Text 3 What is Performance Management? Definitions

Performance Management is a constant communication process when the performance manager and the employee are:

• identifying and describing essential job functions on the basis of the mission and goals of the organisation

• developing realistic and appropriate performance standards

• giving and receiving feedback about performance

• writing and communicating constructive performance appraisals

• planning education and development opportunities to improve employee work performance.

Employee is the person whose performance is managed.

Performance Standards are written statements describing how well a job must be performed.

Performance Appraisal is a process of assessing, summarizing, and developing the work performance of an employee.

The performance management process begins with analysis and description of the job. The performance manager identifies essential func­tions in the job description and the strategic mission and goals of the department or organisational unit. In cooperation with the employee standards of minimum acceptable performance are developed for the position. Additionally, standards for performance that exceeds expec­tations may be set to encourage the employee to reach even better re­sults.

During the appraisal period (typically one year), the performance manager observes the performance of the employee, focusing on help­ing the employee to achieve successful performance. At the end of the appraisal period, and in collaboration with the employee, the perfor­mance manager prepares and writes a final copy of the written perfor­mance appraisal.

At any point in the process, the employee and performance man­ager may identify needs and create a plan for employee education, training or development in job- or career-related areas.

Text 4

Is there a place for time in corporate Utopia?

Employees of SAS Institute live in a workers' Utopia. On the company's wooded cam­pus in North Carolina is everything a person could need: doctors, dentists, on-site childcare, masseurs...

SAS has just been chosen by Fortune magazine as one of the best companies to work for in the US. Like the other 99 companies singled out, SAS is not content to reward employees with a mere pay cheque. Instead, the company is dead set on mak­ing their lives easier.

Indeed, there is little these good employers will not do to take the load off their work­ers' shoulders. Some provide subsidised housekeepers. Some deliver ready-cooked gourmet meals to employees' doors in the evening. Others offer haircuts, free Viagra, cut-price sushi, free ergonomic chairs. One company even provides $10,000 towards the cost of adopting a child.

Not content with the above, some employers are helping their staff fill their leisure hours too. Many offer swim­ming pools and fitness centres, some arrange guitar lessons or provide garden allotments. Some even lay on company holidays, whisking workers and their partners off to luxury island locations.

And that is not all: some companies also set the standard for employees to follow in their private lives. At First Tennessee, employees get a S130 cash bonus if they are seen to be practising 10 specified healthy behaviour pat­terns.

For these forward-looking employers the vexed problem of work / life balance - assumed to be one of the greatest workplace issues facing us is magically elimi­nated. These companies are mounting a take-over bid for their employees' lives with the result that the issue of balance no longer arises.

And at these companies hardly anyone ever leaves. Which might mean everyone is gloriously happy. Or it might mean the prospect of severing one's entire life from an employer is so daunting that it seems easier to stay put.

Amid all this bounty there is just one thing that none of these companies offer. And that is time. If employers really want to show that they are helping employees bal­ance their lives, the answer is not to do their shopping, fix their teeth and issue them with laptops so that they can work 'flexibly' right through the night. It is to ensure that people do not work too hard. To write it into the company's culture that no one will be expected to work more than, say, 40 hours a week on average. And for the Chief Executive to show the way.

Certainly this would not be easy, and probably not cheap either. But an employer that tackled the long-hours culture would be reaching the parts that all the free hair­dos, Viagra and guitar lessons in the world will never reach.