History of KPIs
No one knows exactly where Robert Kaplan and David Norton’s KPIs originated from, with some pointing to the emperors of the 3rd century Chinese Wei Dynasty. We do know that these were not primarily intended to measure individual performance. For individual performance, both the measurement of and the engagement in those performance metrics are key to driving individual and organizational success. Performance Scoring marries the metrics and engagement to move performance forward.
How Can We Move Forward?
Instead of faulty assumptions and isolating individual performance based on KPIs, why not have live authentic data based on realistic expectations and objectives set collectively by management and their employees? Performance Scoring does just that through our performance engagement application. We believe managing people and having performance driven conversations through our simple yet effective platform leverages more time to focus and hone in on areas of improvement company wide.
“ I think there should be opportunities for people to have conversations about their performance, but I don’t think capturing them in one annual or biannual format is the right way to do it.”
- Georgia Murch ; Author of Feedback Flow and Fixing Feedback
Georgia touches on a few reasons why infrequent reviews aren’t positive
- Feedback is stale: A conversation or situation that happened 6 months ago, details won’t be remembered. Opinions replace objective information.
- Feedback becomes “tell” oriented: there’s a lot of perspectives about the employees performance that is crammed into a small amount of time.
- Close to 80,000 work hours are used each year to prep for these annual reviews
The outmoded annual or biannual review approach relying on KPIs does not build up or encourage the individual but instead pushes them to find yet another company that may value and utilize their skills. There has to be a shift in company atmosphere’s where we create a place of trust, honest reflection, collaboration on problem solving and not the blame game, and focus on moving forward.
Performance Scoring has been designed as a internal organizational crowdsourcing framework, built to leverage the experiential knowledge and understanding of each stakeholder, empowering them to declare, value, and engage on the things they know lead their teams to success. An engagement application that changes the dynamic and perspective of these reviews. Performance Scoring is here to help develop, build, and retain employees through creating dynamic and collaborative environments that allow space for forward conversations to happen. Creating change in how we engage with people, moving to more high frequency and low stake engagements, exchanging authority at the expense of additional accountability, pushing people to recognize and reward each other, and meeting people in the moment before challenges become catastrophes, this is how Performance Scoring drives higher performing organizations.
Source: https://www.staceybarr.com/measure-up/a-better-tool-than-kpis-for-employee-performance-management/