Staff in the spotlight
People
performance
Performance management continues to be one of the major challenges for HR. It is also increasingly a matter for line managers, who are having to take on more and more HR responsibilities these days. An interview with Professor Koen Dewettinck about the interaction between HR, line management and staff. In search of optimum people performance.
Many HR managers believe in a consistent people performance management system for the whole organisation. It is the line manager’s responsibility to apply that system so that it can be used for different categories of staff. This is easier in theory than in practice, though. Koen Dewettinck: “A successful performance management system begins with the selection of competent line managers and you then get them involved in developing the system.”
Competent line manager
We expect a manager to coach, inform, and manage everything properly. Not everyone has those skills, however. Koen Dewettinck: “One important task of HR is to select people for leading positions, people who are good at the job or who can become good at it.”
Participation
It is not enough for HR to just launch a performance management system and then hope for the best. Quite the opposite. Koen Dewettinck again: “The more performance management is seen as a straight HR system, the less effective it is. The happier the managers are with the system and the more they see it as supporting their role, the better the chance of success. So what it comes down to is getting the managers together to exchange experiences about people management, and also giving them a say in the design of the performance management system.”
Ongoing process
Performance management is not something that is done once a year and then filed away and forgotten about. “It’s an ongoing process that relies on being accessible to people, on enough two-way contact and informal coordination between the employee and the organisation,” argues Koen Dewettinck. “There are four critical success factors at management’s disposal: motivation, focus on skills, focus on opportunities and good feedback.”
Motivation
Motivation is a basic prerequisite for good performance. Employees develop this themselves to some extent, but it is also very closely associated with the role of the manager. How does he manage his team? To what extent does he determine the atmosphere in the group? Does he communicate adequately about what is decided at a higher level, what the policy is, and what that means for his department? Koen Dewettinck: “A good many academic studies have shown that the manager’s behaviour has an impact on the employee’s perception of work, which in turn can affect performance.”
Skills
Besides motivation, focusing on the right skills has been found to be a crucial factor for successful performance. Koen Dewettinck: “As a manager, make sure that you gather people with the right skills around you for your team. Hone and develop where you need to, but give some thought, too, to the strengths that your people already have and try to use them. This is where the manager’s coaching role comes in: in his willingness to work on developing his staff’s skills, and to direct and guide his people.”
Opportunities
The third success factor in the hands of the manager lies in allowing his staff to grasp opportunities when they arise. To what extent does he back up his staff’s strengths and give them the right tools to take on new challenges and bring them to a successful conclusion? Koen Dewettinck: “The better you, as a manager, understand the specific needs and motives of your people, the easier it will be to get the best out of them.”
Feedback
Feedback on how well you are doing your job is a major and essential part of a good performance management system. “A person who gets no feedback makes no progress,” argues Koen Dewettinck. What’s more, the evaluation should not be confined to the formal annual performance review, but should be a spontaneous constant throughout the work process.
One important aspect of this is how to deal with mistakes. “Preferably they should be absorbed into a broader learning and performance process. If you create an atmosphere where every little mistake is punished, your staff will do everything they can to keep out of sight. Then you’ll be missing opportunities to improve. Ideally you need to create an open learning environment where people are given opportunities and where they are allowed to make a mistake, admit it and then do something about it.”
Another point is that the feedback should not be only about results, but also about how they were achieved. “Too much emphasis on the end product brings its own risks. For instance, when managers focus purely on individual targets, then you can probably say goodbye to team spirit, even though that’s something that can actually have a positive effect on performance. A performance management system is actually most effective when it strikes a balance between the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of performance.”
Performance in practice
A good performance management system is the basis for successful practice, and there are a number of ways to measure that success. Traditionally organisations – especially service providers – have assessed their performance management on the basis of the service provided by their employees; others link their turnover to performance at individual, team or business unit levels. “But you can equally well ask your employees and managers whether they think that the performance management system has helped them to do their job better,” points out Koen Dewettinck. “At the end of the day HR is what the employee experiences. The manager shapes it, the employee perceives how it is and adapts his behaviour accordingly. It is individual behaviour together with organisational structure that are ultimately responsible for performance.”
Working and thinking around people performance
The Centre for Excellence in People Performance (CEPP) is a network of organisations whose aim is to gain a better understanding of how to improve people performance in a professional context. Koen Dewettinck: “Anything to do with employee performance and motivation is a recurrent theme. The CEPP builds on a long-term partnership of at least three years between the School as academic partner and a number of organisations that want to invest in the topic and learn from one another. We meet several times a year and also organise workshops on themes relating to people performance. Research is a cornerstone activity and we hold a seminar once a year. The interaction between theory and practice produces many useful insights. The School contributes insights and speakers to the workshops and gives the partners the opportunity to share their experience. At the same time the School gets the opportunity to test research findings against practice and to keep its finger on the pulse.”
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