Managing Performance

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Introduction

Despite early studies on how to motivate employees, by researchers such as Herzberg, (Motivation & Hygiene Factors); Elton Mayo, (The General Electric Hawthorne Experiments), Vroom (Expectancy Theory); McGregor’s Theory X & Y, for example, since the 1970s and 80s, many organizations have put their faith in performance management by incorporating performance review and reward systems.

Problems have inadvertently been built into these systems as a result of focusing them on the individual, and by calculating rewards on forced ranking and bell curve measurements. Frequently, the only people happy with this were those who gained the biggest bonus payments. Others felt unfairly judged and resentful of their managers. Often the assessments made were based on scant knowledge, guesswork and assumptions about individuals. They demanded that those individuals add their own self-assessments, later to feel they were shot down by their manager’s ignorance of how hard they had worked. In fear of dealing with such resentment, managers have a history of finding performance appraisals difficult. The most serious downside of the focus on individual performance, is its fostering of competition, rather than teamwork and cooperation between colleagues.

Challenges of managing performance

Managing performance is relevant to business in different ways including:

• Administering the entire business and its performance in the market
• Setting objectives and goals for the performance of products and services
• Production processes and performance of teams and individuals

Our attention here is on effective leading and managing of team performance, made more complex by the scattering of team members working on-line and in a hybrid of co-located and remote contexts. For many leaders this must feel like attempting to herd cats!

Team structure

One principle frequently overlooked when structuring teams, is that if all the work of the team could be done by just the team leader, other members would not be needed. However, the responsibility for getting the job done still rests with the team leader or manager. Sensibly, if all of the work were to be carried out by team members, the manager could be available to ensure they have everything they need. Team leaders often take part in the work themselves, becoming individual contributors, either because of their sense of responsibility for results, their naivety, or because of their employers’ excessive expectations about workloads.

Example: Case Study

As an example, a group of Superintendents in a health organization were complaining that they were so busy themselves, that they could not make enough time in the working day to meet with their teams. There were five people in this group, and each had 5 or 6 members in their teams. When asked how many patient treatments each of them performed per day, the average was ten. All were unable to state how many patients each of their team members would deal with in a day, explaining that their own workloads left them no time to supervise and gather that information.

They were invited to consider giving one of their own patient appointments to each of their team members, leaving each Superintendent with just four or five patients per day. The new distribution of work would leave them more time not only to supervise and track patient treatments, but also make it possible to step in and support individuals whenever necessary.

This change revolutionized their department and enabled a step change in managing performance.

Although those Superintendents and their teams were based in a single treatment center, each person worked alone with their patient in a closed treatment room. Not totally unlike remote and hybrid working, with some of their meetings and consultations conducted together in the same room.