• Program Development Cycle

Traditional methods of managing performance aren’t working anymore. Companies are tools, like annual reviews, to new techniques that emphasize real-time feedback.You know the drill: managers and employees sit down once a year to review performance. These performance reviews assess an employee’s performance on a scale, or give it a numerical rating.

And then, in some cases, employees are given a ranking compared to other employees.A performance system used in figure skating or competitive cooking shows may not be the best way of evaluating employees in the workplace. When it comes to the traditional, consider:. 58% of HR executives consider reviews an ineffective use of supervisors’ time.

Every year, the average manager spends about 210 hours doing reviews. That’s more than a month of their time. Only strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that supports them to do outstanding work.Traditional performance management approaches aren’t effective because they. Today, with a tight labor supply and the nature of work very different from the industrial past, organizations must focus on developing people, rather than rating them. This requires a shift to performance development.

Implementing performance development in your organizationHere’s how you as an HR professional can help your management team. Audit your current performance management systemThis is important for two reasons: to make the case to management that there is room for improvement in your current performance management system and, later, to provide baseline metrics to which you can compare your system after the shift to performance development.Your audit should ask the following questions:.

Where is the current system working well? Where is it falling short?. Do employees receive timely and frequent feedback?. Are employees given the opportunity to master skills and develop new ones?.

Are promotion and compensation decisions fair and equitable?. Does the system help employees understand their purpose and how it contributes to the company’s larger goals?As part of your evaluation, also assess current organizational performance.

A shift to performance development will see organizational performance metrics improve, and you want to be able to quantify this improvement. Make the case to senior managementLet your senior management team know that performance management may no longer be meeting your company’s needs. Are shifting from traditional performance management to an emphasis on developing talent and providing continuous feedback.Then present the results of your audit to senior management. What are the areas that need to be improved? Provide examples of how performance development will help improve these areas. For instance, if your employees rarely receive feedback outside of their annual performance review, show how alternatives to the review, such as or monthly or weekly, can provide your employees with regular feedback. Decide how far you’ll goIf your management team is open to a new approach to performance, engage them to decide how far you’ll go.

Will your company entirely abolish old performance management methods or adopt a hybrid approach? Article Continues BelowFor example, some companies have entirely done away with performance reviews and employee ratings. Others, such as PwC and Deloitte, have moved towards more complex performance snapshots provided more frequently. PwC employees now receive scores on five competencies, along with other development feedback, while receive scores on four categories on a quarterly basis. Decide how to replace the old performance model with new approachesWhen, companies often forget that they must do more than simply abolish annual reviews. They need to replace their old techniques with news ones, and find techniques that work for employees and managers.When moving to a performance development structure, work with your managerial team to establish ways to:. Reward performance.

Whatever method your company chooses, employee performance should be judged not only by how an individual worker’s performance stacks up against others, but judged against what is considered success in that role. Identify and support poor performers. How will your company in real-time? This is much better than letting issues fester for months, until the next performance review.5. Train your employeesAsk senior management to allocate time for on the new performance development system and techniques.

Program Development Cycle

With this time, be sure to:. Train managers on how to work with employees to that help employees continue to learn and develop. Brief all employees on the new approach, and let them know how their performance will be measured and developed. Establish norms around frequency of feedback and any tools or systems that will be used to provide and capture feedback.Ideally, this training should be delivered in part by senior management, to demonstrate the strategic importance of performance development and show that it has buy-in from the top.

Evaluate the new system and report back to managementRemember those baseline metrics we establish in step one? Four to six months after implementing a new performance development program, evaluate the new system by those same criteria and note any changes. Report back to senior management on how successful your company has been in its transition to developing and supporting talent in real-time.

Many times leaders don't understand the community planning process, buthave determined that a plan for the entire community or a neighborhoodor small area would be a good idea. We would like to begin with the basic idea that you need to consult the citizens of the impacted area first and foremost. Otherwise, you ignore potentially important information that does not necessarily show up when you consult census data and other published sources, and you also run the risk that residents will be able to launch a fairly successful attack on the plan based on the fact that they were not asked.If residents are brought right into the planning process, and even more so if citizens initiate the planning process, you will find that they will become strong defenders of the plan.

We have written most of this page in the expectation that it is ordinary residents who are reading it, but we do know there are some leaders and even professionals who look at our site. So we say as strongly as we know how, you need to offer real involvement for residents. Here are the steps. Gather up information, called data, and maps.The first step in preparing or any other community planning process is collecting information, including.Collect quantified data (pieces of information), such as U.S.Census data (including the various business information the CensusBureau collects on a schedule other than the Census every 10 years),crime and police report data, business license data, and utilities dataif they will share. Utilities might have information on new connectionsand disconnections that help you determine moving patterns.

If youare doing the planning process yourselves without a paid professional,specialize in the data you can collect yourselves.Volunteers can manage to obtain the Census data, ask City Hallfor all relevant data, and gather information from the increasinglycommon data compilation services on the web, such as for the U.S. Determine the general goals first before getting bogged down in the details of writing. If you have a consultant, ask them to state the goals inthe first language that comes to mind, so you can play with the ideasand see if you want to rally behind that goal.If someone writes goals for you and you don't buy them, it's notgoing to work. It's hard to see why so many consultants think they canwrite inspirational goals for others.To illustrate this, let's try an experiment.

Your goals for the next year are:. You will lose 20 pounds.

You will save $500 more than you did this year. You will watch only C-Span on TV.Did that work? Are you inspired? Are these now your goals for real?

Hmm, I didn't think so.These sample goals might even have been based on good analysis,because typical Americans need to lose weight, save more money, andwatch less junk TV. But they are not goals that you, the decisionmaker, brought forth, and therefore they are not goals that you feel stronglyabout pursuing. Even if you agreed with the topics of weight, savings, and television habits as important to your personal plan, you would want to tinker with the exact numbers or television channels, wouldn't you?So no matter how elegant the plan that I write for you, it won't work unless these are genuinely your goals.4.Generate community choices and develop alternativescenarios.The alternatives step is hard for most do-it-yourself groups becauseby now, you think you know the answers.

See if you can disciplineyourselves to spend about an hour thinking up alternative ways to reachyour goal or goals.If you have a situation where some real alternatives are apparentand you don't know which way to go, spend some effort developing theconcepts behind the alternatives into a coherent narrative, and theninvolve your core group guiding the planning process in a discussion.If possible, hold a public forum, discussion, open house, oron-line survey where you ask the neighborhood at large to comment oneach alternative. Your aim should be a long list of pro's and con's foreach alternative.Discuss and debate, but at some point, choose your direction.If you genuinely can combine two or more desirable alternatives intoone, do so.However, don't jam contradictory ideas together just to makeeveryone a winner in hopes they will support the community planningprocess. At this stage of choosing an alternative, you may alienatesome people. But be nice, and like other situations in life, yourattitude will mean everything about whether the 'losers' stay in thegame.5. Make a written plan!Solidify it with the description and analysis that led you to theseconclusions, a description of the community planning process youfollowed and who was involved, the alternatives you considered, and whyyou chose the one you did. If hired professionals or city employees arepreparing the plan, they will do this step.The elegance of plan documents has no correlation with the degreeto which neighborhood, small area, or city plans will be helpful orimplemented.

Dwell on that sentence; I won't repeat it.Professionals are likely to overdo the style and sacrifice thesubstance. Don't ever let that happen. Yes, you'd like a nice map ordiagram or brochure to show your conclusions from this wonderfulcommunity planning process, but don't let the quality of the printedmaterial outweigh the quality of the thinking.6.