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Performance Management and KPIs

Linking Activities to Vision and Strategy

Managers talk a lot about employee performance. There's constant pressure to achieve performance targets, to reach higher performance levels, and to ensure that people's work supports and furthers the organization's goals.

Performance management is the process used to manage this performance. The key question asked is, "How well is an employee applying his or her current skills, and to what extent is he or she achieving the outcomes desired?"

The answer has traditionally been found in the performance evaluation process, where managers look for hard data to tell how well an employee has performed his or her duties.

What is often missing from this evaluation, however, is the part about making sure that the employee is doing the right thing. After all, you may have a very hard-working and dedicated team member, but if he or she is not working on things that advance the organization's purpose, what is the point?

This is where key performance indicators come into play, and they apply both at the organizational and individual levels. At an organizational level, a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable metric that reflects how well an organization is achieving its stated goals and objectives.

For example, if your vision includes providing superior customer service, then a KPI may target the number of customer support requests that remain unsatisfied by the end of a week. By monitoring this, you can directly measure how well your organization is meeting its long-term goal ...

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