Performance Management: A Sample Essay For Inspiration & Mimicking

Performance management encompasses three important facets such as observation and judgment, feedback process, and organizational intervention. This aspect performance appraisal serves the purpose of improving the employee’s work performance and empowering the employees with information in making work-related decisions. Performance management involves appraisal that serves relevant purposes such as providing formal and legal justification for employment decisions where promotion of outstanding employees is concern. In addition, appraisal also enables the management to weed out marginal performance to be transferred for further training and to justify merits for increase or no increase. Testing validation is another purpose of appraisal in which predicting performance involves test scores.
In terms of career and personal development, the results of the performance appraisal as an instrument of providing feedback to employees, which also includes identifying the developmental needs of the employee that in return establishes the objectives in structuring certain training programs. More importantly, performance appraisal serves the purpose of identifying organizational problems including training needs and consideration to personal characteristics when hiring new employees. This also includes identifying both the effective and ineffective performers and use the appraisal outcome as the basis in hiring employees. Regardless of the negative perceptions about performance appraisal, it is still widely being used in tying pay to performance. Organizational shortcomings cannot be solved solely by identifying problems through performance appraisal because it can be used in both formal and informal manner.
One of the important reasons that organizations employ the use of appraisal in measuring employee performance and basis for decision-making is because it seeks to identify what the people in the organization sees as important to them. Providing a sufficient number of rewards, but inconsiderate of what they really want will render the efforts of the management irrelevant. Otherwise, rewarding employees should be based on what they perceive as valuable, in a timely manner, and in a fair fashion. When establishing a reward system for employees, timing is important, which means that rewards should be given soon after a major accomplishment. This is because delays in reward will render the context of reward an irrelevant potential to motivate subsequent or similar performance. Furthermore, rewards are meant to motivate employees and it should be done in a fair manner. Fairness is rather a subjective concept, but it can be done effectively by adhering to the four important practices.
First is to consider the voice of the employees, which can be obtained through employee surveys and interviews. Secondly, consistency necessitates equal footing in administering rewards and conditions to qualify and value of reward should be imposed without prejudice. Third, the relevance of the rewards is much more important than its value because every reward should accord with what they really want. For instance, a single mother will identify a 2-day paid vacation as more important than a new dishwasher unit as a reward. Lastly, communication is key to all aspects of the reward practice where rules and logic of the reward process were clearly conveyed. In a nutshell, managing performance is all about defining what makes a performance good or not, facilitating performance trough appraisal, and followed by encouraging performance through rewards. On the other hand, the role of the manager is to provide feedback, direction, and orientation, which are all critical components that enables to energize employee performance.