There are two absolute laws of performance assessment. One is that everyone hates the process. The second is managers have short memories and employees have long ones. A manager will likely forget an employee’s good work shortly after recognizing the work. The employee, on the other hand, never forgets that the manager said, “Good job!”
Bring Your Own Device
In a BYOD world, recognizing, measuring, and managing performance is found easier by managers and fairer by employees. Devices and their mobility engage the participants, archive performance details, and prepare objective assessments.
Mobile devices and the technology that supports them have become a tool and a resource. How your HR information systems facilitate and interface this ability – effectively and efficiently – is central to process productivity, compliance fulfillment, and employee retention.
Performance Assessment Potential
Legacy performance assessment has been a paper and labor-intensive managerial task. Despite a best effort by the manager, the employee waits to hear the other shoe drop. In a world of 0.03 increases, the process frustrates everyone and produces zero quality development.
Management needs:
- A plan to progress in terms of strategic growth for individual performance, operational function, and accountability outcomes.
- Tools to track, verify, and monitor work, analytics to interpret and predict trends, and to identify performance and quality problems.
- Define key performance indicators aligned with business goals, customer satisfaction, and regulatory compliance.
- Cross-functional reports of summary and real-time performance.
Employee needs
A recent Microsoft commercial points out that it is not the device that is mobile. The owner is mobile, and the device accepts that and further enables it. It is time the employees’ needs (below) determined the direction and structure of performance assessment.
- A well-communicated vision of the tie between individual performance assessment and corporate needs and objectives.
- Clear key performance indicators simply demonstrated on dashboards, scoreboards, and graphics.
- Simplified and personalized complex analytics that the employee can verify, adjust, and/or provide feedback.
- A sense of ownership and engagement that allows the individual to report the “why” as well as the “what” of the performance.
HR system needs
Transformational performance assessment requires systems that serve manager and employee needs. Fundamentally, it challenges users to move forward from a retro-review that appraises performance as history. You want to stop measuring “What did they do?” and start measuring “Will they get us there?” It is a case of “continuous planning and rolling forecasts” (Filippone, 2012).
This thinking runs the risk of confusing all sorts of processes and levels of performance management. However, that is precisely the point. Human Resources needs the flexibility, adaptability, and scalability expected of other business functions. And, the easy accessibility, active engagement, and personal ownership of mobile access – and the HR software that makes it happen – decides that future.
Works cited
Filippone, T. Y. (2012). Human Resources Transformation: is it driving business performance? HfS Research, Ltd./PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
Image credit, http://www.pwc.com/us/en/people-management/publications/hfs-hr-transform.jhtml