Creating big-picture employee performance plans
Creating big-picture employee performance plans
For federal managers facing pressure to measure their employees' performance against agency goals, there's a new eight-step program for developing a big-picture employee performance plan.
Courtesy of the Office of Personnel Management, the new guide, "A Handbook for Measuring Employee Performance: Aligning Employee Performance Plans with Organizational Goals," is part of the central human resources agency's performance management practitioner series. The book aims to guide managers through all the processes of performance management, not just those mandated by law.
"Some people mistakenly assume that performance management is concerned only with following regulatory requirements to appraise and rate performance. Actually, assigning ratings of record is only one part of the overall process (and perhaps the least important)," the guide states.
The focus of the guide is on determining how individual employees' accomplishments contribute to the overall mission of an agency. Agencies have developed strategic plans and annual performance goals based on those plans under the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act. Now the trick is to divvy up those goals among agency employees. The eight steps OPM lays out are:
- Look at the overall picture
- Determine work unit accomplishments
- Determine individual accomplishments
- Convert accomplishments into performance elements
- Determine measures
- Develop standards
- Determine how to monitor performance
- Check the performance plan
The handbook also includes three appendices with examples of written standards for performance levels, a quiz and a quick reference guide to help readers make sure they absorbed the lessons in the manual.
"Too often, employee performance plans with their elements and standards measure behaviors, actions, or processes without also measuring the results of employees' work," the guide laments. But thinking of employees as pieces of the agency puzzle, managers can review the employee's effect on internal effectiveness, customer satisfaction, an financial efficiency. "By balancing the measures used in employee performance plans, the performance picture becomes complete," OPM says.
The guide is available online at OPM's Web site.