Performance management
If you want to improve an organisation then it’s paramount to correctly identify
the measures that affect performance. This sounds simple, but many
organisations struggle with this, and end up either not changing their
behaviours or having unintended negative outcomes. It helps to be aware of the
following.
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Measures that highlight issues but don’t enable rectification. These are
indicators of a result but not of the changes required to improve the result.
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Measures that are able to be acted on, and when acted upon improve performance.
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Measures that are best inspected on a regular basis e.g. daily, weekly.
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Measures must be understood and trusted to be accurate by staff, and they need
to understand what’s needed to improve these measures.
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Explicitly which behaviours you wish to modify to affect performance.
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The fact that specific persons should have responsibility for specific
measures.
Sometimes, seemingly sensible choices of measures have unintended consequences.
The classic example is where fixed cost overheads are apportioned by their use,
which provides an incentive to reduce their use. Reducing the use of a fixed
cost overhead doesn’t get rid of any costs.
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