Performance Management Motivation
Introduction
After careful examination, evaluation, assessment and analysis of data, it's the prerogative of every study to point out how the aims and objectives of the research were met, which is what this chapter aims to do. It points out how the respective objectives were realized and tries to give an answer to the research question. The chapter also encapsulates specific recommendations and discusses the limitations of the study and areas where further research may be carried out.
Conclusions
For performance management to be successful, organizations need to realize that is a tool which helps them to translate their plan into action and is a way of executing strategy. Research findings highlight the importance of performance management and establish strong correlation between performance management and motivation. Successful performance management systems not only assess employees in terms of performance but also behavior. Also, they have to be closely tied in with the employee career structure. Employee motivation does not only tie in to rewards and recognition but also to proper career direction. Leadership, besides supporting the performance management program, should also have a career structure for their employees to get them intrinsically and extrinsically motivated. The reward structure and the incentive package should be intrinsically linked to the PMS. Besides, the system should also make sure that the departmental goals are in line with the organizational objectives. The study found out that there was a missing linkage between individual performance and departmental performance and between departmental performance and the company performance. Eg. The employees ddi not know what their bigger objective was and how their individual objective affected the company objective. An effective PMS should strive to establish clear links between objectives at every level.
For the effectiveness of its PMS, HBOS has to make sure that it is valued by its employees and managers have trust in it and are willing to put faith in it. Managers should be given proper training and should have the strength to run it. Appraisals should be honest and try to reduce subjectivity. Transparency of the ratings or the scoring criteria also helps to give employees a better understanding of what they are looking to achieve. In this way, employees know what attributes and behaviors are important for the organization. It was mentioned in the review of literature that increasing visibility of the performance management system and the related metrics tends to clear the air of confusion in employees minds. Ideally, organizations should have a session explaining their performance measures so that the employees fully understand why and how they are rated or scored. It has been found that when employees know what they are rated on, they perform better and there is an increasing desire to come true to expectations.
The three aspects which should form an essential ingredient of the performance management system are program design, leadership support and effective execution. Apart from this, systems that capture and measure performance also play a vital role. Organizations have to make sure that the systems are reliable and measure what they are meant to measure. Simplicity of the whole performance management process is also important. Both managers and employees have to understand the process which means the tools in place should be simple to understand and implement and convenient to access. Execution of PMS is as much of an issue with call centers as development and managers have to make sure that the development plan considers the implementation and the management aspects of it. Primary data findings from this research highlight that minimal attention was paid to the management aspect of performance management systems during the time of development. Managers and strategists need to foresee the ease of PMS management. For the PMS to be successful, it has to have elements of goal-setting and coaching.
HBOS was good at completing appraisals and taking feedbacks from employees and most managers did complete their reviews on time. Its outbound call center had a positive work setting, where work was increasingly customized to the needs of the customer. There was no hard and fast script following and employees had the autonomy to change the script as per their or the customers requirements. The small team structure also helped in effective management of PMS. Managers did try to empower employees by asking them to train junior employees or new starters. Sometimes, employees were asked to document best practices within the call center.
It is worth pointing out that even though performance management concerns the employees, it is not an out an out human resources and personnel system for individuals. There is no single performance management system which can be generically said to be good. The design, structure, metrics and the measures included in the performance management system depends on various factors. The size of call center, how well the PMS system is linked to objectives, the structure of the call centre, the systems measuring the performance, the importance of PMS to the management; all determine the structure of performance management systems. It was highlighted in the analysis chapter that HBOS used benchmarking as a way of comparing its KPI's with those of its competitors. Organizations need to careful when they use benchmark tools as other organization using different KPI's may have different objectives. Benchmarking of KPIs should be done against those having similar goals and objectives.
