Sustaining Employee Performance Paper

Sustaining Employee Performance Paper

HRM 300

May 2, 2016

Robert Lacey IV

Introduction

At the core of every successful organization is a reliable, highly productive workforce.  However, low retention rates, low productivity, and poorly motivated employees are detrimental to workforce productivity and the realization of organizational goals.  

Function of Performance Management Systems

Performance management system and compensation plans are two organizational considerations that work in tandem to support retention and quality, and by extension, a successful business.   The performance management system serves maintain the quality of a workforce.  It delivers an evaluation tool to measure the level to which an employee is meeting the behavioral, and work expectations the employer has set for them.  But its principal purpose is to provide a structured method of constructive feedback to the employee.  The overall objective is that the employee uses such feedback as motivation, and a road-map for improvement.   This is a critical mechanism for the employer to periodically assess its employee and provide detailed steps the employee can take to better meet the employer's expectations.   The compensation plan serves as a motivating element.  

Job Evaluation Methods

According to Fundamentals of Human Resource Management (DeCenzo, 2013), evaluation methods can fall under one of three approaches to the implementation of a performance evaluation system: employees can be appraised against (1) absolute standards, (2) relative standards, or (3) outcomes.    The absolute standard approach measures an employee’s performance against established standards, while the relative standards compare the employee to the performance of other employees.  And by the outcomes approach, employees are evaluated on how well they accomplished a specific set of objectives determined as critical in the successful completion of their job.

I am happy my organization, First Data, also sees importance of employee evaluations and employs an effective method to accomplish this.  Evaluations give the employee the necessary information, as discussed above, to identify areas of deficiencies and strengths, and a strategy for improvement.  It also serves as historical documentation.    These records can be particularly useful since they can be used to argue for, or against decisions a company makes with respects to an employee.    For example, an employee's performance record can be used as support for advancement decisions, improved compensation, or a company can use performance records as supporting documentation in regards to terminating the employee.  

To illustrate the affects of a performance management system and compensation plan, I would like to talk about my employer, First Data.  First Data is a business to business organization.  We provide various businesses to consumer organizations with products that facilitate their point of sales (POS) systems and various other operational solutions.   For the purpose of my discussion, I would like to focus on two supporting roles from two separate departments; a Senior Contract Support Specialist and the Customer Support Agent.   Because of the volume of customer calls received Contract Support Specialist; this is a significantly larger group than that of customer care.   Also, the role of the contract support specialist is easily quantifiable, because the job responsibility requires resolution of technical issues.  Technical issues with our products result in our customers experiencing down time, which affects their profitability.  The longer a customer is down the more loss they incur.  On the other hand, the Customer Support Agent deals with basic customer inquiry, and serves as a liaison to help the customers resolve administrative needs.  While this is a less quantifiable aspect of doing business, successful Customer Support Agents fosters positive customer relationships and loyalty.   I have selected to apply the behavioral anchoring rating scale and the individual ranking method to evaluating employees in these roles and discuss the benefits of using each method and the disadvantages.  

First let’s look at behavioral anchoring rating scale.  In this method an employer rates the employees on a numerical scale to measure the level to which an employee meets the expectations outlined for that specific role.  It works well for the Contract Specialist role, because there are quantifiable and observable metrics that can be outlined, and assigned a rating by the appraiser.  Based on such recordable observations as call times, number of call backs from unresolved technical issues, number of times an agent needed to escalate a call and so on; the appraiser can rate the employee's performance. These quantifiable metrics are necessary for the BARS method to be an accurate and effective means of measuring performance.  But for the Customer Support Agent, performance metrics are not as clearly definable, because there are few quantifiable aspects of the role.  Using this method to assess a Customer Support Agent is more likely to provide unsubstantiated assessments.  However, the individual ranking method is a simpler approach that rates employees against their peers.  This rating can be easily assessed for the Customer Support Agent group, because the group is smaller and the rating criteria are less complex than the behavioral anchoring method.  For example the assessor can look at aspects such as work absences, positive customer feedback, work attitude to rate one employee against another.  This method does not work well for the technical department, because criteria such as attitude and customer feedback does not necessarily mean the agent is not effective and efficient at resolving technical problems.   Also, given the size of the technical support department, it would become meaningless to rating each employee against the other from best to worst.  Individual ranking carries more significance in meaning when there are fewer employees.