Altering Employee Performance
There is no other management task or responsibility more challenging than changing a worker's behavior. Nor is there any task that is more often mishandled, mis-delegated or outright ignored than altering employee performance.
The task is certainly not getting any easier. No longer can the manager or supervisor merely order a worker to behave differently. The threat of demotion, dismissal or drop in pay is so rife with pitfalls and legalities that it is far more dangerous to the company than to the employee. All the leverages that were part of the armory of command and control supervision are disappearing faster than slow modems, three-piece suits and time cards.
As our society becomes more fluid and diverse, the ways in which people approach and complete tasks becomes more varied. The manager who sticks with "My way or the highway!" will soon find himself managing nothing but temps or extremely high-priced consultants who know they will only put up with him for a limited time.
The need for transformation of the traditional approaches to performance appraisal is spurred on by the confluence of three forces in American business.
First, there is a growing tendency of reprimanded, demoted, or dismissed employees to seek legal aid on the basis of discrimination or disability. Disability? Yes, a growing number of medical professionals seem all too willing to classify work performance problems as "stress related" or psychological conditions.
Second, with unemployment figures the lowest in years, any kind of educated worker is scarce. And no matter how misanthropic or eccentric a systems engineer is, he can always find another job just down the block. Also, there are constant reminders on the Internet and through mass media of the multitudes of great jobs available anywhere. Managers now face the fact that the slightest suggestion of improving performance may be met with a simple, "Don't like it? (the way I do things) I quit!"
Third, as American business has moved from producing things to moving information (atoms to bits in the new lexicon) the task of assessing employee performance has become far more difficult. In the older manufacturing paradigm, doing repetitive tasks correctly over time produced results. Now, most work is mental: gathering, interpreting, manipulating and producing information. It's harder to determine whether the programmer staring at her computer screen for an hour is really working on a problem or daydreaming about a vacation in Tahiti.
For most companies today, the equation of time-spent-working-on-the-job-equals-productive-results simply does not apply. And in many cases much activity at the office ("I left six messages and wrote ten emails and prioritized my major prospects.") is much ado about nothing.
Faced with these combined forces, the effective manager or executive must transform from commanding and controlling worker behavior to influencing an employee's performance. And the major skill refinement needed is masterful rapport and communication about work outcomes. Also, the new executive must give up insisting that people produce results in exactly the same way as he or she does.
So here is one insight and a couple of procedures you may find useful in the new influencing performance paradigm.
The insight is simply this: People behave congruently with reality as they perceive it. Therefore, worker's performance is totally consistent, meaningful and valuable according to what the worker is paying attention to i.e. to his or her "reality". More often than not "bad" performance is really a difference in what a manager and a worker (or a customer and an agent) perceive as important to the job.
Given the above, here are two procedures you may want to practice in dealing with performance issues.
The first involves reducing presumptions and misunderstandings about the work involved. At the beginning of any performance appraisal (or project debriefing), make sure you and the employee agree exactly on what their job is. I find it useful to think in terms of the "product" they produce. I also find it useful to do this in writing.
The key here is to avoid generalities like "provide customer service" or "manage the programmer team". The description of the job should answer three questions: What is being done? How and to whom is it being delivered? In what time frame? So, "provide customer service" becomes "Assist customers on incoming calls in installing and correctly using their DSL Internet access, browser and email within a 15 minute timeframe."
Once you and your colleague agree on the output of the job then do the same with the key activities. List the 4-7 major activities of the job and rate their importance A, B or C. List only two as top priority or most important. The discipline of only two "most important" I find extremely useful. Some times it's very beneficial to do this separately first before the performance meeting and then compare notes together at the meeting.
What this practice allows a manager and a worker to discover is what each of them is paying attention to. Many times you can begin to influence performance just by communicating your prioritization of the job activities and your description of the department's (or project's) deliverable. And you can learn a great deal about how to interact with a colleague just by learning what they are paying attention to.
The second procedure demands more self-discipline from supervisors and employees alike. Acquire the habit of clarifying evaluation criteria. Most of us fail to fulfill our manager's, executive's, shareholder's or customer's expectations simply because we do not specifically know their criteria for evaluation.
We think we know what somebody wants simply because we recognize the words they use. Recognizing a word is not the same as understanding that word's meaning to a specific person. Even a word like "durable" has a unique meaning to every individual. And comparatives such as 'superior', 'faster', 'easier', 'best' have no value at all in an area as sensitive as human performance. Whenever, you hear one of these words, you should inquire "relative to what?"
If you tell a team member, you expect them to take a leadership role in a project, be prepared to also tell him or her exactly how you would know that they were doing what you requested. Answer the following. What specific actions would you see them doing? What would you hear them saying? or What would you hear about them? And, how many times would you need to see and/or hear those things in order to be satisfied?
For the above example, "I'll know you are taking a leadership role when I see you setting up meetings with other project team members and sending out agendas for those meetings via email. I'll be listening for you to be one of the first to clarify challenges and issues during the weekly project progress meetings. I'll also be listening for other members of the team to comment on how you are taking on responsibility to see that everyone is getting their work done, not just doing your part of the programming. When I notice you doing those kinds of activities on three or four separate instances, I'll know you are taking on leadership of the project."
Learn what your workers think their jobs are and what they pay attention to. Make sure you clearly convey your evaluation criteria whenever you request a change in behavior. Remember responsibility for clear communication lies with the speaker not the listener. Also, remember your reality of what the job entails is not the only real reality. In altering performance, that realization may be your executive edge.
