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Effective performance management involves setting specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (SMART) goals. This ensures objectivity and helps managers identify low performers and reward top achievers. Without SMART goals, a manager’s credibility and ability to evaluate objectively may be questioned.
Choosing the most effective performance management can be daunting but rewarding. A manager’s job is not only to administer disciplinary action to a poorly performing employee, but also to create ways to recognize an employee who has made significant achievements and contributions to the team. When choosing an effective performance management system, the prudent manager should ensure that the system adheres to the notion of setting specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (SMART) goals.
When goals incorporate these five tangible elements, they become concrete and objective. They let the employee know what he needs to do to meet or exceed the standards. This is a critical and sometimes overlooked aspect of an effective manager’s job. To be effective, managers must try to avoid any lingering reliance on subjective assessment in their managerial arsenal and replace it with objective, easy-to-see criteria. When year-end reviews are conducted, it’s easy to pinpoint whether an employee has met, fallen short, or exceeded their goals.
It can be helpful to break SMART goals into an example of effective performance management. Let’s say you’re managing a call center and you want to measure the quality of your employees’ calls. You can create a system where you observe, among other things, that you will hear a certain number of calls per week, that each call made by the employee must conform to a certain flow and structure, that the tone of voice will be monitored, as well as the rigor of responses and surveys. When classifying each of these components or simply checking whether or not they were completed, the manager employed a smart and SMART management system, because he replaced subjective consideration with objective observation.
In addition, there are more obvious standards to apply, such as the amount of employee phone time and whether they logged into the system during the allotted time. In this way, a manager can easily and systematically evaluate the performance of his employees. When it comes time to identify low performers and reward top achievers, the manager is able to produce evidence to support his assessment.
On the other hand, a performance management system that lacks SMART goals could jeopardize the manager’s credibility, call into question his ability to evaluate frankly and objectively, and perhaps result in serious human resource or legal repercussions. If a manager allows his employees’ goals and expectations to fluctuate or vary, he has the right to challenge any negative assessment made against him. As such, any effective performance management will invariably include SMART goals.
Asset Smart.
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