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his new department and interviewed the department’s customers— both inside and outside the organization. Bob quickly filled seven pages with negative comments about the department, work processes, finished products, and more. On his first day in the office, Bob got to witness a typical problem first hand when a company salesperson called in some urgently needed changes to one of the projects—completed the day before—only to find out that the software version of that particular product was lost. Bob figured out exactly what was interfering with his employees’ ability to do a good job and then he discussed department needs and changes with them. Everyone agreed on a set of mutually acceptable goals and a game plan and—together—Bob and his employees set the stage for the next step in achieving world-class performance.

Step 2: Change the performance-monitoring system. When Bob took a look at his new department’s performance reporting systems, he realized that the measures were all negative: late projects, number of mistakes, backlogged orders, and so on. There was plenty of tracking of negative performance measures, but no tracking of positive performance measures. Bob installed a new system that focused on only one performance measure—a positive one— the number of on-time projects. This changed everything. When Bob took over, the department could count only a few on-time projects. Within two years after putting this new performance measurement system into place, his department accomplished 2,700 on-time projects—a night-and-day difference.

Step 3: Revise the plan. As department performance improved, Bob implemented other improvements as well: 24-hour project quotes, project indexing, software storage, streamlining of royalty and invoicing systems, and more. Soon, the company’s top management team noticed what was going on in Bob’s department and liked what they saw. The department was routinely completing 80 percent of its projects within two weeks after receipt, and the

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T H E R E A L W O R L D

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is one of the classic truisms of management. We can add to this the fact that if you can measure it, but don’t, you are likely not to get the results you hoped for. A key part to being a professional manager is to make things happen according to a plan. If a plan is created, but then filed away never to be looked at until the end of the year, it is worthless. Your plans need to be living documents with action steps and deadlines. As the saying goes, “A goal is a dream with a deadline.” And every deadline should have milestones that lead up to the final success.

customization function went from being a liability that the company’s salespeople refused to use to becoming a leading competitive advantage for the company.

Case 2: Helping Your Employees Give 100 Percent

Because of ongoing performance problems, management at Cascades Diamond, Inc. in Thorndike, Massachusetts, decided to survey its employees. The results showed that 79 percent of employees felt they weren’t being rewarded for a job well done, 65 percent felt that management treated them disrespectfully, and 56 percent were pessimistic about their work. With the evidence clearly in front of them, management took the following steps to fix the company’s problems:

Step 1: Create a program based on the behaviors you want. Cascades Diamond’s management team chartered a new club in the company, the 100 Club, to encourage and reinforce these particular behaviors:

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•Attendance.

•Punctuality.

•Safety.

Points were awarded to employees based on certain measurable criteria related to these behaviors. After accumulating 100 points, employees received a special award—a nylon jacket with the Cascades Diamond logo and the words “The 100 Club” imprinted on it.

Step 2: Assign points to the desired behaviors. Employees received 25 points for a year of perfect attendance but, for each full or partial day of absence, points were deducted from their totals. Employees who went an entire year without formal disciplinary actions received 20 points, and employees who worked for a year without injuries resulting in lost time received 15 points. Employees could also receive points for making cost-saving suggestions, safety suggestions, or participating in community service projects such as Red Cross blood drives or the United Way. Management made sure that the number of points was proportionate to the behavior’s importance to the organization and that the numeric goals weren’t impossible to reach or demotivating.

Step 3: Measure and reward employee performance. Measuring and rewarding desired employee behavior were at the heart of Cascades Diamond’s program. It was the job of supervisors and managers to closely track the performance of employees and assign points for each of the factors. When employees reached the coveted 100-point level, they were inducted into the 100 Club, and the jacket was theirs.

Of course, results speak louder than words. In the program’s first year, Cascades Diamond saved $5.2 million, increased productivity by nearly 15 percent, and reduced quality-related mistakes by 40 percent. Not only that, but 79 percent of employees said that their work quality

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concerned them more now than before the program started, 73 percent reported that the company showed concern for them as people, and 86 percent of employees said that the company and management considered them to be either “important” or “very important.” Quite a change in employee attitudes, to say the least.

TOOLS FOR WORLD-CLASS MONITORING

The measurement system you select will be simpler or more complex based on how simple or complex the performance to be measured. If the goal is simply to increase the number of customer grades of “excellent” for your customer service staff from 500 per month to 600 per month, then a simple count will tell you whether your employees have achieved the goal. However, if the goal is to design and fabricate a cold fusion reactor in one year, your job of designing a system for measuring performance will be much more difficult.

Graphical representations—Gantts, PERTs, and the like—of all the goals, milestones, actions, and schedules involved in a project are often much easier to understand than text-based lists of these items, especially for complex or prolonged projects. In the sections that follow, we’ll explore some of the most common and useful.

Bar Charts

Bar charts, sometimes known as Gantt charts, allow managers to quickly see exactly where the project is at any given date and compare actual progress with planned progress.

