Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
A critical evaluation of performance management and development processes within Otis PLC
cascaded to the next level of managers. In the case of line managers, each will be allocated a set of objectives that form part of the overall company plan. It is common for line managers to have only financial objectives. Staff and functional managers, however, have few financial objectives, typically only ones related to managing the cost of their department. Instead they adopt the functional and values based objectives from the company plan and then add their own functional objectives.
In the case of measures imposed from above, particularly worldwide initiatives, there are often questions of relevance and appropriateness to the local organisation. A recent example was the requirement to train all field employees on a particular subject whether or not it was appropriate. In the case of locally adopted objectives, there is no process for co-ordinating them and so opportunities for co-operation between functional departments are missed and one individual’s objectives may be in conflict with those of other employees. In addition, the absence of functional objectives for line managers often means that functional initiatives seem irrelevant to them and are less likely to succeed as they lack line support. As functional objectives are often concerned with “inputs” to performance and line objectives are typically about outputs from performance the tension between these two aspects of the system is heightened.
One final issue in this area is that the setting of objectives at the most senior level is often delayed by external factors and consequently individual objectives may not be confirmed until March of the year in which they are to be achieved. This tends to reduce the scope for long term planning of objectives and to reduce their credibility.
A performance plan for each employee
At the level of individual performance plans and measurement a distinction can be made between staff and field employees. Dealing first with staff employees, at the more senior levels of the organisation, direct reports to the MD and their direct reports, each employee has a performance plan. In addition all line managers and all sales staff will have a set of performance measures. As discussed above these will be almost entirely financial. Beyond this group, individual performance plans typically do not exist. Once again the distinction between input and output measures can be clearly seen. Measures related to the financial performance of the organisation are tracked and reported on, although it should be noted that there are considerable concerns over the integrity of these data. Measures not directly related to financial performance, e.g. those concerned with the development of individual performance or improvement of processes are not tracked and consequently receive less attention. This perhaps can be seen most clearly in the case of functional managers who have non-financial objectives. Their performance is more likely to be assessed on how well they reacted to crises that arose during the year rather than how well they [next page]