Understanding the Management of Employees’ Performance

Introduction

Performance management of employees can be clearly defined as the measurement of all the business activities of the employees hat how an employee is managing their duties and how they are fulfilling their job roles. The management of employee performance involves all those kind of job roles that revolves not only the all day to day office operational activities but also the operational management of all the people who are part of the business starting from the executives to the workers. Performance management of employees also involves the roles of human resource management, so it can be said that it aligns all those overall directions and aims of a business organisation. Here in his assessment, we will be going to read about all the aspects, functions and components of employee performance management system. It will flourish all the methods and ways through which performance management can be done at its best with visible results and how it can be improved further.

4.1.1 Explaining the importance of providing information, resources and on-going mentoring to help employees meet their targets, objectives and quality standards.

Mentoring, providing required resources, appropriate information all of these are a part of the on-going training in every job and it is also a vital part to continue the improvements in the quality of work and performance among the employees. Mentoring is that relationship which is established between the higher experienced person and a lesser experienced person whose purpose is to help and provide the necessities which an employee needs to work properly with a continuous improvement in the quality of their working performances (Winfield et al. 2017). The person who is providing the knowledge is called the “mentor” and the person who is getting informed is called the “mentee”. Continuous mentoring, resourcing and providing information update helps employees in setting and planning about his/her goals and targets and also helps them in turning their objectives regarding the organisations and sometimes their personal targets also (Van Den Ouweland et al. 2019).

The on-job training and the on-going mentoring facilitates the employees with regular knowledge and growth in their working capabilities that becomes beneficial for the organisation because when an employee is selected to work in any company, the company chooses them according to their skills and competencies but with the passing time every business functions changes its form, functions, structures and develops the activities and working styles, strategies and plans (Solá et al. 2018). Therefore it is also important that the employees also must grow and develop themselves with the changing time and improve their knowledge, skills and working quality, an on-going training and mentoring does the same thing. And this is the reason why it is said and found that the on-job mentoring, providing resources and information knowledge is very much crucial that appropriate on-job mentoring to the appropriate person must be given with teaching them how to improve their quality of work (sciencedirect.com, 2021).

4.1.2 Describing the methods used to monitor employees’ progress towards objectives in accordance with agreed plans.

Along with the continuous and regular on-job training and mentoring, the performance monitoring and measuring its effectiveness is also vital to complete the mentoring process because if after the on-going mentoring process, the employee didn’t show any improvement then there must be any issue or problem, so monitoring is crucial and unavoidable part of mentoring and training activities in business organisations (sciencedirect.com, 2018). To keep track of employees about their work, there are lots of different types of measuring methods of performance which includes verbal methods, written methods, performance input and output methods. According to Schramade (2017), numerical scales are the best ways where there are rating scales used in the performance their status or level of performance. The numerical scale has five level scaling systems, where the rating depends on the satisfactory level of work done by each of the employee. As suggested by Nowak (2020), the numerical scaling system is quantitative style approaches of measuring while the verbal feedbacks are qualitative approached methods.

The verbal method includes appraisals and feedbacks are communicative way where the feedbacks are taken from both sides including the mentors or managers and the employees. Both of them share their growth records and monitoring status so that they can be tallied up to measure the development status (Scerri et al. 2020). Apart from these the management can keep track of the employees’ performances measurement by observing them too. The output method mainly focuses on the end pints of the performance and how much effective are the results which are produced. The qualitative information is analysed in the output and input methods to assess the measure of results that impacts the performances (Nejati et al. 2017).

All these are various techniques towards the progress monitoring and objective fulfilment of employees as per the agreed business plans and strategies.

4.1.3 Explaining the importance of recognising individuals’ achievement of targets and quality standards.

Recognising and rewarding the employees for their target achievements and performances is important and has been always proven that it improves organisational values, enhances the team efforts and unity, motivates the behavioural traits amongst the staff members and employees, increases the customer satisfaction aspects and encourages the employees to make themselves more involved in the target achieving and objectives accomplishments of the company. Mendy (2021) opined that recognising individuals’ achievement of quality standards and targets ensures that the planned and set standards are not blurred while it comes to performance management. It also helps and develops a sense of unity and security among the employees and staff members in their values towards the organisation, facilitating motivation to them to make them continue their great work. Proper recognition of employees’ performance and quality standard are said to be the primary keys that an organisations uses to grow or change. Originally recognition is another way through which the employee retention can also be promoted efficiently. Employee retention is facilitated by giving them their worthy advantages against their valued contributions that they pour for the business target fulfilment (journals.plos.org, 2017). The key benefits and importance of recognising individuals’ achievement of targets and quality standards are:

