Given the current context, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is necessary for company managers to provoke innovation and creativity among their employees to maintain competitive organizations, because routine performance will not be enough to face the challenges and the complex economic outlook. planned for the near future. With this scenario involved, leaders must establish an incentive evaluation and management system to motivate their staff and take them out of their comfort zone.
Although the evaluation of employees is a challenge within organizations, it has several benefits, among them, it allows people to understand the goals and objectives that they must achieve, it helps managers to distinguish good and bad performance individually , motivates them to achieve better results, exerts healthy pressure among employees to improve themselves, encourages feedback among employees and encourages the design of training plans, according to the needs of each person.
Incentive evaluation and management systems also serve to create companies with a “winning culture”.
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A recent survey of 365 leaders of European, Asian and North American companies, the consulting firm Bain, found that companies with winning cultures have two characteristics: a) a unique personality or soul, which is defined as a series of attributes that differentiate it from others. and they make it difficult to imitate, and b) a series of values and behaviors, common in this type of organization, that drive it to achieve its objectives. According to Bain, these values or behaviors are:
- Having great aspirations and a desire to win: that is, the phrase: “good is not good enough”, is the main characteristic of this type of company with a “winning culture”.
- Passion and energy: as these words indicate, you always have to do things with the greatest effort, not by halves, and putting your whole soul into it.
- Focusing on the external context: do not waste time in fights or internal policies, but rather be attentive to what is happening in the environment and analyze the actions of competitors.
- That employees think like owners: that is, actions at work should not be carried out to obtain personal benefit, but should be directed to improve the operation of the company.
- Teamwork: employees can help each other to achieve goals and must always be open to discussion and debate to improve the operation of the company.
- Inclination to action: it means that ideas do not remain only in words, but that everything that is planned and agreed must be done.
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Personnel evaluation has several advantages, for example: it supports employers to obtain accurate reports on the performance of employees and helps to identify and evaluate them according to their characteristics; also, it allows establishing a work standard and contributes to integrating improvement mechanisms in the operation of the company.
On the other hand, it is necessary to pay specific attention to some of the disadvantages of evaluation systems, such as: generating a spirit of competition that is not always healthy within the organization; sometimes it promotes individualism instead of teamwork, and can cause demotivation for some employees.
Regarding personnel evaluation, there is currently a practice that Jack Welch applied when he ran General Electric (GE) and that has resurfaced and is regaining popularity: evaluating and classifying employees in relative terms, that is, not all of the same form, but from its performance.
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Thus, a certain number of collaborators was evaluated in group A (outstanding), another group as B (average performance) which was the largest, and the smallest group was classified as C (low activity), the employees who belonged the latter had to improve their performance or leave the organization.
Another practice that is making a comeback and that goes hand in hand with incentive evaluation and management systems is for managers to set very ambitious goals. This mechanism is based on a term first launched by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), that is to say, establish a big, daring and tricky objective, which in the long term guides people and the company to where they want to go, or to put it another way, that the collaborator wants to achieve what the organization needs to be successful.
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Julián Sánchez García, Professor of the Management Information and Control area at IPADE Business School. *
The opinions expressed are solely the responsibility of their authors and are completely independent of the position and editorial line of Forbes Mexico.