Performance Management Essay

1020 Words3 Pages

Performance management is a process that guarantees an organisation and all of its available resources are working collectively and effectively towards achieving the organisation’s mission or goal. Performance management affords an understanding of what drives an individuals, and even organisations, performance at all levels. An understanding of performance management allows for the identification and minimisation of unproductive areas of an organisation, as well as an ability to predict future performance. It is a powerful tool that can be used by managers at all levels of an organisation to help improve a company’s productivity. An organisation’s mission is the back bone of all strategic decisions; the mission will have an influence on all activities performed within the organisation, because if they aren’t achieving their mission an organisation is failing. The long term strategic goals of an organisation should directly aim to achieve their mission and these goals are what performance can be measured off. Without specific goals attempting to measure performance is pointless, and identifying who or what the main focus of these goals is the key to optimisation. When using performance management to improve an organisation’s productivity you need to first decide who is the focus of the organisation’s long term goals, are they focusing on Shareholders or Stakeholders. The Shareholder approach focuses on the profit to the shareholders, no other factors need to be considered aside from the bottom line profits. The Stakeholder approach is a well-rounded, balanced approach to management, considering more than just how much money the organisation makes. Conventional wisdom would suggest that a shareholder approach will produce the larg... ... middle of paper ... ...arket, they still attempt to improve their performance in other areas, by contributing to charity and hence improving their local reputation, however they have very low customer and employee satisfaction. These lowered performance indicators stem from low employee motivation. It would be very beneficial for Walmart to increase these performance factors as the small cost of improving employee’s conditions and motivation would be balanced by not having to re-hire 70% of their work force every year. Performance management is a useful and powerful tool that can be used by managers to identify what areas of their organisation they need to improve to increase the organisation’s overall performance. The idea of a balanced scorecard enforces a sensible distribution of resources and effort across all aspect of performance an organisation is, or should be, concerned with.

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