Performance Monitoring components

Employee Goal Setting

The chart below details the breakdown of each component and the reason for its inclusion.

Performance Monitoring Component Component Breakdown Reason for its Inclusion
EMPLOYEE GOAL SETTING Preparing the individual Most employees will view job monitoring with trepidation so they must be put at ease by suitable preparation. They must understand it is a mutual endeavor established through an objective facilitator with the employee's supervisor as an observer.
Defining the position Define the position in a way that makes it different from any other position in the company because no two positions are ever the same.
Reporting It is important to clarify who is the single person to whom the employee reports, and secondary reports, if any.
Listing the weights of responsibilities for each task To capture the essence of the job it is crucial to know how the individual's work is distributed among the many tasks that make up the job. Rate them by hours per week, by percentage of time or by strategic importance to the company. Note the top few that make up at least 80% of the total weight.
Defining the authority An employee can ONLY be responsible for that over which the person has authority, so authority must be clearly defined in dollars, or people, or levels, etc.
Defining what the employee delivers that creates results For each task, define the deliverable.
Defining the clients For each task, define the single most important 'client'. (Who expects to receive this deliverable?) Indicate secondary clients, if there are any.
Capturing the top 80% Using the 80% weights above, ensure the job measurement involves no more than 3 tasks in order to keep it simple and easy for the employee, the supervisor and the co-employees to measure. (Ask: "Which 80% of your job, if completed well, will make your boss deliriously happy?")
Defining the measure of success Define numerically, what the employee deems to be successful in each case (and hence, will be a failure in the employee's mind, if not achieved). Have the supervisor approve the measure as being readily achievable.
Making the measures simple Only simple measures will remain indisputable. The last thing you need is an argument between the employee and the supervisor about the validity of the measure.
Making the measure reliable Each measure has to easy to gather for if it cannot be reliably gathered, how can employees know day by day if they have been successful?
Getting the supervisor's approval The employee's direct supervisor must agree that these parameters are relevant for the supervisor's group, section or department, and thus fit into the bigger picture one level up.
Getting the employee's approval The employee must fully endorse the measures, without any reservations whatsoever. Without the employee's full cooperation it would not be the employee's 'choice', which would be a violation of principle #1 of striving for employee job satisfaction. See Employee happiness defined.
Iteration Working between the employee and the supervisor may require several iterations, as there must be complete agreement.
Writing it down Keep it all to one sheet of paper per employee or you will get lost in the complexity of your program. KISS.
Creating the Source Data Sheet The numerical results that are considered as acceptable performance must be clearly stated. All of applicable measures (1, 2 or 3) that capture 80% of the job must be listed.
Clarifying acceptable performance They must be stated in a way that no one can misunderstand the goal. For example: "The measure of success is that no more than 1 in 25, i.e. 4% of the responses will indicate 'less than satisfactory' field sales training session, i.e. no more than 3.6 'less-than-satisfactory' responses per month."
Source of reports State clearly where the reports for the measure will come from and who is responsible for ensuring they come in. Example: "Monthly rep and dealer feedback reports to sales manager."
Amount of information There has to be enough information to provide a measure because, for example, one report per year would be useless for monitoring purposes. "10 to 13 trip reports per year each with 12 to 15 sessions = 120 to 195 inputs per year or about 13 inputs per month."
Collection format As the information comes in, the collection format must be known so that it can be posted to some recording system for ultimate display on spreadsheets or dashboard systems.
Manual presentation An example spreadsheet for the specific information must illustrate monthly and year-to-date results and how closely they meet the agreed-upon goals in absolute numbers and how those translate into % of goals achieved.
Creating algorithms A mathematical translation method for the above results has to be developed, uniquely for each measure so that it indicates if the individual is on track for the month and the year within the desirable percentage.
Providing visual indicators Green, yellow and red indicators need to be triggered on the written performance report as follows: for being above target (green), 10% or less above target (yellow), off target (red). Visual color indication is instantly informative.
Dashboard indicators Transferring the above to dashboard indicators provides the best monitoring process possible with traffic lights, green, yellow and red, for each of the key measures (no more than 3) for current month and year to date. Ideally each employee would have 2 sets of traffic lights (one measure) but there could be as many as 6 sets of traffic lights per employee (three measures). The employee needs to be able to access the dashboards each day via a personal computer, no matter where that person is in the world.
Access Control Dashboards for each employee should not be accessible to other employees, except for the individual's immediate supervisor or as agreed in company policy.

Table 3.1. Performance Monitoring component - Employee Goal Setting

Continue to Employee Incentive Program component.