spirit and help building everlasting relationship.  When the people get along, the tasks get done well and quality performance emerges automatically.

5.    Full Attention: It would be wise to keep everyone informed of expectations from them. The people should be engaged to find solutions to troubles as well as pursuing alternates. Not just talk about open door policy, practice it. Allow people to disagree so that new ideas emerge. Adequate and/or increasing response confirms attentiveness. Listening and recognizing ideas with full involvement encourages participation. Full attention to others’ views, ideas, suggestion and communication generate energy within the team and reflects respect to each other. Most of the time, productive ideas don’t get implemented due to the lack of attention. Improvement often comes from small efforts that were previously sent back without enough attention paid to them. If you encourage team to take RISK, your behaviour too must match your word so that the others in the team are confident that they are being heard with full attention. Ensure that the reminders or follow-ups about agreed move are sent in time. This will encourage participation and certainly will result in improved productivity.

       To conclude, research works show that performance management and performance evaluation are two different poles of the magnet.  But both of them have the same purpose. The keys to performance are in the answers to the following questions: What is expected of us? What are we doing? What next? How are we doing? How should we be doing? When we must be doing? Why we should or must be doing?

Once, genuine answers to these are derived, Performance Management becomes integral part of our daily work life.

(Dr Karna is Executive Chairperson, MARK Business Solutions Pvt Ltd & Ad Abhyas Marketing & Communications Pvt Ltd He says this article is based on various research reports and practical experiences.)