Performance Management Best Practices

Discuss about the Performance Management of an Underperformer for Goal.

align their performance management and human resource development with their business culture. This aligns the performances of the employees with the business requirements and which boost the employee performances. However, the new employees may find this alignment a challenge and may perform badly. The immense job responsibilities put immense pressure on them and they slowly start losing out on their motivation. This burnout is more common among newly hired managers owing to the immense responsibilities they have to handle. Organisations deal with these issues by aligning performance management with human resource development. The departmental heads today hold meetings to dig into the root of these stress and poor performances. Then they adopt appropriate methods to deal with them. The paper would delve into this aspect by taking a case study set against the backdrop of the Australian Sports Commission. A newly hired finance manager is not performing well which has led the departmental head to seek advice of an employee of another department to deal with the issue. The paper would point how performance management and HRD can be integrated to deal with such issues.

Performance management aims to improve the performances of employees of organizations by using several best practices which the employees and the employers can use. The factors like excess pressure are known to have dire impacts on the performances of employees, especially the new employees. These employees must adopt achievable goals after discussions with their senior managers and reporting managers (Ahmad, Choi and Park 2015). The points out to the first feature of performance management, which is it is very much goal oriented. For example, the finance manager newly recruited at the Australian Sports Commission was under performing. The senior finance managers along with the senior managers of the other departments should speak to him and try to assess the need of the finance manager. The reason could be stress due to the immense responsibilities and work pressure which he has to handle. This points out to the next performance management best practice which is motivation of the employee (Cascio 2018).            

The senior managers of the Australian Sports Commission should motivate the new finance manager and help him to take up more responsibilities. He should be allowed to share his responsibilities with other managers which would lessen his work pressure and help him to improve his performance. The Australian Commission should also plan performance development initiative of all employees especially the new employees to motivate them to work harder. These performance development programs should include induction of employees to employees of other departments and training (Mostafa, Gould?Williams and Bottomley 2015).

Motivating Employees

The third feature of the performance management best practices is training and development of the employees of all departments and tenures, especially the ones working under high pressure and under-performing. The HR department, the senior managers and the immediate reporting manager of the under-performing finance manager should hold meeting above improving the performance of the latter. They should find out the root causes of poor performances like excess pressure, poor knowledge about the accounting practices followed by the commission or complex organizational structure of the commission (Albrecht et al. 2015). They should then frame a training session to provide him training on the areas he is weak. This training session should be followed up with continuous measurement of improvement in performances, which is the fourth feature of best practices of performance appraisal. The senior managers should from time to time recognize new training needs. This analysis shows that the renowned bodies like the Australian Sports Commission should use performance management of improve the performances of their employees, especially the ones operating under immense pressure like the finance manager (Khan and Jahur 2016).

Large organizations like the Australian Commission require to integrate human resource development with performance management. Human resource development of HRD refers to the training, coaching and mentoring employees to bring about improvement in their performances.  Performances management refers to those practices which organizations take from time to time to ensure that their employees meet the targets set for them. The management and the departmental heads from time to measure the performances of their subordinates to appraise them. The highly performing employees are rewarded while the low performing employees are often trained or mentored. One can clearly point out that the training and mentoring aspects of performance management actually point out to human resource development needs of the companies. There are a number of ways in which business organizations can integrate performance management with HRD (Van Dooren, Bouckaert and Halligan 2015).

The first aspect of performance management is to set realistic and achievable goals for the employees. The senior managers should encourage their subordinates to participate in the entire process of strategy making. They should take the factors relating to juniors like job responsibilities, areas of expertise and experience before entrusting them with responsibilities. They should delegate targets taking these factors into consideration, especially in high posts like that of a finance manager. They should monitor the performances of their subordinates very closely and point out areas in which these subordinates need to excel to be able to achieve the target better. Then the departmental heads   should offer trainings specific to the identified employees who need to be trained. For example, new finance managers, in spite of their qualifications and expertise may require more training. This shows that the departmental heads of organizations like Australian Sports Commission can integrate performance management and HRD to improve employee performances.

