Does Measuring Performance Drive Poor Behaviours?

In recent years I’ve witnessed the following behaviours from those being measured and even from performance measurement teams themselves:

• Scoring high on self-assessments due to lack of understanding of what good performance actually is
• Withholding information deliberately to engineer a low score so that little effort will be needed to demonstrate improvement at the next assessment
• Exaggerating current performance levels to ensure a high score because they believe a low score will reflect badly on themselves or their department
• Expending energy and time on questioning the performance model or working out ways to manipulate the scoring rather than concentrating on improving areas of poor performance

It’s important to know that measuring performance can unfortunately encourage these behaviours and to look out for them. The reasons behind these behaviours will be a mix of the current working culture and personal traits. You can address some of this by clearly setting out what you’re measuring, communicating why you’re doing it and what you expect the measures to achieve, but also consider how you measure.

If you fall into the trap of using subjective measures you'll be encouraging many of the behaviours above. This link will take you to Measurement Tools - Do's and Don'ts, an example of how to best use objective measures:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7SbEtX1W8rGSXFFaE1uNmRuT0k/view?usp=sharing

Note you may need to open in Google Chrome to access

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15 Tips for Measuring Performance

Whether setting out to measure your company’s performance or to measure your potential to improve¹ remember that performance measurement is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach. These tips are relevant to whatever approach you adopt:

1. Develop a measure that suits your industry
2. Keep measures simple - do not make an industry out of it!
3. Agree measures with business leads and stick to them
4. Prioritise and weight the keystones² according to their relevance to your business
5. Do not use subjective measures i.e. do not ask managers to rate an area between 1 & 5 where 1 is no evidence, 2-3 is some evidence, 4 is compliant and 5 is best practice
6. Do use objective measures - this will ensure unprejudiced answers
7. Set a benchmark for Good Practice or Business as Usual
8. Don't overreact if parts (or all) of your business are below the benchmark - Continuous Improvement cannot start until you have a measure to improve upon
9. A low score is not an indication of an underachieving department - it is an indicator of where your resources will best e deployed
10. Accept that some areas for improvement are a low priority for you - focus your efforts where they are most needed
11. Don't set unrealistic improvement (stretch) targets
12. To achieve improvement targets you'll need to develop at least a 5 year plan
13. Use the knowledge that already exists in your business to drive 'quick wins' (further posts will show how this can easily be achieved)
14. Consider letting Business Unit/Operational Leads set their own improvement targets
15. When you have results ask the Business Unit/Operational Leads where they want to improve: the quickest wins will be found by matching existing knowledge with the demand for knowledge

This link will take you to a downloadable version of these tips (you may need to open in google Chrome to access)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7SbEtX1W8rGRVRub29lVUI0N2s/view?usp=sharing

Please feel free to comment and contact me if you would like further information.

^¹ Carl Hayward, The Value of Measuring Continual Improvement across your Whole Organisation, (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7SbEtX1W8rGZEllbnNZQUJ6czQ), 22 Jul 2015
^² Carl Hayward, The 11 Keystone to Improvement, (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7SbEtX1W8rGdVVheDluUGREdzg/view?usp=sharing), 13 Jul 2015