6 tips for delivering successful Primed Performance

March 11, 2019
Jon Ainger

In my previous blogpost ‘Remembering why you get out of bed in the morning and come to work’, I wrote about ‘Primed’ performance – the importance of reconnecting the workforce both to their moral purpose (which gets them out of bed in the morning) and to the need to deliver measurable results. In this follow up, I want to set out a bit more detail about how we achieve this – using a new approach to performance management, Primed Performance Management.

What makes our approach different? The key to this lies in the first step – which traditional approaches often miss out – which is to find out if the team members know why their team exists.

We classify the current state of the team in terms of clarity of purpose:

Poor

Good

There is no clear purpose and objectives
Staff are not aware how they contribute to overall performance of the service

There is some idea of a purpose and objectives, but these are inconsistent and are not regularly reviewed
Staff are not aware of how they contribute to the purpose and objectives

There is a clear purpose and set of objectives for the whole service and each service area
The purpose and objectives are updated to reflect current priorities
Staff are signed up to the purpose and objectives and understand how they contribute to them.

This focus on the purpose of the service, rather than on efficiency or cost, makes the discussion meaningful to staff at all levels and provides the basis for driving the desired behaviours.

Here are my top 6 tips for delivering high quality Primed Performance Management in your service:

Realistic performance expectations take into account demand spikes, team capacity, sickness etc and will vary across the year – so factor this in.
30% of the success of the approach is down to the data you record – and 70% is down to what you do with it.
Think carefully about group dynamics when bringing people together; there are often historic performance issues in the room. Taking time to understand team and individual concerns before starting will enable you to frame the conversation in a way that avoids fear/disengagement/ derailment.
Simplify what is there already – don’t make it additive. Start by understanding what is in place already (spreadsheets, reports, meetings etc).
Consider the discussion and meeting points needed to make sure the right meetings are in place to enable honest and meaningful ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ discussion of performance.
Think about training for middle managers (eg. how to plan and run effective team meetings, convey performance messages, and set realistic performance expectations).

In my next blogpost, I will explore Primed Performance Metrics in more detail.