Monday, 17 August 2015

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:


Note you may need to open in Google Chrome to access




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