PMO Maturity Assessments: People

Assessments are most often used in the hiring process to ensure the right candidate is selected for the role needed. But what happens afterwards? We believe in assessing our employees throughout their tenure within an organization.

​Here is the next installment in our Assessments series.

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Your Best Asset: Your People
 
The success of an organization often lies with whether or not you have the right people in the right roles at the right time.  According to Harvard Business Review, 88% of organizations with more than 100 employees rely on assessment tools for external hiring. These assessments can measure competency, work ethic, personality, situational behavior, and, more recently, emotional intelligence. 

But how often is an employee assessed post hire? Ideally, an employee will continue to grow and move within an organization, and therefore the attributes that were assessed at hiring may not be the attributes that are needed most for the current role being performed. In leadership roles, additional areas of measurement can be based on demonstrating leadership qualities, adherence to an organization’s core values, presentation skills, project management, and stakeholder management.

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We break down our employee assessment objectives into four categories and review the performance against them twice a year with each employee:

1. Client: objectives relating to the performance of client activities, regardless of whether it is billable or non-billable
2. Internal: objectives relating to the performance of company specific activities, typically organizational or internal department support 
3. Personal: objectives relating to what the employee wants to achieve within a project, activity, or an area of personal or interpersonal development that the manager desires for the employee
4. Leadership: objectives relating to an employee’s activities that demonstrate their mastery of our organization’s selected leadership attributes of communication, decision making and judgement, developing self and others, respect, and passion

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Each category of objectives has a different weight depending on the role of the employee. For example, a client-facing employee has a higher client category weighting in comparison to an internal employee that has a higher internal category weighting. We believe that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to performance management, which is why we developed a performance assessment structure that is consistent but adjusts to fit the role of the employee, where they are today.

Ensuring your employees fully understand and agree with the expectations you have for them as they grow and move within the organization is vital to enabling the overall organization’s success. With clear objectives, all parts of your organization will be working towards the same goals based on the attributes that matter to your organization and culture.

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What is your perspective regarding ongoing performance assessment? What process does your organization use to assess an individual’s performance?