Motivation did play a crucial role in call centers where attrition is very high. HBOS' set of metrics and measures, reward structure and recognition schemes did motivate employees in the short term. Its easy to get employee excited and motivated over a period of time with a particular reward scheme, but its difficult to maintain the motivation levels. Once the momentum is lost, performance begins to suffer. Also, the danger with reward schemes are that it raises the employees hopes. Every time employees hits the target, they expect to be rewarded and when this does not happen, they are disillusioned which slowly turns into dissatisfaction. Call centers have to tread a very fine line between rewarding employees regularly for their performance but at the same time not creating a ‘reward' structure within the organization. PMS should have equal ingredients of recognition and ingredients whereby employees are recognized through appreciation letters or certificates. HBOS does have a successful recognition scheme in place which employees value (the scheme was mentioned the findings and analysis chapter). Its PMS was robust and tightly integrate business improvement and analytical methods, but it not involve the employees to the extent that it should.
Recommendations
To keep employees motivated and for motivation to have a direct affect on performance, organizations have to understand the process, theories, and fundamental components of motivation. They will then have to relate the effects of motivation on job performance, once this is done, only then it will be able to redesign the job according to this. The job re-design should be carried out in line with the employee expectations. Re-designing a job without knowing the employees preferences and the extent to which that would motivate them would not help in improving performance.
An increased interest has been developed in ideas concerned generally with the quality of working life in call centers and aspects of organizational change, job redesign and increased employee participation are seen as conducive to this. From the employees perspective, the motivation to make a difference is not merely shaped by the opportunities for impact that a job offers. One of the key findings of the research is that effective management of job design to be a good predictor of organizational survival and growth in call centres. Work re-design can influence productivity directly by changing employee competencies and levels of motivation which result in a quicker/better execution of the process. Job re-design also provides greater variety and autonomy and thus has positive effects on employees attitudes and well-being. This leads to a strong psychological attachment and organizational identification (Haslam, 2004) for the employees which goes on to improve work motivation high job satisfaction, personal accomplishment, and low turnover intentions) and well-being (lower health complaints, lower emotional exhaustion and depersonalization).
- The introduction of alternative work schedules as a form of job redesign in call centers will help to influence employees' ability to do their work and simultaneously meet their family responsibilities. Workers control of the timing and location of work helps them manage potential conflicts between work and personal life. To achieve this, employers can consider options such as flex-time, reduced hours, job sharing. Alternative job schedules can help improve employee satisfaction, reduced absenteeism, loyalty, stability, and productivity. It is also believed that employees are more likely to remain with organizations that offer them the flexibility to design or modify their work schedule. HBOS can use work redesign as an effective retention tool.
- Job rotation is another job redesign measure which can be adopted by call centers. It entails retaining the same basic task structure as before, but with individual workersbecoming less specialized, rotating between different, at specified time periods. The aim should be to relieve boredom or monotony by greater work variety; the extent to which it does so depends upon the degree of difference between the rotated jobs and the rate of rotation. Job rotation should seek to extend the work which people have to do by changing the work itself. HBOS has to make sure that it involves adding extra tasks or activities to the existing content of the job, so that the job incumbent carries out something closer to a work cycle or sequence rather than one specific phase of the sequence. The aim should be to provide not only greater work variety but also to produce a sense of creating something and of using skills in the plural. This has been seen as being conducive to satisfaction in work
- Reduction of subjectivity in assessment also helps to motivate employees. Once employees are clear on their accountabilities and behavioral competencies and understand how the different attributes are scored, they will be more objective driven and motivated to perform. This means that the metrics HBOS uses to measure performance should be quantifiable.
The question, however, will always remain whether it would be possible to increase the motivating potential of work (e.g., task variety, task significance, task completeness) given the strongly restricted nature of the work setting in call centers. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of job impact on the organization, it is useful for organizations to examine the dimensions of the construct that capture the extent of opportunities for impact that the job redesign provides. It should take into consideration factors such as the magnitudeof impact of redesign or the degree of the potential effects of redesign. The scope of impact or the number or breadth of people potentially affected by the job and the frequency of impact (how often the job provides opportunities for affecting others).
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