From “Performance Management” to “Motivation to Perform”

I take a step back and look at the things evolving in last 15-20 years. Waterfall Methodology of Project Management to Agile, Employee life span of 2-3 years in an organization becoming more of a acceptable standard for long tenures, Annual Performance Review to Continuous Feedback, Monthly/Annual rewards to Instant rewards, Gamification of processes to engage constantly and likewise many more. Change is constant and while the examples I gave may not seem directly related to each other but as soon as we deep dive, we will know that they are knitted closely and with many more as the underlying reason is expectations of Gen X onwards is drastically different from previous generations. Its hunger for instant gratification, recognition and depleting patience to achieve what they value

Given the changes taken place in last 20 years, how do we expect our Performance Management system to function same way as its been for last many years. So as to bring all of us on same page, I am referring below definition of Performance Management being practiced almost in every organization that I have come across so far.

Performance Management - Performance management is a?corporate management tool?that helps managers monitor and evaluate employees' work. Performance management's goal is to create an environment where people can perform to the best of their abilities and produce the highest-quality work most efficiently and effectively.
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Some salient features of the above definition are-

1. It’s a corporate management tool – Can a tool used once or twice a year really help monitor real time performance?

2. It helps managers to monitor and evaluate employee’s work – Really? And do you think employee will give same output under 2 managers? Then why it doesn’t evaluates managers ability to get the output?

3. Its goal is to create environment – Really? I haven’t seen any performance management tool creating an conducive environment so far.

4. It helps people to perform to the best of their abilities and produce highest quality output – Is it so? Or it makes colleagues compete against each other and mostly dedicate time and energy in proving that they have done better than other?

By adopting this definition and tools to corroborate, it appears to me that we have somehow adopted something wrong from core manufacturing industry, which was probably not meant for an evolving knowledge based industry that requires more of imagination, invention and continuous challenges to provoke high performance using creativity and enable motivation with an end result of contentment of each employee.

Then the question arises as to what could be a tool which can measure ingredients of performance that ensures high performance instead of performance itself. My opinion is that we need to do lot of thinking in arriving at such a tool which can measure below

1. Ability of manager to create conducive environment for employees to perform without fear of failing

2.?Systematic approach through which employees are given tasks that are challenging

3.?Process though which employee is been supported with best practices followed in organization to complete the task instead of letting wheel reinvented

4.?Rewarding not only employees for their outcome but also managers who could consistently groom employees to perform

5.?System which does not put employee/teams/departments against each other for comparison but instead evaluates collaboration

6.?Finally recognizing “consistently improved performance” instead of “consistent performance” and thereby underlying motivation and mindset to excel.

Friends, I know these are inconsistent asks from the performance management tool and to an extent doesn’t appear to be possible as of now so most of us would hook ourselves up to status quo by merely negating the genuineness of the ask or even the possibility of having them in tool but is not trying a solution? Continuing with something that is being there by virtue of early adopters in pursuit to have something a solution? Worst of all, continuing with the mindset that the complete onus of performance is on employee and managers are just to evaluate is the solution specially with this generation that expects drastically different at work and real life.