It gives increase in the employee productivity in the organisation

It will benefit by increasing the profitability of the business

It facilitates in choosing and retaining the top most talented employees of the organisation and setting them as examples for the juniors to follow and compete with

It builds a positive environment in the workplace culture

It gears up a collaborative nature among the teams and employees in between the organisational work culture

It manages to give continuous fuel to the employees for motivation for self-development and organisational goal achievement

4.2.1 Explaining the typical organisational policies and procedures on discipline, grievance and dealing with underperformance.

There is a set of guidelines known as the ACAS Code of Practice on the Disciplinary & Grievance procedures and policies that are responsible to provide all the basic rules and regulations in respect of the employer, employees and each of their respective set rules and regulations that mainly handle the disciplinary and grievance matters in the organisations. The dealing of the underperformances of the employees are also a matter that is covered by the ACAS Code of Practice which states that whenever there is underperformances from the employees’ side how to manage those situations (Jones et al. 2017).

The disciplinary procedure is applied by the employer to address the employee’s disciplinary actions and conduct the set criteria for the right to appeal, suspensions and potential sanctions. There are set rules which an employee utilises to deal with the disciplinary issues within the organisational underperformance issues. The disciplinary policies and procedures are those policy contents that are consisted of the activities like time keeping, health and safety, absence, utilisation of organisational equipment and facilities as stated by the Equality Act 2010 which says that these must be maintained and followed appropriately (Fleming et al. 2017).

A grievance policies and procedures are there to deal with issues or complaints that are raised from the employees’ sides (Cowan et al. 2021). It is related to concerning about the fairness and transparency in workplaces. Whenever dealing with the disciplinary and grievance guidelines from Code of Practice, the employer must establish investigations with the related facts and figures of the case and along with that the employee must also be given the opportunity to present their side related to the problems that are facing before any decisional responses. According to Hijry and Haleem (2017), grievances covers the matters of the employees’ side causes such as harassment and bullying among the work culture environment, discrimination among the team members, employees and staffs, issues that are raised in the organisational culture and environment.

4.2.2 Explaining the importance of following disciplinary and grievance processes.

Like other vital procedures and processes, the grievance and disciplinary policies and procedures are also equally vital and important for the employees of the organisations as these policies and procedures gives full support and security to the job responsibilities. It states that the grievance and disciplinary policies and procedures facilitate adequate efficiency in the organisational work cultures and environments. Caruso (2017) argued that by maintaining all these, the procedures can offer help to the management asking to employees to obey all the set policies, regulations and rules in between the organisational working environment. The disciplinary and grievance processes are necessary to follow because it ensures the factors that everybody in the organisation must be treated in the same exact way in much similar circumstances (Audenaert et al. 2019). This process ensures also that the issues and problems must be dealt with proper measures fairly and reasonably so that all the employees and staff members must be compliant with the current regulations and legislations. As defined by Amrollahi and Rowlands (2017) all the employees are always encourages them to follow the statutory guidance that is found under the ACAS Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures and the Employment Tribunals according to the code of these policies into consideration. Another importance of the disciplinary and grievance process is that it majorly plays the role of protection from the claims and allegations of unfairness and biasness in the company. Al-Haidar (2018) stated that if any employer or the employee is found that he/she is breaching these codes, the Tribunal has the power to increase the penalty up by up to 25 per cent.

4.2.3 Explaining how to identify causes of underperformance.

There are specifically a lot of the various types of causes of underperformances of the employees in any organisation and in consideration with those, there are two basic ways also to identify all those causes and those two ways are feedbacks from the individuals and feedbacks from groups or teams (Al Anzi et al. 2017). Feedbacks from individuals are the individual form of speech, views, words, thoughts, behaviour and attitude that will give the early indications from the employee’s side regarding the performance gaps and negligence. From feedbacks of individuals, feedbacks from teams or groups are those which are gathered from the other teams or departments or customers also includes in this list of the formal or informal nature (Winfield et al. 2017).

