Employee performance and ultimately organisation effectiveness has and will always be an area of interest for modern societies.  Preoccupation with employee performance appraisal has been at the heart of all human capital endeavours for at least the past 15 years. The result was that organisations spent large amounts of money introducing performance appraisal systems largely on the advice of big consulting firms.  Performance appraisal systems brought such practices as performance based pay, quarterly and/or annual performance appraisals, which were largely organisation wide driven as opposed to manager and employee owned.

These are very much policy based with the result that some people are very cynical about them. At best they are seen as compliance and at worst a waste of everybody's time. Organisations have been doing everything in their power to introduce and maintain these systems as most leading lights in the corporate space have been saying that in order to become high performance organisations, one must 'introduce a
performance appraisal system of one sort or the other'.

In fact to this day, laggards in the corporate development space are still shopping around for the best 'performance appraisal system/software'. They are totally oblivious to the proverbial cat thrown among the pigeons by the greatest proponents of performance appraisal systems, the big consulting firms, needless to say, after making fortunes on these.

Accenture although not the first, was one of the big consulting firms leading the pack in ditching the
performance appraisal system.  In mid 2015 its leader, Pierre Nanterme, reportedly announced that he was going to free his 330 000 employees from the charade of the annual job appraisal.  Nanterme explained, "We are not sure that spending all that time in performance management has been yielding such a great outcome".  His reasoning was that people do not want to wait for the annual performance appraisal cycle to know how they were doing!

What now? Does this mean that employee performance is not as important as it was purported to be when performance appraisals were introduced. To the contrary, the thinking is that day to day employee performance is so important and critical that it has to be evaluated and employees given feedback there and then, therefore instant performance management.  Instant performance management is making employee performance to be manager and employee driven as it used to be. In my view this is restoring the otherwise 'lost' manager ' employee relationship, which depended less on corporate policy compliance cycles but more on exercising efficient management and effective leadership by
managers.

The proponents of this change explain that the modern day workplace has people who crave instant gratification and therefore want to know now if they are doing okay or not. They want to know now where they stand with you as a manager or employee. All because they are free to be, do and go as and
when it feels right to do so.

The implications for this shift in thinking are vast as organisations would have to empower supervisors and employees in the art and science of leadership and management respectively, so that organisation effectiveness is not compromised.

The reality is that instant performance management is in and annual performance reviews are out. Progressive organisations are already working out the practicalities of this inevitable transition. Hopefully no one is burying their head in the sand. 

musa@hrmatters.co.za,
www.hrmatters.co.za