Measuring employee performance – even attitude and behaviour – to keep clients on side, win new business and improve profitability

Outsourcing can bring many benefits to the client organisation, but it is a young and growing industry and, like other sectors before it, makes mistakes or takes its eye off some issues while addressing others. Indeed, there have been, and continue to be, some high profile failures – at home and overseas - that taint the industry’s reputation.

In some sectors, outsourcing ends in failure to reach the agreed objectives; the client moves to another outsourcer, yet meets with failure again. In these cases, expectations at the client end start on a high, the outsourcer oversells and subsequently underperforms and loses the business or suffers penalties.

Human error, sometimes translated as inefficient, inappropriate or ill-trained management, is often the cause. What can be done to ensure risks are reduced or eliminated as close to zero as possible?

The outsourcer may have to manage the performance and, somehow, the attitude of individual team members, of geographically dispersed work forces. They may be dispersed throughout the UK and/or overseas. The outsourcer and all its staff may be headquartered on another continent and have only a nominal presence in the UK.

The client company itself may track the outsourced company’s overall performance, much of it reliant on the performance of individuals – some of whom may be contract and freelance staff - and teams.

Appraisals

Many of you will be familiar with annual staff appraisals, although the smaller your company, the less likely you are to have them or to follow formal procedures. Formal procedures do introduce an element of objectivity into the proceedings, thereby reassuring staff with performance problems that they are not under personal attack or the victim of office politics.

Training or mentoring should iron out these problemsm but in a typical SME or large enterprise a host of other issues will be happening that will impact on the performance of individuals, the teams of which they are a part, and therefore the business itself.

Annual appraisals cannot hope to keep up with events, especially in the fast moving environment that is outsourcing. If they are paper based, the information in the appraisals has to be scanned or typed into a computer for analysis or, in the worst case, just looked at in order to gain a very basic understanding of what is going on with an individual.

Breakthrough

There has been a breakthrough with appraisals and performance management in general, and this has come with an online approach, which can cater for most, if not all, demands a company makes of its employees and contract or freelance workers.

There are three core benefits of the online approach (i) employee appraisals and performance measures can happen quickly and easily at any time, so dispensing with cumbersome [and often expensive] annual or six monthly appraisal procedures (ii) results are rapidly obtained, and analysed automatically, allowing for a quick response where required (iii) it doesn’t matter where employees [and contract staff] are physically located; they could be next door and/or 12,000 miles away. They can still be measured and their performance improved.

Looking at (i) and (ii) in a little detail - in outsourcing especially, individuals or teams may have to meet objectives or targets at short notice and in different projects. Online performance management allows for a target to be set by a manager in control of the performance measurement tool, and individual and team reaction to the target to be analysed. That way, the manager can see at a glance who [or which team] is having difficulty in reaching the target – and why.

In some cases, measurement may have to be ongoing in order to turn difficult situations around or meet a new technical or business target. Automated analysis of development plans for all staff, or just those requiring improvement, can help when combined with an analysis of their competencies and the provision of training, whether the need for improvement is acute or less urgent.

A side, but important, issue is resistance by an individual. The online tool can provide an audit trail that can be used to support, under employment law, the laying off of that individual. Another issue of importance is compliance; the online approach is a cost effective way to enforce standards compliance.

Addressing item (iii), this is a key one for the industry. There was a time when managing [and measuring the performance of] geographically dispersed individuals or teams was laborious and therefore almost self defeating, due to the amount of time and the cost involved.

It is not only performance and meeting targets [technical or business] that can be measured. Behaviour and attitude, including the ability to work well with other people, can also be measured and managed. Getting staff to pull in the same direction is not necessarily a subsidiary issue; it may be the only thing required, the sole key to improving business performance.

Web enabling the different, but allied, processes outlined above within an online tool now makes the such tools highly viable and attractive to the outsourcer, adding as they do to the evidence of proof of target attainment that the client and/or outsourcer – or both parties - may demand.

Summary

Keeping track of employee performance and attitude and behaviour has implications for the business and almost overwhelming attractions. The implications include not only much greater and more fluid business agility, but the need to support that with training, coaching or mentoring. The attractions includes improved performance and profitability, and an increased likelihood of retaining or winning business.