Historically company performance review was an annual affair…review the numbers and, based on what you learned, chart the course for the next year. Sometimes the course had been corrected based on the numbers, but often not. Reputation often drove business success—as much, if not, more than performance.
As we know this is no longer an effective approach to leadership. The market changes too fast and companies need to both predict and respond to marketplace trends and rapidly course correct as indicated. We need to perform (at least) at the level required in the contract. More likely than not, if we are to stay competitive, we need to exceed contractual expectations.
According to a recent survey reported in NonprofitHR, “87 percent of global organizations said they had transformed their performance management approach in the last 18 months or intended to change it in the near future.” Organizations are moving to an emphasis on continuous, rigorous review of data, leveraging accessible and efficient financial and
programmatic platforms.
Today effective company leaders must be able to cite precise performance goals (financial and programmatic) and their status toward meeting targets by the day, month, quarter and year.
“Go deep with business performance monitoring…” advises Optimas Financial and Accounting Solutions. “It can be the difference between success or failure in this highly competitive marketplace”. Optimas cites benchmarking, a technique of comparing our business performance against competitors as a good way to gain insight into performance. Companies can use benchmarking to compare their performance to similar organizations working in the same sector, and within their own organizations by comparing performance with industry standards.
Rigorous performance management is essential to ensuring sustainability, relevance and impact—key pillars of the work of The Fedcap Group. Each year performance management becomes increasingly important and is the focus of our Corporate Weeks, Brown Bag Lunches and Leadership Academy. We are working hard to activate additional features of our financial, HR, fund-raising and business development software platforms—becoming increasingly data informed.
For monitoring financial performance, we have selected key measures such as revenue, cash, margin, A/R, % of budget expended, pipeline, billing, and contract maximization—developing both agency-wide and company specific dashboards. These dashboards focus our leaders on the right financial metrics—the metrics that we believe matter.
It is imperative to build the same kind of deep dive key performance indicators (metrics that
matter) in the areas of contract/regulatory compliance, program outcomes (to include our 5 Bold Goals I have discussed in past blogs), fund raising and new business development.
Critical to the long-term efficacy of building a data driven organization is our approach to employee performance. According to Sara Pollock in HR Daily Advisor the strategies for driving employee performance must include tightly linking company and programmatic goals to individual performance measurement. I believe that employees need to see the direct link between what they do every day and the overarching goals of the company. Tying their performance to organizational goals and outcomes means that they have a stake in the impact, they see how their role contributes to making a long-term impact. I plan to discuss this more in upcoming blogs.
As always, I welcome your thoughts.
https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2018/01/11/6-strategies-effective-performance-management/
https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=772
http://www.optimasllc.com/learning-center/3-essential-business-monitoring-methods/
https://www.nonprofithr.com/performance-management/
https://ultraconsultants.com/erp-software-blog/monitoring-business-performance/