The causes that bring out the underperformance status in the employees are such as:

Lack of opportunities of growth in employees among the workplace environment

Lack of variety of work and monotonous type of work sometimes bring lack of interest in working and hence underperformance in them

Lack of effective and proper communication between employees and from higher to lower and lower to higher hierarchy

Excessive work related stress

Several kinds of personal issues

Bad working environment conditions

Lack of challenges and encouragement to take part in the existing challenges

The formal and informal feedback ways of identifying the causes gives chance to the line managers all the necessary information to process the individual and team members who shows gaps in their performance (sciencedirect.com, 2021). It provides the supervisors to plan the actual strategies and the achieved result to boot the underperformances among the employees. Some of the ways are:

Performance appraisals

Performance reviews

Motivational trainings

Increasing the interest to work efficiently

Analysing the feedbacks and working on them

Solving the organisational internal complaints

4.2.4 Explaining the purpose of making individuals aware of their underperformance clearly but sensitively.

The identification of the root causes of the underperformances in employees and evaluating out the ways to solve them is not just enough to remove this problem of underperformances in the organisational environment. Along with the identification and evaluation, the individuals of the business should be made aware of their performance gaps and mistakes & how it is moving the business growth to downwards (sciencedirect.com, 2018). So the awareness of the underperformances must be made aware clearly, simply, effectively and most important is sensitively so that the employees can understand the ways through which their underperformances can be overcome (Cowan et al. 2021). The ultimate aim of making the employees aware of their underperformances is done so that they can accept their mistakes and try harder to reach the set standards of performance in business organisations. In this regard, the employer can inform and provide support the employees in numerous ways such as:

Feedbacks are very crucial but sometimes late feedbacks are of no use so as soon as the feedbacks are given to the employees, the chances of underperformance are less. They need to be frequent and immediate just after the task completion for effective results.

Next big technique for employee awareness of the underperformance is to assign a silent mentor who will always keep an eye on the employees and knocks them whenever the performance goes down but sensitively and silently without pressurising and insulting (Solá et al. 2018).

Awareness can also be created regarding the underperformances by reminding about the past good performances and their rewards, it will encourage them and they might improve their performances in achieving specific goals and self-improvement too.

4.2.5 Explaining how to address issues that hamper individuals’ performance.

The issues that arise when talking about the performance management and underperformances can be addressed by simple one to one conversations since the performance topic is that matter which one should not know about others. So individual meetings are the best ways to address them and making the making those confidential so that no individual can feel embarrassing or demotivate din front of others. Personal chats must be done without any kind of interruptions or visitors. The feedbacks about the issues should be communicated to and from both sides so that both the communicators can understand each other’s messages. Al-Haidar (2018) advised that t is very much important there should be speaking and listening from both sides and needed time must be given for the conversations to complete fully. Other ways to address these issues are observing the actions of the employees in events, group discussions, team behavioural traits and many more.

All these issues can be addressed clearly through the following ways:

The issues must be stated clearly but sensitively because as mentioned above also that talking with people about their gaps and performance failures is very much difficult and can turn into any side; either good or bad side.

Long discussions must be avoided, the message must be short and simple without any tough conversation

Messages regarding the performance of employees needs to be specific in their nature

The most vital thing opined by Caruso (2017) is to listen to the individual at the utmost priority since before conveying anything the side and feeling of that personnel is to be heard so that his/her problem can be understood and then appropriate measures can be taken accordingly

As suggested by Amrollahi and Rowlands (2017) rewarding improvements are the best and simple solutions to keep the employees motivated and avoiding the underperformance matters; which can be either monetary or non-monetary in their form

4.2.6 Explain how to agree a course of action to address underperformance.

Every issue or problem can only be solved if an appropriate set of steps or course of actions are formed and implemented to address that issue and along with that regular observing that whether all the actions were working properly and as per the expectations or not. The course of actions must be prepared following the guidance of these steps:

Preparing the course of actions, first of all needs an understanding about the issues, what are the solutions and how they can be implemented. The issues must be clear and simple in their form so that everyone can understand it.

Setting up the expectations from the underperformance conversations and measures to the same and deciding what different is expected from the course of action which is being prepared (Solá et al. 2018).

Setting up the realistic actions which should not be difficult to implement and uncomfortable for both the parties to discuss and regulate.

Each and every individual is different so do their behaviour and nature is; in regards to understanding the issue and accepting the problems. Many people get demotivated and some take these as challenges and get more inspired to conquer the issue. So each and every course of action for each person must be specific (Cowan et al. 2021).

The most sensitive part of the whole course of action is conveying the message through the actions which must be delicately and gently transferred to the person who is the focus of this setup.

