Re-engineering Performance Management

Don't just copy new, perceived best practices in performance management (particularly as rank and yank seems to be making a comeback!). Instead focus on what's important to your organisation, and your workforce, through debundling.

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My last two articles, on Organisation Design and Strategic Partnering were selected based on the schedule of study groups in the Academy. However, they, and this article, have provided a nice sequential flow as well.

In my first article on Organisation Design, I wrote about the need for clear objectives, including organisation outcomes, workforce needs and organisation principles. In the second on Strategic Partnering, I suggested that we needed to apply a future focused perspective on these objectives, and then work towards this future vision from the current state.

In this new article on Performance Management, I want to build on these earlier recommendations and suggest that to improve and transform our HR processes (not our organisation), we need to prioritise (a key aspect of acting more strategically) your organisation's most important objectives, and ensure that your process meets these requirements first. Other supplementary objectives can probably be met in other ways.

Performance management is a wonderful example of the above approach. One of the key reasons that performance management doesn't often work is that we expect it to do too much. Our trainer, Jon Ingham, refers to the suggestion that Professor Herman Aguinis has identified 22 different objectives for performance management. That's far too many for any process to achieve. Even half a dozen is too much. One is perfect!

We can also get blinkered by particular types of objectives. Jon suggests that different objectives support the creation of human, social and organisation capital and drills down from there. For me, this point is super important. If we don't start with the right objective (or even worse, don't have an objective and just copy best practice) then it's no wonder the process doesn't work!

Designing performance management well involves a lot of different decisions, which are all reviewed in the Academy's Performance Management Re-engineering course. However, it all starts with understanding your future state obejctives, prioritising down on the most important of these, and designing a 'debundled' performance management process to meet this or these priority objectives in a best fit way.

You can then look at the other remaining objectives and potentially design another process to achieve them.

The approach may result in you creating a performance management process that looks very different to what you have now, and to what other organisations may have too. And that will be a good thing! Your organisation and workforce are different, and performance management should be too.

I’d love to hear your own views on performance management and what you think re-engineering this requires. Please share your comments below. I look forward to discussing this important topic with you!

If you enjoyed this article, I also invite you to join the Strategic HR Academy and learn much more about best practices, latest thinking and new opportunities in on-demand courses on HR and Competitive Advantage; Performance Management and Reward; Organisation, Process, Work and Job Design; Strategic Partnering and HR Transformation. Then discuss best fit application within your own organisation with Jon Ingham and other HR practitioners regularly scheduled cohort based study groups. I'll hopefully see you in the Academy too.

Note: our next Performance Management study group starts from 13 March 2023. (The first couple of weeks of this are for orientation and introductions so can be a little late in joining us, but ideally let us know if that's going to be the case.)

Kind regards - Sandra (marketing and community management for the Strategic HR Academy)