Bar charts contain three basic elements:

1.Timeline: This is the scale by which you measure progress. The timeline can be illustrated with any units that work best for your projects, including days, weeks, months, or more. The timeline appears along the horizontal axis (the x-axis) in most bar charts.

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2.Actions: These are the individual activities that must be performed to get from one milestone to the next. In a bar chart, actions are listed—usually in chronological order—vertically along the left side of the chart (the y-axis).

3.Bars: Bars on your chart indicate the estimated length of time that a particular action should take to accomplish. Short bars represent short periods of time; long bars represent long periods of time. The bars provide a quick visual reference of complete and incomplete actions.

The advantages of the Gantt chart are its simplicity, ease of preparation and use, and low cost. While Gantt charts are generally unsuitable for large, complex projects, they are great for projects that are relatively simple.

Flowcharts

As we mentioned above, bar charts are great for simple projects, but not so great for complex projects. Why? Because they don’t illustrate the sequential flow of actions in a project that are predominant in complex projects. This is where flowcharts come to the rescue. Like bar charts, flowcharts also have three basic elements:

1.Actions: Arrows indicate actions, leading from one event to the next on the flowchart until the project is completed. The arrows’ primary purpose in a flowchart is to illustrate the sequential relationship of actions to one another, and their length is not necessarily proportional to the amount of time between actions.

2.Events: Events, represented in flowcharts by numbered circles, are used to indicate completion of a particular action.

3.Time: Time estimates are inserted alongside each action (arrow) in the flowchart. By following a particular path and adding up the

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number of time units, you can determine the total time for the completion of an action.

Flowcharts show exactly how actions relate to one another, and the critical path—the actions that determine how soon that a project can be completed—can be ascertained by following the longest path in terms of time. This method of analysis is commonly known as the Critical Path Method (CPM).

Program evaluation and review technique (PERT) is a variation of CPM that uses statistical techniques to average a range of possible times to arrive at estimates for each action when the time to complete individual actions cannot be estimated with a high degree of certainty.

PUTTING NUMBERS INTO PRACTICE

Of course, once you have all your goals, measures, and other performance measurement tools up and running, you’ve got to use them to positively impact the performance of your employees. Here’s how to accomplish that particular task:

•Compare results to expectations. Let’s say that your employee has a goal to complete a report by November 1. The first question is: Was the report completed on time? As it turns out, the report was completed on October 15,—two weeks before the deadline. This particular goal was accomplished with time to spare.

•Record the results. Note of the results in writing—in your employee’s file or in a computer-based project tracking system where you keep track of all your employees’ goals and responsibilities.

•Praise, coach, or counsel your employees. Give your employee a reward for accomplishing the goal—a simple verbal or written

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thank-you is probably sufficient. If the goal was not met, however, find out why not and what your employee will do to ensure that the goal is achieved the next time.

P O P Q U I Z !

Monitoring employee performance is an important tool for building high-performing organizations. Reflect for a few moments on what you have learned in this chapter; then ask yourself the following questions:

1.In what ways do you currently monitor employee performance?

2.Are your measures clear and objective?

3.How do you communicate performance measures and expectations to employees?

4.To what degree have your employees had a role in determining— and bought into—the measures used to assess their performance?

5.In what ways do you share monitoring results with your employees?

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C H A P T E R 1 0

V

Building Employee

Accountability

IT’S A NEW WORLD OUT THERE . . .

Accountability and . . .

How managers can create an environment where employees will perform.

The link between performance appraisals and accountability.

You need a process.

Common traps in the evaluation process.

Be a partner with your employees, not an executioner.

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ARE PERFORMANCE APPRAISALS OBSOLETE?

One of the goals, if not the most important goal, of the performance appraisal and review process is to motivate employees. Yes, we know that’s not what comes to mind when most people think of their performance appraisal process, which goes to show how far afield we’ve gotten on this topic. At its best, the performance review process encourages employees to put forth their best effort and take initiative at work to achieve both organizational and personal goals. At its worst, the exact opposite happens and employees are made to feel unimportant, abused, and unappreciated for the job they’ve done. Tensions mount, feelings are bruised, and goodwill is lost.

Performance appraisals and reviews are a necessary and important part of work and, for better or worse, are a reality in most organizations. However, as many companies are learning, traditional performance appraisals fail miserably in positively influencing employee behavior. In reality, the performance appraisal process has few true supporters. Indeed, many managers feel that appraisals are ineffec- tive—a fact that their employees would likely readily agree with.

In a traditional performance review, the manager typically meets with an employee once a year and in less than an hour (and with less than an hour’s preparation), attempts to get through the necessary review forms from personnel to trigger the employee’s annual raise. More typically, however, the review often focuses on a negative aspect of the employee’s recent job performance—not the previous 12 months’ work—and is far from an accurate reflection of the employee’s job performance.

As a result, an overall dissatisfaction with this system by both the employer and the employee is reflected repeatedly in surveys and studies. Employees report feeling intimidated, defensive, short-changed, and manipulated in this process. They feel that appraisals are too

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