Training and Development

The second way in which bodies like Australian Sports Commission can integrate performance management with human resource development is allowing the junior manager to participate in the decision making activities. The newly hired finance managers often face difficulty in performing due to their limited knowledge about the organizations and the other members of the organizations. This lack of knowledge prevents them from taking appropriate decisions which contributes to their poor performances. The apex management of bodies like the Australian Commission should encourage the newly hired finance managers. This would allow these managers to observe how decisions are made in the organizations. They would also be able to gain knowledge about the important people in the organization like the other departmental heads. They would be able to gain knowledge about the colleagues whom they can approach for advices and guidance to deal with tough situations.   These measures would automatically boost the confidence of the new employees and they would as a result start performing better. This analysis shows that organizations can integrate performance management and HRD to improve the performance of the newly hired managers like the finance manager.

The departmental heads face several issues while managing under-performing employees. The first issue pertains to lack of knowledge and expertise. The profile of finance manager at the prestigious Australian Sports Commission requires to have immense knowledge on finance to do justice to his high profile job position. The knowledge in this case is not limited to the area of profession like, finance in this case. The employees working in the finance department require to have sound knowledge about the stakeholder groups with which the organizations work. They should know the sources of revenue of the Australian Sports Commission and the areas in which the revenue is channelized. They should know the investors and financing bodies which hold maximum share of the Australian Sports Commission. They should also have good working working relationship with the other departments of the Australian Sports Commission. One can assume that the new finance manager had the required knowledge about finance. However, being newly hired he lacked knowledge about the stakeholders of the Australian Sports Commission.  He apparently did not share great equation with his colleagues which created further issue for him and his reporting manager.

The next issue which the newly hired finance manager might have been facing was workplace environment problem. He might have been facing problems due to work pressure from his superiors and peers. This issue may have been aggravated by his limited knowledge of the organizational structure of the Australian Sports Commission.  This might have impacted his performance in the organization.

Integrating Performance Management with HRD

The third issue which the under-performing employees like the finance manager at the Australian Sports Commission face is lack of motivation. New employees require a lot of motivation to perform. Factors like new working environment and challenges increase the stress of these employees manifold. They as a result tend to suffer from lack of motivation and find it difficult to deal with this problem. The professional challenges employees faced in big organizations like the Australian Sports Commission require the new employees to start performing highly within a short span of time. Moreover, the high profile organizations like the Australian Sports Commission works in vast areas of operations. For example, the Australian Sports Commission works towards providing leadership and guidance to Australian sports sectors. Its stakeholder group includes athletes involved in various sports and companies sponsoring their events. Thus, finance manager is required to acquire thorough knowledge of these stakeholders and their impact on the finances of the company. It is evident over here that limitation of stakeholder knowledge and knowledge about the organizational culture puts immense pressure on him which impacts his motivation.

The organizations like the Australian Sports Commission should implement reward programs to motivate their employees. The departmental heads of every department should measure the performances of the employees from time to time. Then these employees should be appraised as per their performances. The apex management of the Australian Sports Commission must reward the highly performing employees both financially and non-financially. the financial incentives should include salary increments and monetary incentives. The non-financial incentives should include paid leaves, holiday trips and work from home facilities. This would enable the apex management to motivate the under-performing employees perform better. The company should award the poorly performing employees showing signs of improvements to motivate them further.

The bodies like the Australian Sports Commission should integrate the human resource management or HRM practices with their corporate strategies. The apex management should first take the target performances which they want to achieve. The body should then communicate the information to the departmental heads. The departmental heads of different departments should hold meetings with their subordinates. This would enable them to recognize the present strengths and weaknesses existing in their respective departments. The departmental heads can match these strengths and weaknesses against the requirement of the company. Then can then form training plans to improve the present standards of abilities of their employees. These steps would be particularly very helpful to the new employees. They would get opportunities to improve their competencies with the requirements of the company. The departmental heads can arrange the human resource development plans to improve the performance of their subordinates in two ways. First, the departmental heads can mentor their subordinates and second, the human resource department can arrange for training programs from the employees. The training program would at first contain similar course content like organizational culture which can then be segregated into department wise requirements.

Conclusion:

One can conclude from the discussion that the head of the finance department should resort to human resource development and performance development integration to improve the performance of the newly hired finance manager. He should be provided with trainings about the company, its stakeholders and its operational aspects. The other employees of the department should motivate him to improve his performance. The apex management should establish reward system to motivate employees to improve their performances.

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