The Continuous Performance Management

Corporate performance management systems and processes are gradually moving away from a static, unidirectional, and time-bound avatar to a more dynamic, continuous, and interactive state.


Corporate Performance Management is needed for all organizations as a way of living, what is the reason for their existence, and how and what. Corporate Performance Management is also a management control from strategy to the shop floor in both a qualitative and quantitative way. Due to the digital nature of hyper-connectivity and interdependence, organizational management practices are shifting from silo-based, reductionistic traditional management style to the holistic digital management discipline. The corporate performance management also needs to do a similar adjustment, to ensure the individual performance is assessed objectively and the corporate performance is evaluated holistically, to ensure the business as the whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

Continuous Performance Management: Employee performance management in traditional organizations is often the annual event, focusing on a past performance review, not on the future of talent development. Waiting until once per year or every six months to evaluate workers is also not enough to know key performance nor should it be. There is a danger of not having a dynamic process to "develop and nurture" performance, bias and favoritism are common in the workplace. Digital is the age of continuous delivery, how about real-time appraisals that take place consistently and can be tracked accordingly. The idea is to get away from the annual event based on stale data and poor record-keeping. The continuous performance management has the focus from evaluating the individual to partnering with the employee to evaluate the quality of the interactions the employee has started with the manager and employee, with the goal to map every individual's performance and potential with the dynamic business strategy execution more closely and seamlessly. Many forward-looking organizations also leverage self-performance management to provide employees opportunities for self-management, encourage autonomy, discovery, and continuous improvement.

Holistic measurement: One of the significant pitfalls in digital organizations is about silo thinking and ineffective measurement. Often, forward-thinking and holistic performance management are frequently retarded or prevented by how organizations define success on the individual or departmental performance level. The larger the organization, the more and more isolated goals become when considered in the context of the organization's enterprise goals. Often in these environments, each one of department measures on their own success, the department actually rewards or incentivizes behaviors that enhance the appearance of the performance of that department at the expense of other parts of the organization. If you want collaboration, and build a forward-thinking, high-performance organization, each responsibility of each job within the organization should be evaluated based not on the impact of the individual or a department's goals, but on the overall impact of the enterprise. Avoid silo thinking, individual goals typically are goals that are based on a subsection of a department's goals, and the division goals are always the coherent part of the company’s goal. Hence, it is important to advocate a holistic performance management system for enforcing and maintaining trust, transparency, and collaboration.

A balanced scorecard will help to measure performance and impact in a structural way: Digital strategy is nothing unless it’s implemented effectively. Digital strategy execution is the dynamic continuum. A scoreboard is to provide the “balanced” view of trade-off variables. You also need to consider, among other things, such as the overall strategic balance, dependencies, and constraints between components, individuals, and overall risk exposure. In terms of the full gamut of strategic management, such as analysis, options development, trade-offs, and other choices, successful implementation, feedback, and adjustment, a balanced scorecard is necessary to practice the holistic performance management in a structural way, allowing the most effective initiatives to be planned for achieving the corporate goals and the appropriate corrective actions to be taken upon those initiatives, when needed, in order to keep strategy execution on track.

With increasing speed and hyper-connectivity of digital businesses, performance management systems and processes are gradually moving away from a static, unidirectional, and time-bound avatar to a more dynamic, continuous, and interactive state, for improving transparency, goal tracking, real-time feedback, and enterprise-wide acknowledgment/recognition of achievements.

Posted in: KPIs,Performance Master,Talent Master