Performance management: can we practice what we preach? by Duncan Brown

I chaired CIPD Performance Management conference last month in London. The excellent line up of speakers and very lively and participative delegates provided a great view of the state-of-the-nation on this. And it wasn’t a pretty one. The admittedly unscientific audience response to my polling questions was overwhelmingly negative. Performance management isn’t working.

When HR departments all started a decade ago to re-christen their often-hated, control-oriented  appraisal systems with the PM nomenclature, they were setting out a much more positive, organisational performance-related and employee engagement-oriented agenda. But it was also a much more challenging one, attempting to marry organisation strategy and personal objectives and action, and linking in many of the disparate strands of HR policy: training and development, talent management, reward and diversity, all loaded on top of the traditional, humble appraisal process.

The problems are therefore not of ambition or intent, but rather practice and delivery. Low rates of coverage and even more frequently low quality conversations and non-existent follow-up are commonplace, in the wake of uncommitted directors, incompetent line managers, uncomprehending employees and hectoring HR with their still complex and bureaucratic HR processes.

Rightly employers and their HR functions haven’t given up on their ambitions: performance management practices invariably emerge as some of the most impacting in research studies on high performance working. Damned important, but also damned difficult.

So how are organisations breaking out of this impasse and producing truly meaningful and valued performance management practice? At IES we are just launching a major piece of case study research in this important area and the leading case studies at the conference gave us all some excellent clues. So before you add on another competency framework, sophisticated rating and ranking scale or personal development planning tool to your existing process, pay attention to the following three areas.

First, the link to organisation purpose and a broad scorecard of performance.  HR Director at Carphone Warehouse Caroline Edwards explained how the company have driven a major culture change and higher financial performance using their Compass scorecard of five sets of criteria, driving these down into everyone’s performance management goals and rewards. This was backed up by an impressive range of tools and guidance for managers and staff.

Second, focus on the reviewing managers who have to implement the wonderful process you design.  Ingrid Waterfield from KPMG explained how they had designated and extensively trained more than 300 Performance Management Leaders across their business to act as the vanguard of a movement to build continuous, ongoing performance feedback and review throughout the organisation. Impressive improvements have resulted in the proportion of staff who feel they have clear goals related to the organisation’s strategy and who feel their reward is linked to their performance.

And third, concentrate on the conversation. Both Debbie Meech of Cable and Wireless International and Janet Willars from CAPP extolled and illustrated the benefits of a strength-based approach to performance conversations and reviews, building on employee’s strengths and energy levels, rather than diminishing and demotivating them.

Fifty years ago Renesis Likert wrote in the Harvard Business Review of the dreaded and dispiriting process of performance appraisal in many organisations. It’s about time that more of us realised the benefits of effective performance management