Performance Management

In the last byte, we looked at how goal setting is related to performance. In today's byte, we begin our discussion on performance management and shall continue the same over the next few bytes.

Performance management deals with the attempt of an organization to achieve the best performance from its employees. Given this challenge, performance management could be thought of as having the following phases:

1. Defining
2. Measuring
3. Appraising
4. Providing Feedback
5. Improving performance.

The above order is extremely important to be kept in mind. Only if the definition of performance in behavioral terms is gone well can the next few stages be really built on. Once defined, we could use the definition to make performance more measurable and then perform an assessment on the same. This information of the measurement and assessment could be fed back to the individual and used as basis for goal setting and establishing plans for performance improvement.

Coupling this with the way we can reinforce learning through rewards, poor performance can be corrected. We shall discuss some of these stages performance management as we move ahead.