Other Benefits of Performance Management *

·         Helps you think about what results you really want. You're forced to be accountable, to "put a stake in the ground".

·         Depersonalizes issues. Supervisor's focus on behaviors and results, rather than personalities.

·         Validates expectations. In today's age of high expectations when organizations are striving to transform themselves and society, having measurable results can verify whether grand visions are realistic or not.

·         Helps ensure equitable treatment of employees because appraisals are based on results.

·         Optimizes operations in the organization because goals and results are more closely aligned.

·         Cultivates a change in perspective from activities to results.

·         Performance reviews are focused on contributions to the organizational goals, e.g., forms include the question "What organizational goal were contributed to and how?"

·         Supports ongoing communication, feedback and dialogue about organizational goals. Also supports communication between employee and supervisor.

·         Performance is seen as an ongoing process, rather than a one-time, snapshot event.

·         Provokes focus on the needs of customers, whether internal or external.

·         Cultivates a systems perspective, that is, focus on the relationships and exchanges between subsystems, e.g., departments, processes, teams and employees. Accordingly, personnel focus on patterns and themes in the organization, rather than specific events.

·         Continuing focus and analysis on results helps to correct several myths, e.g., "learning means results", "job satisfaction produces productivity", etc.

·         Produces specificity in commitments and resources.

·         Provides specificity for comparisons, direction and planning.

·         Redirects attention from bottom-up approaches (e.g., doing job descriptions, performance reviews, etc., first and then "rolling up" results to the top of the organization) to top-down approaches (e.g., ensuring all subsystem goals and results are aligned first with the organization's overall goals and results).

 

* Written by Carter McNamara, PhD, http://www.managementhelp.org/perf_mng/benefits.htm

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