Just sharing the some Industry Chatter.
How has technology helped or hindered your performance management process
I scream when I see blatant sales pitches on what should be a medium for exchanges of ideas and experiences so I will declare now that I represent a vendor but am going to answer your question directly and from a general perspective.
1. Be specific
You ask, “How has technology helped or hindered your performance management process? yet most so-called PM processes are NOT performance MANAGEMENT – they are usually crude goal cascading processes and/or trivialized performance appraisal processes. Performance Management is a wholly different process, albeit with some elements of the former two included.
2. Understand the benefits
For many organisations technology has automated both episodic planning and appraisal. That can bring a number of benefits:
- Speed of completion
- Efficiency of completion
- Ability to monitor, if not manage, compliance
- Ability to monitor, if not manage, plan and appraisal calibration
- Ability to manage workflow, approvals and data access.
3. Know the consequences
For many organisations technology has automated both episodic planning and appraisal. That can bring a number of consequences:
- Investment of substantial funds in a process that nobody has ever proven adds value to the business e.g., can you produce evidence that such goal alignment has enhanced individual performance; can you prove that an annual appraisal has actually influenced someone’s performance sustainably; ….(rhetorical!)?
- Paper-based process are cumbersome but enforced rules on such things as workflow, access etc can be immensely annoying and inhibiting if they are not designed exceedingly well
- The very people for whom the processes were designed don’t follow them and the others begrudge having to do it
- HR gets accused (I prefer to say ‘Complimented’) of going back to policing
- Mangers talk with their staff even less – relying instead on emails, desktop alerts and ‘the system’ for their communications
- Initial reactions are good with high compliance levels but on second and subsequent cycles users realize the ineffectiveness of the tools and utilization wanes.
4. Technology
If well designed (to trigger, drive, support, sustain and enhance your optimal processes) , can add tremendous value to an organization. It can enable the implementation of a true performance management process in which 24 x 7 targeted attention is given to the 7 key elements of any performance management process e.g.:
- Setting direction – how the organization on an hour by hour, day by day, week by week, basis communicates to each individual member of staff what the vision is, what the values and strategies are, what matters for them,
- Role clarification – how the organization engages each individual in their specific job but also in the wider performance management process
- Planning and alignment – not merely goal cascading (you can’t manage outputs, only activities and behaviours); how individuals interact with each other to agree desired activity and out comes; how those are aligned with others; how behavior is planned to support goal achievement; how development is planned to support behavior enhancement; how goal and competency data is used to predict likely success and failure; …
- etc.
5. Technology can be deployed as a behavioural engineering tool
- To trigger desired behavior in response to data accumulated
- To reinforce actions proven to lead to enhanced performance
- To identify and highlight shortfalls in results, behaviours, activity, even plans
- To manage the collection of quality data (comprehensive, valid, reliable, differentiating, defensible, and useful) rather than mere overall ratings which are largely meaningless
- To provide management information regarding cause and effect and thereby enable prediction of performance from which interventions can be planned.
In short, technology is currently more often used to automate existing processes, many of which were and remain ineffective if not destructive. However, it can be deployed to introduce dramatically better processes that were not feasible without it and to provide management information with which transformational results can be achieved.
Before you even consider investing in technology, you MUST identify what the true underlying goal is e.g., are you really wanting to drive up performance; are you wanting to make a painful process easy/less painful; are you wanting to quality data about performance so that you can do empirical studies to determine what really drives success; ….. then look for technology that will do that brilliantly! “Don’t buy a hammer to put in screws” – it won’t work very well but you can’t then blame the hammer.
