Managing People And Groups In The Global Workplace Research Paper Samples

Business

Introduction
Performance appraisal systems are essential for the management of performance of employees in an organization, to suitably reward them and retain them. The paper presents an effective performance appraisal system for a marketing executive employed in a multinational corporation (MNC).
The thesis statement for the present paper is that effective performance management systems can contribute a great deal in management of employee performance in an organization.

Context: The Position and its Key Responsibilities

The research is conducted on optimum performance appraisal strategy, the requirement of the suggested appraisal and its ensuing benefits are based on the position of a marketing communications executive working in a multinational organization.
2.1 Job Responsibilities of Present position (Marketing Communications Executive):
In this research paper the position for which the performance is to be appraised is that of a Marketing communication Executive working in an MNC and the key responsibilities pertaining to this position are:

Development and implementation of Marketing Communication strategy

Coordinating with the Sales team, vertical head, senior management, internal and external stakeholders for devising content for Market communication and Corporate Communication.

Public Relation – Conceptualizing Press releases and pushing it to relevant media

Event marketing, promotion and management
Brand Development and recall activities
Alliance development and relation maintenance with creative agencies.
Theoretical Framework
3.1 Main Purpose and Requirements of an Effective Performance Appraisal System
An effective performance appraisal system goes a long way in satisfying and motivating an employee. A competitive, dedicated and hardworking employee is intrigued and inquisitive to know how he has performed or what his line manager or superiors think of his performance? Has he been able to fulfill his seniors’ expectations? As a lot of resources is invested in recruiting and training employees before they start delivering so it is important that their performance objectives are aligned to company goals and they work towardsachieving the same. An optimum Performance appraisal system helps to figure out the loopholes in an employee’s performance and the reasons behind the gap created.
An effective Performance appraisal system is extremely important as it helps in charting the growth path and development of both the employee and the organization. It is significant in determining the following:

Promotions

Rewards, benefits and recognitions
Termination/lay offs
Transfers
Compensation decisions
Training and development needs of employees
Above all it is a mechanism of feedbackon performance and acts as a report card to the annual/half yearly/quarterly performance of an employee.

Proposed Performance Appraisal System

3.2 Basis of performance appraisal system:
The case in hand orients setting an optimum performance appraisal system for a marketing executive working in a multinational firm. The research has been executed on the basis of the following steps:
Hailing from the background of Marketing communication- a job that entails good communication with internal departments (senior management, sales force, investors, finance, vertical managers), connecting with external customers (to gauge brand position, image and expectations), creativity (behavioral traits of employee) to translate the vision and mission into collaterals, Print ads, TVCs, online propertiesetc., it is important for such an employee to feel that he is getting a good shot at an open, authentic and liberal feedback system. Keeping this in view the 360 degree feedback system would prove extremely effective.
But in order to ensure that though free-flowing and creative but the objectives of the liberally thinking Marketing executive does not deviate from the company’s objective, the Goal setting theory will ensure that the marketing executive’s objectives and goals are within practical realms of actual business objectives.
Most importantly to anchor the Marketing executive’s performance on robust and significant parameters, the Balanced score-card would be involved in appraising the performance, as it would give an all pervading view of the work delivered by the marketing executive, adjudged by the most significant determinants of the business.
Lastly the relevance, practicality, sensitivity, reliability, acceptability , legal issues, nepotism, biases, cultural differences and other implications ensuing from the performance appraisal system has been covered

Four things are very important while adjudging the choice of approach for a performance appraisal system:

