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Roles, not tasks, may be key to workplace performance measurement

At the most basic level, the performance of individuals allows organizations to realize their strategic goals. But what is performance? A W. P. Carey School of Business management professor says that the way organizations define, think about and measure performance profoundly impacts the effectiveness of its people. For many years performance was conceived simply as the ability to accomplish a list of tasks. Organizations whose mission requires a dynamic environment are finding that they need a new way of thinking about performance in order to succeed. For those firms, task-oriented standards are giving way to a model of performance based on roles or values.

In most companies, performance is the hot topic at least once a year when managers conduct the annual reviews. But if that's the only time performance is considered, then the organization is operating under a perilously narrow definition of one of the most important concepts in business.

Robert Cardy, a management professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business, says that an organization's definition of performance can have profound impact on success — either positive or negative.

"How performance is conceived, thought about and measured can dramatically influence how effectively workers perform in an organization," he writes in a recent feature article in the HR Division Newsletter. "Unfortunately, how performance is measured, and even conceived, can serve to limit potential, contribution and satisfaction."

So what is performance? One common notion is that performance is the achievement of a set of tasks which combine to make up duty areas or dimensions. Task-based evaluation has been around for a long time. It originated in scientific management, an approach developed almost a hundred years ago involving the division of labor into definable tasks. Managers can train workers to perform these tasks, then evaluate and reward performance based on those standards.

There is nothing inherently bad or obsolete about task-based evaluations, Cardy says. It works well in organizations where work is well defined, static and managed closely by supervisors. "The environment in which a task-based approach would make sense would be one in which there is a fairly fixed set of tasks that are repetitive and the environment is not posing major changes in the near term,' he explains.

But there are situations that call for a different conception of performance. For example, companies that must respond quickly to changes in the market may need workers who are creative or can learn quickly. With the nature of the work itself in flux, the old checklist of tasks may not work in those environments.

Cardy has discovered that some organizations have developed performance models that address this new environment. One defines performance based on the worker's role in the company, and a second measures how well employees implement the company's values.

Finding the right model is important, because in addition to measuring job achievement, how performance is defined can determine if strategic goals are realized. Further, how performance is defined can determine the extent to which workers find their responsibilities to be meaningful and engaging.

Roles versus tasks

Some firms may find that they will have more success developing a high level of achievement among employees if they measure how well people perform in their roles, rather than how well they accomplish tasks. As an example, Cardy cites a Florida hospital that was suffering low morale, high employee turnover and poor patient satisfaction. Interviews with nurses about how they did their jobs uncovered a simple but revealing fact: not everyone liked all aspects of the job.

"Some nurses were very methodical and liked the technical responsibility of keeping charts accurate and up-to-date and double-checking medicines and their amounts," Cardy writes. "However, other nurses didn't care for this technical and record-keeping set of tasks. These nurses went into nursing because they wanted to help people and alleviate suffering. They comforted patients and established caring relationships.'

The hospital identified two roles involved in the job of nurse: "technical" and "empathic." Both roles are essential to good patient care. In what Cardy describes as "a stroke of genius,' the hospital enabled individual nurses to engage in the role they preferred by forming teams of nurses that included both technical and empathic members. The result: a 50 percent decease in turnover among the nurses and a 160 percent increase in patient satisfaction.

"Since the nurses were doing the things they were best at and liked to do, their performance and satisfaction increased,' Cardy writes. "Further, patients were the happy customers on the receiving end of these improvements. From a customer perspective, it is important to have both nursing roles performed well.'

Putting values to work

A second model that Cardy has identified applies to organizations that must follow through on their values in order to succeed in their mission. Those organizations, Cardy says, will make strides if they define and measure worker performance based on how well employee behaviors adhere to the values held by the organization.

The example Cardy uses is a social service agency serving disabled clients.

The agency, he reports, was experiencing high turnover among staff, and the managers were concerned about the quality of the services it was delivering. A decision was made to link performance to the agency's values. Under this metric, the high evaluation would go to an employee who goes great lengths to uphold the agency's standard, even if it means interrupting his or her desk work.

The hard work in making this system succeed is in identifying the values of the organization, and defining those values in terms of specific behaviors. Cardy explains that the hospital utilized the critical incident technique (CIT), a job analysis process, to identify actual behaviors that embody the agency's values.

For example, the agency had identified as one of its values that all clients were to be treated with respect. Listening carefully when someone speaks is a gesture of respect. Because the agency's disabled clients in many cases had difficulty speaking, listening respectfully would mean putting down whatever work the employee was doing and waiting patiently for the client to form the words.

The agency used scenarios like this in its hiring process to screen for individuals who would naturally behave in synch with the agency's standards. Developing the standards also helped the agency to make its values clear to existing employees. "Behaviorally defining the core values of an organization allows a concern with ethics and integrity to go beyond rhetoric and make the values very real in terms of how workers are selected, assessed and rewarded," Cardy writes.

Cardy points out that management cannot anticipate every situation and have a policy for it, but it can maximize organizational success by identifying and implementing the organization's core values: "The importance of being able to have a strong fit between worker values and values of the organization probably can't be overstated.'

Performance improves

Cardy says the roles and values approaches empower workers, and empowered workers do a better job.

"Roles and values are concepts that offer compelling alternatives to the traditional task-based conception of performance,' Cardy writes. "In the shifting and dynamic environments that typify many organizations, tasks can prove to be unstable bases on which to define and measure performance. Roles and values may offer more enduring concepts that better capture what performance is or should be for many organizations.'

Asked if performance reviews can have pitfalls, Cardy offers these general guidelines: "The annual appraisal may be something that needs to be done as a formal requirement in an organization. However, the informal reality is that performance feedback should be occurring all the time,' he says.

"Thus, there should be no surprises when the formal appraisal time comes around. Unfortunately, there are a number of managers who don't take the time or aren't comfortable giving performance feedback, and the once-a-year meeting can then be a negative and surprising event.'

He said that maximal performance results when people can do what they like to do and what they do best. "I think there is enough diversity of interests and skills," he comments. "The important thing for management is to recruit and select people based on these roles.'

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