The 15% Solution

• Peter Drucker taught us that 35% of the efforts of good people in an average organization are spent doing the wrong things very well.  35%!       
• The average turnover is 12.5% per year.  More than half of the people that leave are the wrong half - the ones the organization wants to keep.
• Thirty percent of people hired into a company leave within the first 5 years.  They are generally the best performers who can do better elsewhere.
• Sixty percent of the people who leave say they leave because of their boss, not the organization.
• Chief executives report that between 10% and 15% of the staff ought to be working somewhere else.  They are often the marginal contributors who have no desire or ambition to leave.
• Eighty percent of your staff hates performance reviews – most find them useless and bureaucratic.
• Well over 75% of the population feels they are underpaid, when in fact, most are not.
• Seventy percent of the staff feels policies are inconsistent and decisions are made on the basis of personal relationships and politics.
• Half of the staff feels leadership is lacking in the organization.

What if there was just a 15% decrease in the unfavorable numbers? 

Higher levels of productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, alignment, focus, time, quality of life, morale, enthusiasm, creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, time, personal and professional growth and development …. success.  

How can you significantly improve the effective of your organization? 

Easy.  Dump the bureaucracy and replace it with “best practice” policies and practices so that effective management is on autopilot and you can concentrate on business problems instead of management processes.

• What if you had an alignment process that started with your mission statement and defined “how” it could be accomplished by developing a series of explicit “performance objectives” at every level and for every person in the organization?  And what if this were an explicit part of your performance management process?
• Consider that half the people that leave are the people you didn’t want to leave.  What if you had a program that identified the top and bottom half of the organization and treated each differently so that the top 10% stayed and the bottom 10% didn’t?  Do you really have room for people that chronically contribute at lower than standards levels and shift work to others?
• What if you had a recruiting program that was twice as effective as your current process in that it included effective sourcing of candidates using the latest technology and effective screening and selection of candidates using the latest “best practices” such as the use of scorecards, case-studies, behavioral and values profiling, and others.  Sound expensive?  So what exactly is your turnover and what does it cost?
• What if you had a performance review process that was in the middle of a performance management process that started with the planning and goal-setting process, moved to periodic performance reporting and then to periodic performance evaluations followed by explicit plans to improve operating results as well as the skills, knowledge, attributes – the talents of the staff.
• What if you could credibly report how your compensation targets are determined, the performance basis and why people are paid they way they are?
• What if you could eliminate bureaucracy in favor of performance management principles and policies that facilitated versus interfered with the leadership and management role of the management staff?
• What if you leadership and management team had access to the same level of training and development as the world-class, “best practice” companies that have the resources do to it?
• What if you had a process of generic ladders that provided upward mobility for people to stay in the same job for longer periods of time without becoming stale.
What if you increased efficiency, effectiveness and productivity by developing, communicating and managing explicit performance objectives for every single person and team in the organization, based on an explicit and well communicated mission statement?
What if we eliminated the undesired turnover and increased the desired turnover?

Why 15%?  That’s about average:  Well performing companies will benefits less from updating these processes. Some will have more dramatic increases because they are bumping along using outdated bureaucratic systems and processes. 

What can you do with this 15%?  You apply it to accomplishing the mission instead of pushing the bureaucracy.   

What’s the certain result?  Higher levels of productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, alignment, focus, quality of life, morale, enthusiasm, creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, personal and professional growth and development - success. Less undesired turnover, poor performance, bureaucracy, grousing, dissipated energy.

All of this is empirical information and describes the average US Company.  So how is your company doing compared to these averages?

Click HERE to find out !

For More Information
To learn more about how the 360° Review Process can help your training and development mission, please contact Performance Management, Inc., at (203) 359-3322 or E-mail us at info@performancemgt.com.

WWW www.performancemgt.com