Create energy with your team to deliver lasting performance. Especially in these COVID-19 times driven by social distancing and people working from home, the question arises how to develop or maintain a sustainable performance culture. Since this is a relevant topic in many of our assignments, we have developed a model, which we would like to share with you in this miniseries of three blogs. The three blogs will be published weekly over the next three weeks. In this first blog, we explain the background of our performance management approach. We use an holistic view, focus on impact and build people’s capabilities.
Our performance management approach is built on three starting points:
- We use an holistic view. In our set up of performance management culture we take at least four performance dimensions into account:
Thus, performance is more than finance, it takes into account different parts of the organisation.
- We focus on business impact, not on tool implementation. What tools we should use is dependent on and derived from the nature of the business challenge. In many of the programs we see around us, the main focus is training and teaching people how to use Lean, Six Sigma, Agile or Scrum tools and techniques. People follow the training, get the certificate and go back to work. The true business impact remains unclear. When we support a company, the tool is always a means to an end.
- We build capabilities. One of the key results of our involvement is to build the capabilities within the client organization so they can continue their journey of performance management and continuous improvement without external support.
Based on these characteristics we have designed an approach with transparent goal setting, the creation of KPIs and the introduction of performance dialogues. Furthermore, in this approach people are supported by developing coaching skills and a culture of transparency and flexibility. The team becomes more agile and is able to work flexibly in the rapidly changing business environment.
It starts with leadership
The leadership team is our starting point. With a series of short workshops, we facilitate the leadership team to bring transparency on the overall objectives, goals, strategies and measures of the company or business unit. This is called the OGSM approach. Especially since the Covid-19 measures have forced many people to work from home and keep a distance, we have found the OGSM way of working extremely useful in providing guidance and alignment in organisations, even when the workshops are done online. (See our blog from June 2020 for more details). It really aligns and prioritises people’s efforts and prevents people to work on items that in the end prove not to support the company strategy.
Now, you understand the background of our thinking about performance management. In the next blog, we will dive deeper into the performance management model and show you how to use it in your organisation.