The followed step is to make a plan which will be agreed by both the conveyer and the person receiving the information and then it can be implemented. In this step, one thing which needs to be taken care is sticking to the plan and to maintain all the planned steps since not following the prepared plan will ruin the overall course of actions formed (Audenaert et al. 2019).

The last step is to review the progress of the pan after each step so that if any modifications or changes are needed, it can be done at the early stage without failing the overall process.

Conclusion

After analysing the whole assessment above the conclusion says that mentoring is that relationship which is established between the higher experienced person and a lesser experienced person whose purpose is to help and provide the necessities which an employee needs to work properly. Originally recognition is said to work for employees and the companies’ values and the contributions that employees pour for the success of the business targets among the teams and the overall company. There are some issues that arise when talking about the performance management and underperformances can be addressed by simple one to one conversations since the performance topic is that matter which one should not know about others. So lastly it can be presented that in case of performance management process, providing appropriate knowledge, proper resources and on-job training and mentoring are very much necessary.

Continue your journey with our comprehensive guide to Understanding Recruitment and Selection.

References

Al Anzi, F. and Ismail, S.A.M.M., 2017. Utilising Employees Performance Management System (EPMS) towards Enhancing Academic Staff Performance in Higher Education Institutions. Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, 5(9).

Al-Haidar, F., 2018. Administrative disciplinary and grievance procedures for public employees in Kuwait and UK. International Journal of Law and Management.

Amrollahi, A. and Rowlands, B., 2017. Collaborative open strategic planning: a method and case study. Information technology & people.

Audenaert, M., Decramer, A., George, B., Verschuere, B. and Van Waeyenberg, T., 2019. When employee performance management affects individual innovation in public organizations: The role of consistency and LMX. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 30(5), pp.815-834.

Caruso, S.J., 2017. A foundation for understanding knowledge sharing: Organizational culture, informal workplace learning, performance support, and knowledge management. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, 10(1), p.45.

Cowan, R.L., Clayton, E. and Bochantin, J., 2021. Human resources as an important actor in workplace bullying situations: Where we have been and where we should go. Pathways of Job-related Negative Behaviour, pp.477-494.

Fleming, A., Wise, R.M., Hansen, H. and Sams, L., 2017. The sustainable development goals: A case study. Marine Policy, 86, pp.94-103.

Hijry, H. and Haleem, A., 2017. Study the Factors That Influence Employees Performance in the Steel Factory, Saudi Arabia. In Proceedings of the 2017International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Rabat, Morocco.

Jones, P., Wynn, M., Hillier, D. and Comfort, D., 2017. The sustainable development goals and information and communication technologies. Indonesian Journal of Sustainability Accounting and Management, 1(1), pp.1-15.

journals.plos.org, 2017. Disentangling self-management goal setting and action planning: A scoping review, available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0188822

Mendy, J., 2021. Performance management problem of four small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): towards a performance resolution. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development.

Nejati, M., Rabiei, S. and Jabbour, C.J.C., 2017. Envisioning the invisible: Understanding the synergy between green human resource management and green supply chain management in manufacturing firms in Iran in light of the moderating effect of employees' resistance to change. Journal of Cleaner Production, 168, pp.163-172. .

Nowak, R., 2020. Does employee understanding of strategic objectives matter? Effects on culture and performance. Journal of Strategy and Management.

Scerri, M., Presbury, R. and Goh, E., 2020. An application of the mentoring framework to investigate the effectiveness of mentoring programs between industry mentors and student mentees in hospitality. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 45, pp.143-151.

Schramade, W., 2017. Investing in the UN sustainable development goals: opportunities for companies and investors. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 29(2), pp.87-99.

sciencedirect.com, 2018. Using Management by Objectives as a performance appraisal tool for employee satisfaction, available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2314721016300275

sciencedirect.com, 2021. Mentorship, equity, and research productivity: lessons from a pandemic, available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320721000185

Solá, A.G., Vilhelmson, B. and Larsson, A., 2018. Understanding sustainable accessibility in urban planning: Themes of consensus, themes of tension. Journal of transport geography, 70, pp.1-10.

Van Den Ouweland, L., Vanhoof, J. and Van den Bossche, P., 2019. Underperforming teachers: the impact on co-workers and their responses. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 31(1), pp.5-32.

Winfield, C., Sparkman-Key, N. and Vajda, A., 2017. Professional standards: Embracing preventive ethics in human services. Journal of Human Services, 37(1).