Facilitate Participation In Employee Reviews

　　The Mansis System: Facilitate Participation In Employee Reviews

　　By Joe Dysart

　　HR managers looking for a detailed, deeply thought-out PC program to help with employee performance management and review will want to give The Mansis System serious consideration.

　　What It Does

　　Elegantly designed to work from a single "main switchboard" page, the program enables HR managers to eradicate much of the fear, uncertainty and potential miscommunication often associated with performance management by putting the entire review process on everyone’s PC desktop.

　　Essentially, the software achieves this end by offering every player in the performance management and review process - including the employee, the manager and senior management -- PC access to that process on a need-to-know basis. Users simply enter a pre-assigned security code and review data that it deemed relevant to their role in the process.

　　The result: Company direction on performance expectations is clear and consistent throughout the enterprise, communication about performance expectations and results is more timely and accessible, and individual performance recognition is ensured. In short, employees know what they’re supposed to do.

　　What I Like

　　Undoubtedly, one of the program’s greatest strengths is its simplicity. With one glance at the program’s opening main switchboard, HR managers are able to grasp what the program is attempting to achieve, and how the program goes about achieving it.

　　Designed with familiar point-and-click Windows button bars, the main switchboard organizes the performance management process into three categories: job direction, job performance and coaching topics.

　　Employees, for example, can access the job direction category to pull up details on job performance standards and company policies, hone knowledge on specific job procedures and verify performance goals they have set for themselves, as well as action plans that have been designed to achieve those goals.

　　Meanwhile, managers can look over the same information, as well as access areas they may deem off limits to employee users, such as actions they’re taking to elevate employee skill levels, coaching measures in place to change skill levels, or steps they’re taking to ultimately dismiss an employee.

　　Quite handily, the program also can be a boon to senior level managers. With just a few simple keystrokes, senior management is able to assess the differing approaches various department heads are using to evaluate employee performance and motivate employees to achieve more.

　　The software also has some great tools to help managers finesse changes in employee performance. Managers who have not had success with informal requests for employee behavior change, for example, can generate a "change worksheet," which details the date of the unacceptable behavior, a description of the behavior, how the employee’s behavior negatively impacted job performance and any attempts made to discuss the behavior with the employee.

　　More than a simple incident reporting tool, the change worksheet prompts the manager to attempt to analyze the causes of the unacceptable behavior and offers the manager background on some common causes of behavior problems. Finally, the change worksheet prompts the manager to specifically detail how he or she expects the behavior to be altered.

　　All told, the program is designed to work as a tool for implementing the Mansis philosophy of employee performance management and will find greatest success at firms that share the belief that employees should play an active role in the performance management and review process.

　　Indeed, the program encourages employees to actively participate in every step of the performance management process. Employee users, for example, are invited to input factors and goals they feel should be discussed at their performance reviews -- a practice that is not necessarily accepted at all firms.

　　What Could Be Improved

　　HR managers tempted to perceive The Mansis System as an employee performance management system in a box will be sorely disappointed. As stressed by the program’s creator, The Mansis System is simply a tool firms can use to implement a philosophy of employee performance management promulgated by the Mansis Development Corporation.

　　HR managers seriously interested in maximizing the program’s potential need to be ready to buy into the Mansis performance management philosophy. They must be convinced that when an employee participates in his or her own performance management, those employees will take more ownership of their own performance results and record -- and ultimately, become better employees.

　　Moreover, managers must also be convinced that by making the performance review process easily accessible to everyone in the company, they will create a genuine sense of equity throughout the enterprise. And they must believe that as a result of this sense of fairness, employees will be better motivated, fewer grievances will occur, productivity will increase, discipline will be consistent and constructive, and wrongful dismissal claims will decrease.

　　In practice, being ready to adopt that world view will most likely mean putting up extra revenue for the intensive on-site training Mansis offers to help acquaint new users with the PC program as well as its employee performance management philosophy.

　　Given those caveats, the Mansis software is best perceived as an easy to use, viable system for HR managers who are not looking to reinvent the wheel when it comes to designing a system for employee performance management, and who are looking to hit the ground running with a management approach that has already proved successful.

　　(Joe Dysart is a software analyst based in Thousand Oaks, California)