Performance Management a Comparison Case Studies Practices Essay

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Performance Management

A comparison case studies practices organisations United Kingdom. You choose specifically focus performance management (PM) high performance working (HPW). Research choose organisations high performance work (HPW) practices.

Performance management is a process-centric, holistic approach to company's decision making process that is intended to improve the company's capability and to manage its performance at all levels by combining stakeholders, customers, managers, and suppliers. Many companies rely on performance management to improve the quality of their management process by putting together the many different units found within the company into a stable, highly coordinated enterprise (Armstrong, 2006).

Due to the change in the business environment as a result of stiff competition from other players and globalization, companies are being forced to become more competitive and some of the ways of enabling them to achieve such length is by performance management (Cokins, 2009). In support of how performance management has an impact on a company's prosperity, here is a case study of BHP Billiton and British gas companies.

These two companies share some similarities in their performance management, in that, their managers are normally faced with several challenges while trying to manage their performance, these challenges include; strategic misalignment, local optimization, uncompetitive reaction times, unreliable decisions, slow rate of improvement, hidden knowledge and lackluster execution among others.

Both companies are diverse nature, this sometimes leads to lack of shared commitment by the employees towards the strategic goal of the company. This has made most of the company resources be wasted as some of the departments in the company pull away in a different direction. This has also strained their existence in the market as one of the largest companies dealing with natural resources. Though this might be a setback to their growth, performance management has assisted the company to shift its focus and direct it towards the same goal (Edds, 2011).

The two companies are also faced with local optimization, where the managers have a similar strategic goal which leads to them utilizing most of their resources on the same business unit hence neglecting the others. This leads to the growth of the company not being evenly spread, hence making them to spend more of the gained resources to improve on the neglected sectors (Bol, 2011). Therefore, it is important for these entire departments to work together for the overall improvement of the company.

The companies are also faced with uncompetitive reaction times, where the company is faced with various bureaucratic procedures and rigid staff members who do not to respond to the changing times. This will in the long run make them weak and unable to compete with other companies. The companies are also going through the presence of unreliable decision made by managers, this arises when majority of the managers do not have access to quality information, which has been compiled correctly and analyzed, thus making them make choices which are less relevant (Armstrong, 2006).

Another challenge is the slow rate of improvement being experienced at both companies. The companies' managers lack the courage to initiate a high level innovation which would have a major impact to the company. They in turn, rely, on the what-if scenarios analysis, to evaluate the impact of the investment they are to make; therefore, this has a great impact on the progress of a company of this size (Cokins, 2009).

Hidden knowledge is also a problem to them just like any other competitive companies. Most of the information locked away, so that another person/company may not have access to it for their own benefit, may also come with other problems such as; the innovator may decide to shift from the company hence moving with his/her innovation; also the innovative idea created by one manager cannot be shared by others. Performance management helps to tackle these challenges by having all forms of information safely documented and catalogued (Cokins, 2009).

Lastly, lackluster execution is one of the common challenges. This is because most of the plans and decisions are termed useless if they are not exploited. Performance management, therefore, assist in conveyance of the information or decision in a timely manner and even coordinates other sectors of the business such as the customer relationship management, supply chain management, employee relationship management, contract management, sales force automation and risk management so as to ensure effective delivery of results (Cokins, 2009).

BHP Billiton Company

BHP Billiton is one of the world's largest diversified natural resources. This company is known for its quality asserts, deep inventory for growth projects, customer focused marketing diversity across countries, commodities and market and petroleum business.

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With their large operation base, they require a large number of workers, which are about 40,990 employees in 25 countries. BHP Billiton majorly deal in energy coal, metallurgical coal, aluminum, manganese, iron ore, uranium, silver, nickel, titanium and have a substantial interest in oil liquefied natural gas, diamond and gas. BHP Billiton is known to value high performance from their employees and through that they have to have a proper performance management (Nankervis, 2006).

Within this company, its performance management mechanism is driven by several fundamental elements. These elements include; participants, interactive management process, management practices, conceptual framework, systems and technology (Bol, 2011).

In this company, all workers have developed a culture where they work as a team to stir the performance of the company to greater heights (Nankervis, 2006). Though, within the company, there is a network of teams, all these teams have a common goal, and their efforts are normally coordinated by their respective managers. The same managers should be able to identify abilities in their employees so as to be able to assign them roles that suit their capabilities.

In addition, this company has an interactive management process where the participant continually perform the activities, independently and jointly at the same time so as to meet their business goals.at the management level, some of their duties are to ensure a continuous cycle of maintaining some of the activities within the business, come up with the plan which will assist them to achieve their goals and developing a driving force for the plans developed. The management teams are also supposed to coordinate and work with the customers, the stakeholders, suppliers, and staff members (Risher, 2011).

Due to the large volume of operation BHP Billiton deals with, they manage to keep their activities running through having a diverse management practices. Where the management processes, business rules, metrics, participant roles and management information are all put together forms a single, consistent representation of the business operations. Their performance management practice accommodates all other local differences within the various departments it has while at the same time having a firm central control to facilitate interactions between the business units/department smooth flowing and efficient (Mithas, 2011).

BHP Billiton also has a conceptual framework which forms a bridge between the various management practices available and the systems. This conceptual framework forms a common base for all companies' management practices. Just like in most companies, the framework provides standard approaches of activities, their building blocks, and how they can interact together, these include; information processes and activities i.e. planning, monitoring, modeling etc., business rules, user roles and workspaces. BHP Billiton has also been flexible in its management strategies because some of the variety of practices may change over time, therefore; the changes may not hinder their operation because they would have had alternatives for it (Nankervis, 2006).

One of the final elements BHP Billiton has in its performance management strategy is the ability to have the best systems and technologies which is capable of involving all other company management strategies such as the Management Practices, Conceptual Framework and the Interactive Management Processes for the Participants (Seiden, 2011).

British gas

British Gas Company also uses a performance management scheme to ensure that their day-to-day activity is in line with and promote its company goals. British gas is the leading supplier of energy in the United Kingdom. British Gas has experienced steady growth over the years, and most of it is contributed by its ability to manage the performance of all employees working for it. British gas is known to have five main trading division, these include public gas supply, transportation and storage of gas, service and installation, contract trading and retail of services of its products.

British Gas Company was developed on a culture where the employees are evaluated, and they receive feedbacks immediately which will help them to make drastic changes in improving the company's image and business activities before it gets out of hand.

The company not only focuses on the goal being achieved but also how that goal will be achieved. One of the ways it does so is by offering incentive on performance which will motivate the employees towards achieving a higher performance and in the long run, both parties will benefit from the growth. Research shows that, employees motivation has a direct impact on management both in practical and theoretical perspectives. From the performance management put in….....

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