Monitoring employees performance

Question

Explore approaches applied by your chosen organisation in monitoring employee’s performance.

Answer 1

In Centrica all the employees require to fill out an online form termed as the Individual Performance Contract (IPC). The form contains objectives and competencies for the employee to attain throughout the work/project assignment and/or for a calendar year. All through meetings with the line manager, an employee can fill this out just once and the direction has been achieved from the line manager in question. This contract made an informal agreement among the line manager and employee of what is needed.

The employee and line manager will meet regularly, either twice a month or once a month to discuss current performance, obstacles, blockers, difficulties and progress made against the defined objectives. A line manager will advise the employee what he needs to achieve to meet an objective, and what he needs to achieve to get a higher rating for an objective. At every meeting each objective will be given a rating (I, G, H or E) and this will be formally documented by the line manager at every meeting that occurs. The line manager gives his view and then gives a future plan of what the employee needs to achieve to move a level.

At the end of the calendar year, a more formal review takes place between the employee, line manager and HR. During this meeting the employee will give his/her case of why he should be at a certain level and the line manager also gives his/her account of view. Performance will be measured on a number of factors such as, the time taken to complete a task, the level at which a task was completed, extra work taken to help team members and so on. Once confirmed the employees formal performance rating will be recorded and rewarded accordingly.

It is important to note that an extra level of responsibility is given to the employee for ‘driving his/her own career’ and where the employee feels it should be going. As a result the responsibility is on the employee to ‘manager his/her manager’ and to ensure they set up regular review and performance meeting. This can be derived from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Herzberg’s theory on giving employees extra responsibility to motivate them.

Another medium that is widely used to monitor an employee’s performance is via a 360 degree feedback form. This is a form created by the line manager and sent out to a group of key stakeholders that the employee has had some interaction with. This form will vary for the role in question, but will generally follow the lines of asking some probing questions to obtain performance level and also levels of development that may be required by the employee going forward. Thank you emails or like can also be used to help judge an employee’s performance for the year.

Another medium used to find current level of performance and ability, is when the line manager sends his/her employee to an assessment centre to determine development points and to see on a scale how far the employee has reached for the team. Performance is also tracked during these assessment centres and fed back to the line manager.

As you can see Centrica, use different forms and types of medium available for line managers to appraise their employee performance levels. The key thing is that the employee takes responsibility for his/her actions and manages the performance process.