Striving for Excellence
Global competition and rapidly advancing technology have raised the bar for performance. Excellence is no longer merely highly desirable but essential. For many companies, design and production efficiencies are mitigated when competitors from low-wage countries can launch product clones in mere months. For service-centric organizations such as financial services and telecommunications companies, new customer offers are quickly mimicked by competitors and price competition is eventually self-defeating. Increasingly, the most significant point of differentiation is neither product nor price, but the quality of service provided.
In recent years North American and European companies consistently implemented productivity improvements that more than offset their higher wage structures. However, it now appears that the low-hanging fruit has largely been plucked. Organizations have to dig deeper to optimize not only production and distribution processes, but to find ways to make internal administrative and sales/marketing activities more efficient. To that end they are embracing programs that strive for excellence such as ISO 9000 and Six Sigma, and investing in technologies that promise to raise the return on human capital. Too often these human resources-oriented applications automate basic management functions such as performing annual evaluations, but do not optimize the true value of human capital.
At the heart of every organization are the people that manage and run the enterprise. Jack Welch, former Chairman of GE and noted business authority said, “Business is about finding and building great people.” The premise of performance management is that if you can optimize the performance of the people that run the enterprise then you optimize the enterprise itself.
Performance management software takes a holistic view of the processes involved in building and developing a superior workforce. It optimizes the key performance management processes of managing, evaluating, developing, and successfully recruiting employees – or the “Value Curve.”
Flaws in the process
Current methods of managing, evaluating, developing, and recruiting call center customer service representatives (CSRs), while well-meaning and widely practiced, are inherently flawed. Traditional methods do not drive best practices and often have not changed to reflect the new priorities of modern call centers.
Enter Performance Management
Performance Management can be broken down into two main activities, setting goals and then maximizing the achievement of those goals by employees. Most organizations have a process where goals are set and communicated down through the management hierarchy to the goals and day-to-day activities of individual employees. The trouble with most of these processes is that many companies set goals and then promptly change their direction, making these goals irrelevant. And even if they stay their course, many companies have no method of ensuring that goals are achieved.
The key is to provide consistent direction and feedback to employees to ensure that they know their goals and how they are performing against them. Employees with a clear understanding of tasks, priorities and their personal performance level, show steady improvement without additional development activities. Entire organizations can leverage this “self-improvement” tendency by supplying goal adjustments to best reflect the most recent changes to corporate goals and initiatives.
The road to success
In today’s hyper-competitive business world satisfactory performance is no longer enough. Organizations must strive for excellence – to get the highest possible return from their most important asset, the employees that drive the business. Performance Management solutions enable companies to optimize their business by ensuring that the individual contributions remain focused on corporate goals and deviations are quickly spotted and corrective actions taken in order to achieve both individual and overall business success.
For a more in-depth look at how performance management leads to business optimization, including the areas of development, evaluation, and recruiting, download the full whitepaper.