PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IMPLEMENTATION LESSONS LEARNED
From left: Carter R. Rohan, Vice President/Chief Construction Officer; Bernard Schmidt, Vice President - Automation; Lisa Darnall, Vice President/Chief Transportation Officer, Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., CEO; Cleveland Ferguson III, Senior Vice Presi- dent for Administration/CAO; and Gregory B. Hayes, Vice President/CFO.
Change starts from the top. • Buy-in from the top is essential if a performance measurement system is to impact the culture of the organization. Goal-setting should be informed by those responsible for achieving them. • Teams and managers should have mid-year and annual retreats to propose the annual goals for the succeeding year. • Employees have to know the direction being charted to buy in. Incentives are key motivators, but they must be tied to attainable goals. • Establishing a minimum, target and a stretch goal (a maximum) better ensures cultural focus on achieving the metric over a single target. Missing a single target by tenths or hundredths of a point can be demoralizing, particularly when any merit-based compensation is at stake. • Goals need to be attainable to have the cultural change desired. Keep the distance between percentages used to assess the measures (minimum, target and maximums) consistent. Establish a baseline, but when the target is set stick with it until the end of the reporting period. • Do not be afraid to establish baselines based on Year 1 of trying it out. Once the baseline is established, that becomes the target for Year 2. Managers should be focused on achieving the
maximum goal, such that if a unit (or an employee) only makes the target, success is still achieved. • Moving the goalposts during the evaluation period will undermine confidence in the entire performance management system. • Similarly awarding incentives even when the minimum goals are not met could result in the targets not being taken seriously. Make Big Data Smart Data. • Agencies are overwhelmed with data. Verify the data, its sources and agree on how and whether it should be used based on the credibility of the sources. • Automate as many of the processes that transmit the data from the source to the scorecard or dashboard. This increases the confidence in the reliability of the data. Integrate the analysis of the data into other key processes of the organization. • Balance the timeline for determining targets with the budget approval process and personnel decisions to achieve them. If a target is consistently not being met, this is not a cause for alarm. It is a cause for analysis that should help decision-makers determine whether budgetary and/or personnel adjustments need to be made, not merely writing off the target as unattainable and deleting it from the scorecard. Analytics should help inform budgetary decisions beyond financial considerations.
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