Future of Work – part 2 – Shifting focus of performance?

What does a performance culture look like in a business that is computerising and automating?

This is a good question to consider as it will have significant impact on many of the short to medium  term decisions you need to make regarding your employees, their work practices and the capability you need to develop in that group of people.

Over the last 20 years in my experience there have been many definitions of high performance. While there are multiple differences I have also experienced a number of consistencies. For example many businesses have identified and aligned workforces to the company values; they have set performance targets and measured to see if the targets are achieved; they have put systems in place to develop their workers both technically and behaviourally; they have created reward schemes to help motivate high achievement; they have created succession pathways to enable people to progress their career within the organisation; they have created a safe working environment.

When you speak with managers and employees within organisations regarding the above mentioned systems and processes, they are generally positive about them; they also often remark that they could be better. When you explore the statement “they could be better” a couple of consistent issues are raised. The first is that the system is overlooking the good people. The second is that it takes way too long to respond.

So sticking with the first issue of overlooking the good people, when it is broken down further, most performance processes we experience are based on some form of performance target coupled with a measure. These tend to be reasonably similar across the business. Furthermore the measures tend to be governed by the organisations capability to measure and report. In short performance tends to identify the people that are able to get work done “the organisations way”. In contrast the performance systems tend not to reward and recognise the creative thinkers who are prepared to take risks. Furthermore many of the performance management processes tend to identify people who like to take risks and challenge the status quo as underperformers and “difficult to manage people”.

The second observation is that it takes too long to respond. Having worked with a number of large organisations, this is a consistent problem. When you look deeper into the issue it is most often not the “system” side of things that is slow, it is the human side. To explain this further, it is the poor decision making by various people in the process that slows the process down.  To be more specific it is the manager that uses hierarchical process to maintain power or the employee that refuses to comply because they don’t like the work that slows the process down.

In a world that now has the capacity to capture data automatically at the point of customer interaction many of the decision making blockages I referred to will be eliminated through computerisation and automation.

Our key point in this post is that many of the processes we currently use to measure performance are impacted by issues such as hierarchical decision making, process compliance, and maintaining order and discipline. Given that computerisation and automation is more consistent and accurate than people when it comes to repeatable tasks, it is time to think about how we need to change these processes to more effectively exploit the creativity of people and the efficiency and accuracy gained from automation.

In our next post we will look further at how decision making can evolve the performance culture.