In one of the forums that I belong to, a frustrated member related her husband’s experiences of the job market. According to her he applied for a 6 month contract position that was a little below his level of experience. Although the rate wasn’t great he figured that it was better to earn some money rather than none at all. He felt that he could probably do the job relatively easily and still continue with his job search.

When I did a Google image search for ‘long term view’ the search results were filled with graphs and statistics. Funny, I was expecting to see sustainable forests, children and maybe property. Shows you how much money influences our ability to assess the long-term view!

We weigh up the long-term with the short-term on a daily basis. Raising children is not without its short-term rewards but as parents we look forward to the company of our grown children. Those of us who choose to exercise and keep an eye on what we eat do so because we feel better for it but also because we hope that in the long-term there will be a benefit to our health. Of course there is no guarantee that you won’t get ill at a later stage but we make good choices because research has shown us that it will increase our chances of a good outcome. To some extent making a choice for the long-term can be a leap of faith!

When times are tight people tighten their belts and go into survival mode. This can manifest itself in all sorts of different ways from the managers who hold onto information because it might give them an edge over another to the teams who won’t collaborate because they believe that they can do it better on their own.

I like a clean and tidy house and although I am prepared to contribute to tidiness levels I would prefer to leave the cleaning to others! So I employ a great cleaning service that do a wonderful job of achieving my goal for me. Before I found my current cleaning service I struggled with another one (lets call them the ‘Come Clean Co’) that never quite delivered what I needed and in the end we just agreed to part ways.

Reward and development are often overlooked as reasons to have a performance management process because they don’t solve immediate problems. The impact on motivation is even more neglected as a reason to manage performance because it is a ‘down the road’ consequence and it is not visible (unless you measure it). If we were all highly concerned about ‘down the road’ consequences, more people would stop smoking and drive more carefully! I touched on the subject in my last post when I indicated that a lack of reward and development impact morale, but I would like to unpack this a little more.

Reward and development are often overlooked as reasons to have a performance management process because they don’t solve immediate problems. If you set goals and direction for your employees you immediately have something that you can use to benchmark someone’s progress. It is an instant solution of sorts. Reward and development are more long-term reasons for performance management. If you have a process, then it will make your life easier in the long term with respect to identifying development needs and rewarding good performance appropriately. You will not see the benefit today, next week or even next month. But when you come to increase time again, you will be grateful that you have put something in place that will enable you to make fair decisions that maintain the morale of your employees.

So why should you have some form of process for managing performance. The picture that is generated in everyone’s head when the words ‘system’ or ‘process’ is used is that of a bureaucratic administrative burden. It also conjures up images of conflict and not many people enjoy that! Business owners, managers and employees do not understand the benefit of having a process so everyone sees it as a drag. Neither do people appreciate the consequences of not having a process and this is what I would like to explore today.

Broadly, the role of a manager broadly is to draw the best from the people and their resources to get things done. The nature of most successful managers is that they enjoy coordinating people and resources and typically they are naturally good at controlling processes, projects and outcomes. What about the people; who actually do the work, can they be managed too?

Everyone has advice at the moment about how to manage your business during a downturn. Re-strategise, re-prioritise, re-organise and re-double efforts to contain costs and sell. One of the most sensible bits of advice I have see for a while I found in a McKinsey article.