Performance Measurement is NOT People Measurement
When I share about Performance Management or Performance Measurement, many people will look upon it as a “Mine-field” and avoid getting involve or even mentioning it to their boss.
People by nature are afraid to be measured and they do not want others to know their weakness. The irony is when you do not know yourself, how are you going to improve yourself. That is where PRIVACY comes in to protect the individual interest, yet allowing them to know what they lacked so that they can embark on their learning adventure.
It is thus important that we let the staff know that Performance Measurement is NOT People Measurement!
Some of the signs of people who don’t want to be measured are:
- Focusing on trivial measures to distract the real issue and work on thing that are easy to count and within their control.
- Next, they will take the easiest path to game the results of the measures by doing “Across the board Implementation”; eg. get everyone vaccinated without taking into consideration the implication of allergy that can cause long term vaccine injury or death
- Or they will shift the goalposts so they can report some kind of performance result which they see as easier to reach and communicate, and cover up other real issues!
For those who manage projects or people would have some experiences of such people who will try to come out with “results” to show their performance when the actual issue was not solved.
Thus, when we measure people, we get people reinforcing the defensiveness, cover up their helplessness, and cynicism that people feedback on reality — resulting in the resistance and wayanging (putting on an act) and cheating, as it always has done.
In the book DRIVE, https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/
It shows how to offer Intrinsic reward through these 3 elements:
- Autonomy. Measures are used to improve performance rather than the measures being used to judge their performance. These measures will help them understand business performance and motivate them to do something about it.
- Mastery. Skills training is critical for anything, and measurement helps people to be more targeted in their skills training to the work they need to perform, instead of taking courses for the sake of taking courses which cannot improve their performance. When people have mastery in working ON the business, they have the confidence to change the business processes and systems to make performance better.
- Purpose. People embraced the organisation bigger picture — Vision, Mission and Core Values; Corporate culture. Staff will be able to see how their work contributes to the organisation’s culture. With alignment to the purpose; the “WHY” of the organisation, then people can see how their work matters, and their improvements make real impact which gives the people that rewarding feeling.
So how to STOP MEASURING PEOPLE and START MEASURING PERFORMANCE?
Note: If people are resisting performance measurement, it is because they believe their performance is being measured directly, or because they believe measures are used to judge them, then the best first thing you can do is to get them more involved.
STEP 1:
Involving the people applies the Autonomy principle. Let the people understand what their goals really mean and why they matter. Then, get them to design measures for these goals which logically quantify the most relevant and feasible evidence of their goals into performance measures. Next, get them to defining the calculation and data collection for their measures. When people can see how the data collected, calculated and the interpretation of what the measure is saying, it builds up ownership and purpose.
STEP 2:
After having ownership of the measures, it is important to establish ACCOUNTABILITY. Accountability drives the right behaviour to improve performance and not do the gaming and goalpost-shifting that are commonly seen.
The Three essential parts to ACCOUNTABILITY are:
- Have meaningful performance measures to track results.
- Interpreting the performance measures to identify performance gaps.
- Initiating improvement action
The above is actually the basic PDCA cycle everyone should be very family with. It is used extensively in ISO processes improvement.
However, for accountability to become a norm, it needs constant discussion, reflective practice, and reinforcement from the management, thus it will take time. Because of the TIME factor, it is important to start now with discussing this meaning of accountability with your staff and introducing what I have stated above.
Taking on the mandatory Privacy compliance as a project to work on and measure will be a great start of killing two birds with one stone!
Feel free to contact us if your organisation needs guidance in Performance Management and Compliance.
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