Performance Measurement Analysis

Every organization strives to ensure that they have the right kind of staff (people) with a collect mix of skills and technical competences. To be able to achieve their goals, an organization needs to train their employees or encourage staff to engage in training programs on the skills that they lack. The ability of staff to engage and complete these skill development programs is in some cases incorporated as part of the criteria for evaluating staff performance. The process of evaluating the performance of employees is in most organizations is ongoing. This process begins with ensuring that employees have the right skills by doing a training needs assessment (Sonnentag & Frese, 2005). Employees who have performed well are then rewarded for their performance.

The whole process involves transforming the goals of the organization into individual goals that they need to achieve. Knowledge Management Knowledge management is very important when it comes to performance management. Knowledge management is about ensuring that the employees and the manager have the know how they need. In other words, they have knowledge about performance management. The strong team maybe identified as a source of knowledge while the weaker ones are the users of the knowledge. At this time, benchmarking can also be done. This involves comparing the performance of other top or best performing companies with the performance of your firm. This is a good way to identify performance gaps if they even exist. In return, information is used to improve the performance of the organization.

They can get this intellectual knowledge from research because for the past one decade so many researchers and academicians have conducted research that addresses the issue of intellectual capital. To assess the Intellectual Capital and to implement the knowledge management initiatives are two things that should be used together. Knowledge management can be looked at in two dimensions. The first dimension portrays Knowledge management as the use of it, its development, renewal of knowledge and value creation of knowledge. The second aspect looks at Knowledge management in a more economical way. Some other projects which involve the use of ICT are also used in this perspective. The connection between knowledge management and performance of employees In order to improve the performance of employees it is always important to set targets for each employee.

Failure for the employer to set targets, will lead the employees to perform the way they have always done. This means that there will be no improvement in performance. However, setting the performance targets for each employee will make each of them, to work hard to achieve the set targets (Martina, et al. Also, the knowledge management helps to understand the needs of the employees (Liebowitz, 2004). The key thing is not to measure the impact that knowledge management has on productivity but to use the existing knowledge and to create more knowledge in order to increase the value that the stakeholders have in an organization. Intellectual Capital (IC) Intellectual capital can be defined as a summation of all the resources in an organization that determine its value and competitiveness in general (Hall & Television Education Network, 2001).

It can also be looked at as all the assets of knowledge that are connected or belong to a firm and are said to contribute to the competitiveness of the firm. Peter Drucker in 1999, said that “knowledge has become the key economic and the dominant and perhaps even the only of competitive advantage. It has a mixture of what structural and human capital connected to the relationship that the company has with stakeholders. It also includes the perception that these stakeholders have about the organization. The relational capital includes brands, customer loyalty towards the organization and distribution channels. All these three are important stimulators of intellectual capital. They should be considered when planning for innovation. The most unfortunate thing is that their knowledge is often not made available for use by others.

In an article entitled, “Business Week” written by Deborah Stead, she talks about the importance of preserving the intellectual capital. The Basic Life Support (BLS) report indicated that the loyalty of employees who are top performing dropped in 2009 by 25%. The reason is that there had been an increase in layoffs, reduction in promotion and reduction or elimination of some employee benefits programs. Such employees may leave the organization in search for better opportunities. It could be a combination of processes, knowledge and technology to be able to give the organization a competitive advantage. For instance, when handling a difficult employee, the managers could combine all the knowledge they have from past experience to be able to come up with a solution.

People are different and each is unique in their own way. Through interaction, people are able to learn something new from their partner. Exchange involves one person learning something new from their partner. People who engage in learning together as a process and have something that they share in common form the communities of practice. They have the same interests or passion for what they do and through interaction learn how to do it better. They are like an iron that sharpens another iron. The members in a community of practice often engage in common activities, discussions and help each other as well by sharing information. Their relationships help them to learn from one another. Managers may brainstorm to come up with a good employee reward system that will motivate employees to achieve the organizational goals.

They can also discuss with the employees on their needs or challenges that may hinder them from performing or rather achieving the organizational goals. Thought the term “communities of practice” was first introduced by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, the later extended and used it in other contexts like organizations. The coming up of the internet and the success of building online communities has further pushed the importance of improved knowledge management. They have been viewed as a way of promoting innovation and spreading knowledge in a group set-up. For instance, an employee may consult a fellow employee on how certain processes are conducted in the organization. The employee with more knowledge will explain to the other. An IT employee may help another by offering a proposal they wrote for a client so that the colleague may tweak it for a new client.

The sales team may consult each other on how to deal with a difficult customer and so on. In summary, before setting out the performance objectives, firms or HR managers need to conduct a Training Needs Assessment to be able to identify the training needs of the employees in an organization. Employees of a firm need to be aware of the strategy so that they can work towards achieving the goals. To achieve goals, some changes have to be put into place like employees working harder than they used to. If they are not aware of the strategy, they will maintain their status quo in terms of their performance. During the performance appraisal process, the progress should be reviewed periodically as agreed to be able to find out if the efforts are geared towards the set goals.