Objective and goals of the organization
Objectives and targets set for the employee
Readiness(how prepared is the organization) of the organization to deploy the suggested Performance Appraisal System
Feedback and queries of the employee once he has or they have been communicated about the performance appraisal policies.
3.3 360 Degree Feedback
In sync with the aforesaid parameters a 360 degree performance appraisal feedback is suggested that incorporates Goal setting theory and an effective strategic tool-the Balanced Scorecard theory.
First and foremost the 360 degree performance appraisal system will help in collecting a cumulative feedback about an employee’s performance from his work environment. It would facilitate feedback from peers and teammates, from immediate supervisors, line managers, head of departments, senior management and cross departments. This would give a holistic view as to how the efforts and service put in by an employee is being valued and perceived by everyone else in the system as well as the employee, yes the employee also gets to give his ratings and feedback regarding how he feels and thinks he has performed.This system proves to cater to the need of relevance, sensitivity, reliability, acceptability of employees within an appraisal system .
3.4 Steps for Implementation
But it is extremely important to set the business environment ready to implement the 360 degree feedback system. It has been witnessed that many organizations that implement the 360 degree feedback system is not able to implement it efficiently owing to systems and resources not being in place and updated to meet the appraisal system’s requisitions. It is necessary to follow the below enumerated steps:
Elaborately communicate the need for everyone in the system to actively participate in giving their feedback and share their unbiased viewpoints, i.e. no nepotism while grading their colleagues/seniors/juniors.

Explain the metrics and policies involved in appraising and evaluating an employee

Provide training and implement an online-IT based system as there will be multiple feedbacks and algorithms might be needed to arrive at aggregate scores or grades of every individual employee.
Encourage a strong feedback system wherein employees can share and negotiate their opinion about parameters, metrics and objectives enclosed in the evaluation sheets.
Employees should be convinced that the parameters enclosed or policies involved are relevant to them-i.e.their career growth path and job arena and sensitive to their feelings - for instance over-gratifying one department and ignoring another department’s achievement might bruise feelings. It is a reliable and authentic representation of actual performance delivered basis, which employees might get a pink slip or a double promotion. So the accuracy of this process is very, very important.
Lastly, as this appraisal system value every employees’ opinion, so the result of such an evaluation would be widely acceptable without much resistance or lengthy negotiationsfor the employees appraised thereof.
But while executing the 360 degree approach we also need to factor in the weight-age given to feedback from different avenues. While the overall evaluation will consider rating provided by cross department and employees across all levels of hierarchy, but one might include a higher weight-age corresponding to feedback from senior management and line managers , immediate bosses of the employee appraised vis-à-vis an evaluation from a cross department junior colleague or the evaluation coming from a new junior resource in the organization. The latter’s evaluation may be given a lower weight-age comparatively. This would render the 360 degree feedback more relevant.
3.5 Goal Setting Theory
Secondly the framework of the suggested performance appraisal model needs to stay within the realms of Goal alignment or Goal setting theory .
Goal alignment as its name suggests, reflects alignment between organizational goals and objectives of each employee working within the organization. More often there is a gap between the objectives of the corporate and the goals set to its internal customers i.e. employees. In such a corporate environment, even if an employee over delivers, it will seldom do any good to the firm and so his good efforts and hard work will go unrecognized. Finally the lack of recognition and appreciation will result into an extremely dissatisfied employee, one who stops taking a proactive interest in his job and loses motivation to carry on further progress. This disconnect arises because the employee’s objectives are not directed towards the overall organizational goals. To bridge this gap an organization needs to re-instate the objective of each employee in the department from the C-level official to the junior executives in the smallest business units or their Ancillaries.
3.6 Balanced Score Card
Lastly the suggested performance appraisal system needs to inculcate the coherent measures explained under the Balance scorecard. This strategic management tool defines the vision and mission of an organization in the performance evaluation system.
The Balance scorecard rests on four pillars and describes the a) Objectives, b) Measures, c) Targets and d) Initiatives for each of these fourcriteria:

Financial measures- To achieve our financial goal how should we appear to our shareholders?

Customers’ viewpoint- To achieve our Vision and strategic goals, how our customers shouldperceive us?
Internal Business Process – To achieve the prior twoparameters, i.e. shareholders’ and customers’ satisfaction, what internal business processes need to be worked and improved upon?
Training and development- In order to achieve our Vision and strategic goals, how would we sustain our ability todevelop and improve ourselves?
These four parameters lay significant weight age to the most important arena if an organization and its employees are poised for growth and attainment of once vision transitioning it from mere words to practical and tangible success.
In addition, in parlance to the case in hand- the marketing executive belongs to a multi-national corporation so it is important to inculcate Cultural customizations when dealing with the performance Appraisal system within the wire-frame of MNC’s .
Culture, communications and goal setting -Cultures across the world are varied in terms of gestures, expression, languages, etc. While levying the appraisal system we need to fine tune distribution of targets and communicate the same basis the perception and interpretation of respective cultures.
Rewards basis culture- Some cultures look down at personal recognition and promote teamwork versus individualistic cultures where aggressive individual competition is promoted. The reward of the former and latter organizations needs to be attuned to these sensitive reward acceptance cultures.
4. Components of Proposed Performance Appraisal System
360 degrees feedback that includes inputs from the employees, managers, peers, and customers about employee performance

