The discipline of performance management system continues to draw the attention of all—the employees, the HR function, the CEO and the Board as well. A lot has been said about the type of software and tools that could be used to implement a successful performance management system. Performance management systems traditionally drive the employee appraisal process which in turn determines promotion, incentives and compensation structures as well as highlights the areas for competency development.
According to a survey conducted by McKinsey, nearly 60% of the respondents say that building organisational capabilities is a top priority for their companies, yet only one third of the companies actually focus their training programmes on capability building leading to enhancement of their business performance. The competitive standing of the business is built around the capabilities the organisation possesses in the areas of importance in the industry or the unique methods and processes that the businesses build, leading to the delight of the customers. Hence the performance management systems have to be closely aligned and tuned to the capability levels which the business plans to create in the organisation.
On the contrary, according to a recent global study conducted by Deloitte on the emerging trends of HR, only 18% of the companies participating in the survey stated that performance management system leads to concrete initiatives in capability building in the organisations. This is a
serious matter to ponder over as it highlights the current status in most organisations and reflects a disconnect between capability building initiative of the organisation and the performance management system.
One of the challenges that traditional performance management system faces is—the feeders into the talent and capability development systems are episodic and not continuous. Hence it is difficult to establish the specific impact as a consequence of the performance management system. Further the current capability development models also function as a stand-alone system most of the times, measuring only the outcomes at intervals, based on specific interventions put in place from time to time.
In the digital era, an always connected world, where every individual is constantly being exposed to content through ‘pull’ or ‘push’ mechanisms within the organisation through the intranet or outside the organisation through social media and other collaborative forums, it is extremely important to recognise that on account of accessing different types of content, there is an opportunity for learning and continuous upgradation as well. It is about time for HR practitioners to start factoring such channels which are not in their direct control but play an active role in shaping the development pace and path of the individuals. The journey of self
development and growth of the individual is now possible to be guided by smart tools and analytics and by integrating the exploratory learning paths of the individuals’ own initiatives along with the planned learning components designed by the specialists in a seamless manner.
Further, through i-beacons installed in the production environment in the factory or with the help of sophisticated tools that could study the mail and phone communications and analyse areas requiring attention, it would be possible to serve up specific learning objects on the smart phones at the time of trouble shooting or proactively averting downtime. Thus performance management function tightly coupled with competency building process has the opportunity to make customised and adaptive interventions real time on the strength of exhaustive analytics which in turn will furnish rich data that would help in succession planning and identifying the critical talent based on the key skills required by the organisation.
Currently in most organisations, performance management is primarily viewed as the responsibility of HR function. In reality, HR function is the custodian and administrator of the system, the real stakeholders are the individuals and their immediate supervisors who play a pivotal role in determining the learning paths towards development of competencies based on the business needs and the industry opportunities. Technology allows every employee to control his/her destiny and provides a transparent and collaborative platform for reaching out to experts within and outside the organisation for acquiring and upgrading skills and knowledge as well as mentoring and counselling for performance.
Organisations have to gear up for unbundling the learning solutions and adopt the i-tune approach to learning to help individuals on their nirvana path to discover what they know, what they do not know and help them in acquiring what they need to know. Instead of the cookie cutter models of training which are aimed at a group of individuals with similar needs, it should be feasible to proactively configure and delivercustomised, very precise learning objects based on time, location and device specific needs of the individuals.
Investments in training are not only meaningful ways of employee engagement, but have to deliver on the clearly articulated outcomes related to business performance goals which are drawn up in consultation with the business managers. Measuring the success of training programmes and the measurements are unique to each organisation, as their strategic objectives from each of these initiatives will differ.
Thus although organisations are keen to arrive at the ROI from capability building initiatives it has been challenging to establish for a long time. For this to happen, the focus has to shift from ‘knowledge acquisition’ to ‘knowledge application’ and ‘skills with strong measurement techniques to study the business impact at granular levels in order to derive value from the investments made in learning and development. The long term interest and commitment of managers and employees in skills and knowledge upgrade will be ensured only with the successful demonstration of relevance, benefits and reliable metrics.
The writer is CEO, Global Talent Track, a corporate training solutions company
