Balanced Scorecards – A New Approach to Performance Evaluation
The art of management is not an easy one. It involves the process of achieving organizational goals engaging in functions as planning, organizing, leading and controlling. Managing the workforce is even more difficult. This task is an on-going activity interrelated with constant vigilance at all levels.
This vigilance or performance evaluation of employees is crucial to the organization as it influences the phenomenon of reciprocity amongst the organization which signifies that individuals anticipate that there actions will be reimbursed one way or the other by the organization. Since corporate entities have to deal with human expectations to meet and exceed them with humans evaluating them the process is prone to subjectivity which marks it as one of the most difficult of tasks.
However, since the time numbers have been invented mankind has come to know the power of miracles. Isn’t it just wonderful to identify the important inputs in a situation once, assign them maximum and minimum limits to be achieved and then rate the actual occurrences to gauge the degree to which they have been successful?
Well, in today’s era Balanced Scorecard is one of the leading softwares that merges the magic of numbers with that of effective management, using its dominant feature of ‘indicators’ or ‘metrics’ that measure and control the performance of HR department and can be integrated into the human resource management system for a holistic approach to performance evaluation of employees.
This helps each department of the organization to personalize the performance indicators according to the departmental goals and makes tasks more specific to be accomplished while the higher management can focus on larger perspective of performance.
Performance evaluation is a critical task which requires efficient, specific and sophisticated technology to attain accuracy in results. Softwares like Balanced Scorecards identify the symbolic performance indicators like attendance, productivity hours, length of employment, turnover rate, turnover cost etc. that are assigned numerical values to track the changes occurring at every step. This quantifies the data and it can be viewed and analyzed easily saving the most valuable resource of time for all.
Such a support system with integrated Performance evaluation tools provides meaningful performance feedback and enables ease of analyses for job improvement. It also assists by laying out a plan for future career development, identifying resources and tools and recognizing personal achievements. The use of strategy maps in this software serves as a formal documentation of numerous actions such as training, performance and improvement needs, recognition of goal, actual performances, reward system, job redesign, and discipline. It identifies the potential in employees and building the resource pool for the organizations. It bring to life the past performances though its active visualizations and lays a roadmap for future assigning the goals, strategies, missions and services needed of them while reinforcing a sense of accountability.
