organizational performance management

1. Organizational performance management
What is the "new normal" in your organization? The Great Recession has hit the reset
button and has changed how enterprises will manage organizational performance and
drive improvement.
This may be a whole new ball game but the influences are familiar in both the public
and private sector. Industry is faced with employees who are disengaged; now weary
from months and months of job vulnerability and layoffs. Bringing people back on
board as business picks up takes training and a long time to restore that lost
experience and talent. Throughout the economic downturn inventories were drawn
down and global supply chains are squeezed making it harder to meet margins and
operate with peak efficiency. The public sector, which has been moving more
aggressively to performance based budgeting, is now facing unprecedented
government budget deficits. Nonprofits are faced with shrinking resources and greater
demand for strategic outcomes.
There is one beacon of hope for organizations across the globe - a resource sitting
right under the proverbial nose of the CEOs - relatively untapped, costs nothing more,
and is proven to increase operating margins. The solution -- People. Those already
employed in your organization. However, engaging employees is hard to do.
According to Gallup Management, 71% of Americans who go to work every day are
not engaged. Disengagement comes with significant cost to organizations. The cost to
the U.S. economy of disengaged employees is estimated at between $254 and $363
billion annually.
According to Harvard Business Review's annual 10 fresh solutions that will improve
the world, the top motivator of performance is progress. The report says, "It's on days
when workers have the sense they're making headway in their jobs, or when they
receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive
and their drive to succeed is at its peak." Unfortunately, the leaders surveyed about
what makes employees enthusiastic about their work ranked progress dead last.
Enterprises can show progress on a regular enough basis by communicating the
strategy and vision for across employee lines; eliminate the friction between the front
office and the front line; share real time information - not just boat loads of
dashboarded, posterized data; and most importantly, engage the front line in real
conversations and planning for change. There is a lot of tribal wisdom there, yet it
remains untapped as long as initiatives have to eke out of the front office, and filter
through middle managers, organizational policies, and balanced scorecards.
There is plenty to gain by developing a new focus on progress and engaging front line
employees. According to a study conducted by ISR global research, there was a fifty-
two percent gap in the one-year performance improvement in operating income
between companies with highly engaged employees versus companies whose
employees have low engagement scores.

2. Henry Mintzberg wrote, in a July 2009 HBR article, about the need for companies to
rebuild themselves as communities, where employees feel good about their company
and the people who work there. Hintzberg states, "Beneath the current economic crisis
lies another crisis of far greater proportions: the depreciation in companies of
community-people's sense of belonging to and caring for something larger than
themselves." His asserts that, " Decades of short-term management, in the United
States especially, have inflated the importance of CEOs and reduced others in the
corporation to fungible commodities-human resources to be "downsized" at the drop
of a share price." His fix is to create community.
The basic elements of this community, where people feel good about the people they
work with, feel valued, know that they are making progress and are able to contribute
to that effort, are founded in a few recognizable initiatives.
1) Culture: Leadership, vision, values, and a strategic plan.
2) People-focused policies: With budget and resources needed to empower.
3) Meaningful Metrics: measurement of factors essential to the organization's
performance.
All of these elements lead to higher organizational performance which in turn leads to
high level of trust, pride, satisfaction, and success. A tall order but a necessity in this
new normal.
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