A rating system shall be used to rate employees on the basis of their performance

Employees shall be rated on a scale of 0-10 for skills such as communication, performance, entrepreneurship (initiatives) and creativity.
Employees that will be rated between 8-10 shall be rated high performers, 6-8 will be good performers, 4-6 will be average performers and between 0-4 will be poor performers.

Employees that consistently rate higher on the appraisal system shall be promoted to higher positions.

Employees rating lower shall be provided assistance by managers to improve their performance.
Merits of New Performance Appraisal System
The new performance appraisal system has the following benefits:
Employee performance measurement by employees, peers, managers and customers that provide a 360 degree view of employee performance.
Employee feedback mechanisms to improve performance.
Motivation and rewards for consistently performing employees.
Training and development to improve the performance of employees
The new performance management system is reliable as it measures the performance of marketing communication executives through a complete 360 degrees feedback, sensitive as it incorporates the feedback of various stakeholders and suggests changes through training and development, relevant as it provides a transparent method of employee appraisals, acceptable as the system allows room for the growth and development of employees and practical in approach as it can be implemented in an organizational set-up.

Conclusion

The research paper discusses the ideal and optimal processes for conducting one of the most important functions of the Human resource department and the senior management i.e. performance appraisal. While it is very important to accurately and justifiably appraise and reward an employee to keep him motivated and disclose the realistic fruition of his initiatives, but it is also very important to consider that no matter how complex, intricate and detailed a performance appraisal system is but until and unless it is deployed and monitored accurately it might have some grave consequences. The most important of all such consequences is legal issues.
For example, if post a performance feedback, an employee of an organization is terminated because he or she has a bad evaluation, then it must validate. Termination letters or transfers should not be handled loosely based on an evaluation that lacks authentic evidence, seem pronouncedly biased, or are based on lesser important attributes. Most often in such scenarios, it has been observed that lawsuits filed against firm’s with loopholes in their performance appraisal system have lead to maligning their names in the job market leading to apprehensions and pushing away good prospects from joining such organizations.
Besides particularly in the suggested 360 degree feedback approach it is important to keep in mind that it will be quite a challenge to seek accurate and relevant feedback from cross department and levels of hierarchy. For instance: a senior manager of sales may be completely unaware about the presence of a junior R&D researcher and thus the senior manager’s appraisal, assessment would not be relevant to the actual performance of the junior researcher.
In addition, other errors and issues such as lack of evidence, assessment disconnected from rewards, no comprehensive team assessment, no second review, cross comparisons, no process goals, forced ranking issues, gender bias, personal preferences all intervenes and render several performance appraisal processes ineffective.
So it is extremely important to clearly spell out a detailed full proof appraisal system basis macro and micro economic environment and with a keen eye on the person being adjudged. In the case in hand a Marketing communication executive would never be appraised justifiably if he is subjected to a pay for performance model as the nature of work here cannot be easily identified in numeric and tangible achievements. On the other hand the pay for performance model would have been successful while conducting a short term evaluation and gratifying a front line sales personnel.
Thus, it is suggested to work out a combination of 360 degree feedback and limit it with organizational objectives through goal alignment system. Finally, itis suggested to ratify the performance from four very important angles-stake holders, customers, internal business processes and individual employee growth needs. This performance appraisal system if launched online after elaborate communication, training, feedback about the system, negotiation and strictly adhering to legal grounds, then the chances of succeeding with such a feedback mechanism are extremely bright.
The thesis statement has been appropriately emphasized in the paper and it is correct to state that effective performance management systems can contribute a great deal in management of employee performance in an organization.

References

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