Performance is the act of accomplishing some activity, objective, or responsibility. In the context of work, performance means taking effective action in accordance with the expectations and requirements of a specific role in a specific situation. Essentially, performance means doing what’s expected.

This definition leads us to the understanding that, without expectations, whether stated or implied, performance cannot occur. Workers can’t accomplish objectives they don’t know about or understand. So a crucial principle concerning performance is that workers and supervisors (constituents, stakeholders, etc.) need to have clear understanding and agreement on what is to be accomplished.

Performance Measures

The quality or extent of performance is relative to the standard that is established before the work is attempted. Performance can be graded based on a percentage of the standard that is achieved. Doing exactly what is expected is a 100-percent performance; doing half of what is expected is a 50-percent performance; and doing more than is expected would result in a performance in excess of 100 percent. General terms like good, bad, excellent, better, and world-class can also be used, but are vague or nonspecific ways of communicating performance and convey an appreciative or denigrating judgment of the performance.

Once the performance of workers is measured and stated in numerical terms, it is often compared or ranked within the relevant group. This information can be helpful to managers for identifying people whose performance deserves acknowledgement, people whose capabilities might be underutilized, and people most in need of support.

Improving Performance

Savvy managers recognize that work performance is the result of a highly-complex system of inputs and interactions, and the worker is just one of many elements in the system. Though it may be easier for managers to just blame workers for substandard performance, humaneering makes clear that the performance of knowledge and service workers is equally attributable to other elements in the work system. When worker performance requires improving, the more effective initiatives engage the involved employees, managers, and practitioners to diagnose what is happening within the work system and determine an appropriate response.

The attention managers give to performance that is below expectations is often the wrong kind, and its effect can be the opposite of the improvement the manager intended. Likewise, the practice of some managers of publishing individual employee performance results for comparison or ranking has a substantially more negative impact on the performance of the organization as a whole than any performance effect from the positive regard bestowed on the top performers. Using employee rankings as a means to identify and terminate lesser performers has a similar negative effect to which many managers are uninformed. Even the ubiquitous annual performance evaluation has been proven to have an overall negative impact on performance.

Self-Management

Humaneering technology teaches us that effective human work systems must have methods for measuring performance so that workers can self-regulate their behavior. These methods may include scores, charts, or other indicators that are readily understood. Note the purpose of these measures—essentially to provide the worker with feedback necessary for effective self-management. Feedback like this is critical to performance improvement because human work systems are organic in nature and require this indication of the impact of current behavior so that the need for appropriate adjustments is recognized.

For measures of performance to provide helpful feedback, they must represent aspects of performance that are within the control of the worker to effect a change. In addition, these measures must be understood and accepted as accurate, and together they provide a full and balanced view of workers’ performance as it relates to the standard. Many managers miss the point that the most valuable reason for measuring the performance of workers is to facilitate their self-management, not to inform management so they can intercede with rewards and punishment.

Helpful Measures

The measures of performance that are most helpful to workers are formative—real-time feedback on results for one or more of the elements that indicate or contribute materially to an important standard of performance. These will vary with the nature of the work and may include unit measures of activity (e.g., calls made, orders taken, claims processed, customers served), interim measures of progress (e.g., half finished, 60 percent of goal, presentation stage), or qualitative measures of work characteristics, effort, and development (e.g., more assertive, working hard, competent). Generally speaking, it is a mistake to hold people accountable for formative measures because there are infinite paths to effective human performance.

Summative measures symbolize the performance objective or standard, and closely replicate or contribute directly to measures of management’s performance. Though summative measures are common as the ultimate measure of performance, they are less helpful than formative measures because they provide little or no insight into what changes in behavior might improve performance.

Measurement of Knowledge and Service Work

For most work roles, and particularly for knowledge- and service-based work, there are important aspects of performance which are not easily assessed or quantified. To deal with this challenge, managerial systems often stray from good practice by resorting to measures that are easily obtained and which are subsequently accepted as reasonable indicators of performance. Workers come to understand that management is asking for one aspect of performance (i.e., the objective) but holding them accountable for another (i.e., what’s measured). It should come as no surprise that people will attend most to those aspects of performance for which they receive feedback.

The more effective summative measures for knowledge- and service-based work reflect value creation (i.e., value contribution or value-added) in financial terms such as market value, revenue, margin, expense reduction, cost savings, payback, etc. Reducing work outcomes to financial terms allows management to more easily equate and contrast the financial consequences of alternative sources of value. It also assures that workers clearly understand their ultimate goals and can apportion their time proportionally to the value potential of their opportunities.

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