Measuring Employee Performance - Book Report/Review Example

One of the most important factor that is influential to every business or company’s success would be its ability to take care of their employees which make it possible for them to continue with their business operations. One way to do so would be to show appreciation towards the work done by their employees and to be able to do so, a performance plan should be set up based on activities of each employee’s role in the company. This would mean identifying a list of roles that each employee should deliver depending on their job description. This is the easiest way to know the guidelines on the measures of rewarding your employees. However, aside from that, the more important part of an employee performance plan would be one that establishes standards that address the many goals of a business as a whole. To be able to understand this better, there is an eight- step plan that we all should understand. First of which would be to look at the overall picture. Instead of determining your employee performance plan by looking at the bottom of the organization and deriving the plan based on their job description, you will begin your plan by putting to mind your company’s goals and identifying how each employee’s role could be able to help achieve it. The second step would be to determine work unit accomplishments based on three sub methods which are the Goal Cascading method, A Customer-Focused method, and A Workflow Charting method. Implementation of these three methods would be a great motivation for each employee to develop cooperation and team work instead of focusing on fulfilling only one’s job requirements. The third step would be determining individual accomplishments that support work unit goals. This could be done by using a role-results matrix which is simply a table that identifies which roles a unit member must produce to support the unit’s accomplishments. This matrix could be built by listing the work unit’s products or services at the top row of the table. Then at the left corner of the table, list down the names of each member of the work unit. For each cell of the table, you can ask questions that are relevant to your specific business such as their job deliverables and put a check mark on each requirement if they were able to deliver. The fourth step would be to convert expected accomplishments to performance elements, indicating type and priority. This is done by clearly stating to different levels of employees the critical elements from the non-critical ones which will make appraisal programs easier to determine and will allow you to give equal rewards to each employee based on the percentage or points of an element in the performance plan that was achieved. The fifth step would be determining work unit and individual measures. If step 4 involved designating which performance elements are critical from those that are not, step 5 would be how to measure performance on those elements. To put this simply, all you have to do is ask yourself how well work units or employees produced or provided products and services. However, to be able to develop specific measures that will give you a more consistent answer, you must first determine general measures that apply to it such as the quality, quantity, timeliness, cost-effectiveness and a lot more. Moving forward, after being able to determine the general and specific measures, the next or the sixth step would be to develop work unit and individual standards. This would mean establishing standards for each element and to begin this, you would need to know the number of levels your appraisal program uses to appraise elements. Also, it is important that you take consideration of the specific performance level your program uses as the retention standard. This would help all employees to know the specific expectations required of them and at the same time the standard of which they would consider themselves as fully successful in a certain job requirement. Also, in the part of the employer, being able to establish this would allow you to give each employee what is due to them not only based on quantity or quality but at the same time in all aspects of their performance as you would be able to easily classify their reward or appraisal based on these categories: fully successful, minimally successful, and exceeds fully successful. The 7th step would be to determine how to monitor performance. This has to do with measuring performance and providing feedback to your employees. This is a very important process when it comes to giving appraisal as one of the greatest measures of which would be the progress measured from each employee. To be able to complete this process, one would have to determine what data to collect for each performance element, determine when to collect the data, who will collect it, and who will receive it; review existing reports for use as feedback reports, create feedback tables and a lot more. We all know that the timeliness, manner, and at the same time specifying certain elements on a feedback addressing any kind of employee performance is an essential component of a successful performance management program. Lastly, step 8 would be to check the performance plan. What is the use of knowing all these 7 steps if you are not going to use it to make sure the elements and standards you have determined are effective in meeting your goals in the company right? You can ask yourself these questions to know whether you did a great job in building your employee performance plan. Are the critical elements truly critical? Is the range of acceptable performance clear? Are the standards reasonable? Are the standards applicable? Are the elements and standards flexible? Can they be adapted readily to changes in circumstances or resources? If all these would help you and your employees to reach the goal of your company then it is best to use it as a determining factor in your appraisal system. We all know that one of the most successful companies are those that have healthy and happy employees who truly understand what is expected of them while consisting of an employer who would take time to study and learn how to empower and improve one’s employees individually as well. Bibliography: Compensation and Performance Service.(2011). A Handbook For Measuring Employee Performance.A Handbook For Measuring Employee Performance, 1, 20-68. Read More