Philolaus, a fifth century B.C. philosopher, once said, “Without numbers, we can understand nothing and know nothing.” This and other phrases familiar to measurement circles, such as “you can’t manage anything unless you measure it,” form the basis of performance management systems in modern-day corporations (Marr, 2006, p.98).
Well, I wonder if Philolaus would be intrigued at how, some 2,500 years after his initial musings, humanity has taken his words to the utter extremes. With the advent of social media like Twitter, we're now - as seen in an article in the 23-20 March 2009 edition of BusinessWeek - talking about things like a job review in 140 keystrokes! More on this as we go along...
According to the Center for Organizational Effectiveness, performance management systems shape a firm’s culture by defining how people are managed, how work gets done, what gets rewarded, and how communication, improvement, and change occur.
Professor Andy Neely, author of Performance Management (cited by Marr, 2006, p.98), says performance is measured for four reasons:
- to use the indicators to check relative position in the competitive environment,
- to communicate the organization's position to society as part of social accountability,
- to highlight issues that are organizational priorities, and
- to compel employees toward those priorities.
All these are certainly critical strategic management issues, but drilling down to the day to day performance management concerns for senior executives, the HR Department, as well as bosses and supervisors who need to fill up the dreaded performance appraisal forms, it's the last point that is especially pertinent.
As employees strive to meet organizational priorities, the firm’s performance management system is supposed to provide the infrastructure with which supervisors can provide ongoing feedback about how they're doing, how they can become even more productive at work, and how positive behavior can be recognized and rewarded (Bogardus, 2007, p.228).
How Performance-Related Feedback is Traditionally Given [Today]...
Currently, performance feedback is done in two ways in most organizations: (1) informally, which covers the daily or ongoing evaluation and feedback that may or may not be recorded (tends to be the latter, sadly); and (2) systematically, which is a formal, documented, appraisal process (also known as focal review) at designated times of the year. According to Bogardus (2007, pp.230-231), formal appraisal is an elaborate process designed to capture and document the performance history of the employee, and it's done with a combination of metrics such as supervisor reviews, employee self-assessments, 360 degree feedback, positional ranking, rating scales, or narrative descriptions of accomplishments and behaviors.
To be effective, feedback must be clear in describing the task or action that the employee has done correctly or incorrectly. It should also focus on behaviors rather than attitudes. This second point, according to Bogardus (2007, p.229), is because the latter are hard to quantify and measure, and is therefore open to interpretation. Also, feedback must always be timely; performance issues shouldn't be 'saved up' for discussion later as this is bad for personal development and corporate well-being (so says the Center for Organizational Effectiveness).
Are Social Networking Platforms the New Liberty in Corporate Performance Management?
Towards this last point, it seems therefore to make sense that companies turning to social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook and other organic systems) to make the performance evaluation process more fun, useful, and on time (McGregor, 2009, p.58). Accenture, for example, is cited as having developed a Facebook-style program called Performance Multiplier where employees can post status updates, photos, and two or three weekly goals that can be viewed by their bosses as well as fellow staffers.
Jack Welch (2005, p.105) and Bogardus (2007, p.229) stress the importance of measuring people based on relevant, agreed-upon criteria that relates directly to their performance. Management guru Peter Druker (2007, pp.84-85) says that this is essentially Management by Objectives (MBO), where employees are judged according to how much their achievements contribute to the overall success of the firm.
Acenture's appraisal platform, in this respect, would fit into this MBO track as employees - subordinates and superiors alike - will have to post brief goals on a weekly and quarterly basis. It is intuitive that these goals would first be discussed between a staff and his/her supervisor before being published, but once out in the system, it becomes two things at once: a de-facto yardstick for supervisors to track performance, and also attainable and regular milestones by which employees can track achievements, and this motivate themselves along the way.
Typically, "managers and employees are scrambling to fill [evaluation forms] out in the 24 hours before HR calls saying 'where's yours?'" McGregor quotes management guru Marcus Buckingham as saying. So it seems the clear advantage with this approach is that it radically reinvents the conventional appraisal process and sits it within a more regular and even-paced environment.
Or how about this Twitter-like tool called Rypple, where an employee like me can send a 140-character question or comment to a list of people called 'advisors' by Rypple (they're really anyone I choose to be on the list - i.e. my peers, subordinates, superiors, vendors, partners, customers, anyone that matters, etc) to seek feedback or comments about my performance levels.
An interesting thing I find about Rypple is that the advisors can send their comments by giving numerical ratings to certain attributes I want to measure, such as performance, or communication, or leadership, for example, but the system will ensure that response is anonymous (really takes the sting out in some way, doesn't it?) and all feedback will be aggregated before being sent to me. Written feedback (200 characters) may also be sent anonymously as well!
Digital documentation (and the promise of instant retrieval and reviews), the measurement of set, agreed-upon metrics, as well as timeliness. It seems these are some of the plus points offered by systems like Rypple, or Acenture's Performance Multiplier. It's therefore little wonder, as McGregor (2009, p.58) discovers, that companies like Great Harvest Bread Co. and Mozilla are now clients of Rypple, or why Acenture is confidently trying to market its performance management solutions to other corporations.
"Such initiatives [i.e. the creative application of social networking capabilities to performance appraisals] upend the dreaded rite of annual reviews by making performance feedback a much more real-time and ongoing process," she writes, once again highlighting the crux of the shift towards making performance feedback and appraisal a more timely endeavor.
Management have long understood, at least in theory, the need to provide performance feedback on a regular level instead of confining it to a once or twice-a-year affair. But any good intentions almost always seemed destined for fruitlessness in the face of massive administrative paperwork (little wonder that one of David Ogilvy's leadership principles since the late 1960s was to crusade against paper warfare - how enlightened this advertising legend had been!!!).
Yet today, the solutions and possibilities offered by social networking platforms seem to offer so much promise in terms of bridging the past with a brand new reality of speed, accessibility, convenience and of course, a new level of transparency and accountability.
So then... how about it? A job review in 140 keystrokes or less?
Companies saddled with legacy and archaic administrative practices ought to sit up and seriously contemplate the possibilities offered by social networking. In these tectonic times of chopping and churning of economies and markets, a revised appraisal system that energizes the workforce could be part of the needed wind behind the sails to take you through the storm.
No guarantees... but hey, some of these systems are free anyway, so why not give them a shot?
MEDIA CENTER
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References [Selected]
Bogardus, A. M. (2007). Chapter 5: Human resource evelopment. In Professional in human resources certification study guide (2nd ed., pp. 228 – 229, 230-231, 233). Indiana: Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Drucker, P. F. (2007). Chapter 8: Management by objectives and self-control. In The essential Drucker (pp. 84-85). The classic Drucker collection. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Ltd. (Original work published 2001)
Marr, B. (2006). Chapter 5: Performance indicators. In Strategic performance management: Leveraging and measuring your intangible value drivers (pp. 98, 102). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Ltd.
Welch, J. (2005). Chapter 7 - People management. In Winning (p. 105). New York: HarperCollins.