When market conditions are challenging, it is important to maximize the performance of your workforce. Luckily, human performance experts have learned a lot about the behaviors and contributing factors that affect performance. And their findings can help you avoid spending significant resources on workforce development initiatives that may not ultimately fix problems. You just need to learn to think differently about performance improvement.
Performance Thinking, a methodology crafted by Dr. Carl Binder, lays out a scientifically sound way to improve human performance. It draws from the findings of behavioral psychology experts and is a great place to start when seeking a better way to enhance workforce performance.
Performance Thinking is about making the connection between team members' workplace behaviors and the business results they influence. It helps you think through what business results are valuable and what work outputs affect those results. Then it helps you analyze how employee behaviors affect their outputs and what factors influence those behaviors. Finally, it helps you adjust behavioral influences to create value for the business.
Performance Thinking encourages us to focus on improving and measuring employees' ability to accomplish, not just learn. It emphasizes equipping the employee to produce high-quality outputs by addressing factors that prevent them from doing so. Performance Thinking helps you avoid investing heavily in development initiatives that don't drive lasting value because they focus on solving the wrong problem (e.g., enhancing knowledge through training) rather than finding out what is limiting accomplishment and addressing that.
Performance Thinking introduces a framework called the Six Boxes Model for organizing behavioral influences affecting workplace behavior. Certified Performance Thinking practitioners work through these boxes to help clients find opportunities to better equip team members to create valuable, high-quality work outputs. The model identifies the right behavioral influences to adjust to achieve desired goals.
Here is an example of how the model could be used to determine what behavioral influences are at play and what interventions should be pursued to improve an employee's performance:
1. Expectations and feedback: Are expectations of the employee clear to them, and are they receiving well-articulated feedback on whether they are meeting expectations?
2. Tools and resources: Does the employee have the reference materials, process documents, templates or other tools necessary to do their job effectively?
3. Consequences and incentives: Are there consequences for performance deficits or incentives for strong performance in place to motivate the employee to exhibit desired behaviors?
4. Skills and knowledge: Does the employee have the appropriate skillset and knowledge to do their job effectively?
5. Selection and assignment: Is the employee in the right role, and do they have the capacity to perform their job well?
6. Motivation and preferences: Does the employee have a positive attitude about their work, and are they motivated?
To apply Performance Thinking, start by determining your desired business results, accomplishments needed to reach them, standards for what "good" looks like, and what behaviors are needed to reach those standards. Delve then into the behavior influences that affect your team members' ability to perform well.
We applied the Six Boxes method with the Radcom operations team to improve our process for providing instructional design services. We focused on enhancing the quality and consistency of instructional designers' outputs (specifically the "design document" that serve as a blueprint for learning programs), reducing the amount of time project managers spend getting consultants up to speed, and more proactively dealing with recurring issues.
We identified opportunities for behavioral influence improvement across nearly all of the six areas. For example, in the expectations and feedback box, we recognized an opportunity to create a guidebook laying out tasks, behaviors, criteria and checklists as a roadmap for design document development. We also saw the value in developing an "exemplar library" that provides examples of projects that meet our quality standards.
Based on our findings from working through other boxes, we are working on creating an incentives-based compensation system, setting up a program for coaching, adding more touchpoints throughout projects and training our team to use new tools. We plan to create guidelines for all our instructional designers' accomplishments, and we are finding the interventions we develop to improve our instructional design process can positively impact the rest of our business.
Performance Thinking offers you a framework to not only productively deal with ongoing performance challenges, but boost the success (and happiness) of your team members and customers.
Longo is vice president of operations for Hudson's Radcom Services, which develops training, technical and process documentation.
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October 17, 2020 at 03:00PM
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Adviser: Are your performance improvement initiatives focusing on the right factors? - Crain's Cleveland Business
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