The World Health Organization (WHO) observes World Mental Health Day on October 10 each year. 

With this year’s theme, “Make mental health and wellbeing for all,” WHO believes that people with mental health conditions and advocates can come together to celebrate the progress made in this matter and speak  about what needs to be done “to ensure Mental Health & Well-Being becomes a Global Priority for all.”

According to WHO, the cases of people experiencing anxiety and depression increased by 25% in the first half of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the gap in treatment for mental health disorders has expanded as mental health services have been severely interrupted. Professionals or employees were one of the populations who were affected the most.

Based on report, 55% of 1,425 U.S. workers surveyed share that their mental health issues have been affecting their productivity on the job since the pandemic began. The same report shows that workers suffering from mental health issues increase to 46% (during the pandemic) from 39% (pre-pandemic), and more than 10% suffer from serious mental illness. 

How To Performance Manage Employee With Mental Health Concerns

WHO believes that strengthening awareness and response to mental conditions at work, especially for those with supervisory responsibilities like managers, is a key component of protecting and promoting wellbeing at work. They recommend mental health training for managers and employees and programs for people to learn stress management techniques and lessen mental health symptoms.

Training in mental health promotes greater awareness of how occupational pressures affect mental health and may be controlled. It also assists supervisors in recognizing and responding to supervisees who are experiencing emotional distress. Aside from mental health training, here are a few things managers can do to support employees’ mental health while managing performance:

1. Cultivate a culture of connection by checking-in with employees, especially now that many individuals work from home, it may be more difficult to spot the warning signals of distress.
2. Enhance managerial competency. Focusing on employees’ strengths while promoting efficiency and performance is an essential skill to develop.
3. Build a strong system for employee management. Managers should still adhere to performance management practices when managing employees who have mental health difficulties. They must modify this procedure when mental health concerns are present to balance fairness.

In establishing a competitive employee performance management system, The KPI Institute offers a Certificate in Employee Performance Management Maturity Assessment. This micro-certification course examines the key components required to develop an employee performance management system in businesses and also uses a maturity model to evaluate the system’s complexity.

Enrolled professionals in this course have the chance to access the Employee Performance Management Maturity Model Framework v2.0 and learn first-hand how to weigh the upsides and downsides of organizational processes and develop ideas for improvement in six important areas:

• Performance Planning
• Performance Measurement
• Performance Review
• Performance Recognition
• Performance Improvement
• System Governance

Establish the proper framework for defining, evaluating, and motivating performance in your organization; invite your colleagues and enroll now! For further information, visit https://kpiinstitute.org/

This piece is originally published in the latest edition of Performance Magazine. Here is the response of Alina Miertou, a Senior Management Consultant at The KPI Institute, to the question “What’s the Best Way to Measure Employee Performance?”

I wouldn’t say there is a “best way to measure employee performance management given that performance management practices should be customized for the context they’re being implemented. 

However, we can still see the traditional approach in employee performance management based on bi-annually appraisals of the KPIs, behaviors and skills, and competencies in numerous organizations. Clearly, there has been a trend developed in the past few years, and this is abandoning the traditional performance appraisals in favor of recurrent feedback and more informal check-ins. 

One of the reasons for the change we see in employee performance management comes directly from the employees, with the workforce dominated by millennials. The management style is forced to accommodate their expectations, such as participation, flexibility, creativity or focus on creating an impact through their jobs. A study done by PWC in 2011 stated: “Millennials tend to be uncomfortable with rigid corporate structures and turned off by information silos. They expect rapid progression, a varied and interesting career and constant feedback.” 

The second most important reason comes from the business needs. In a world full of information that is changing rapidly and facing a growing employee retention issue (for example, all the organizations I have worked with this year had at least one objective regarding retention and improving their brand as an employer), we can no longer afford to base our employee performance management on punishing or rewarding past behavior or past performance. 

We are challenged to always be on the lookout for ways to improve performance and grow the talent pool available in the organization. A growing number of organizations (around more than a third of US companies) are choosing a less rigid and more frequent performance review rather than a formal appraisal score. 

Alina Miertou facilitates the Certified OKR Professional Live Online Course of The KPI Institute. The course is designed for professionals who want to understand how to deploy and use OKRs. Some of the learning objectives are to distinguish objectives, key results, and initiatives; identify the different types of OKRs; and determine the advantages of stretched goals. Learn more about the course and its schedule in the following months here.

Building healthy work relationships is essential for both the employees and their employer when they are building a performance-oriented culture.

Citing several studies on work relationships, SHRM Foundation’s Effective Practice Guidelines Series shows that high-quality human relationships can impact one’s physical and psychological health, cognitive abilities, thinking capacity, learning, resiliency, commitment, creativity, and organizational citizenship behavior. This means more efficient employee coordination with qualities that support “greater organizational effectiveness and efficiency.”

However, the work setup of most companies changed when the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world. Organizations moved their operations online, forcing employees to perform their duties and communicate virtually. 

Cultivating professional relationships is not easy in such an environment. Employees connecting virtually rather than face-to-face communication have lesser chances of building relationships, according to a study held by Xiao-Ping Chen, the Philip M. Condit Endowed Chair in Business Administration at the University of Washington Foster School of Business.

Findings showed that it is difficult to understand the nonverbal cues of remote workers, such as facial expressions, hand gestures, silence, or delayed responses. Moreover, most employees struggle with paying attention during a meeting done via video conferencing.

What Organizations Can Do

Increasing resilience in the workplace as people recover from a crisis means giving them purpose and hope, flexibility and adaptability, and connection to their colleagues. Organizations can arrange activities that can help employees stay connected even while working remotely. 

In an interview with CNBC, Jason Fried, CEO of the project management company Basecamp, recommends a daily check-in with colleagues or a time at work where they can share ideas and express support over personal matters.

Meanwhile, education company General Assembly implemented watercooler chat over coffee through video chat rooms. Meg Randall, the director of product delivery for the company’s tech team in New York City, said that those coffee breaks help her mentally start her day. “It’s a small talk that lasts for a few minutes, but it’s a nice ritual if you’re craving that human connection every day, which I have been,” said Randall. 

Trust, transparency, and open communication can also help organizations nurture healthy work relationships. One of the ways this can be tested, particularly between leaders and employees, is performance evaluation. Assessing employee performance has changed due to the pandemic. 

In the online event held by ECCP and HURIS on August 2021, Cristina Mihăiloaie, Business Unit Manager at The KPI Institute, said that the performance criteria used for employee evaluations, whether it involves key performance indicators or not, should be “flexible, easy to adapt to changes, and more focused on the extent to which the role is successfully achieved, compared to looking at operational details.”

“For example, employees who worked from home and multitasked between being a parent and a professional may have missed some meetings, or maybe they seemed more absent during work. Overall, if the output of their job is good, the operational details may be less important,” she said. 

Join Cristina as she delivers the Certified Performance Management Systems Audit Professional Live Online course on 07 – 11 March 2022 / EMEA 18:00 – 22:00 GST and ASEAN 09:00 – 13:00 CST (US).

This 40-hour course will discuss how to diagnose and audit the maturity of performance architectures for five capabilities: strategic planning, performance measurement, performance management, performance culture and employee performance management.

Don’t miss this opportunity to widen your knowledge and experience in employee performance management. You can sign up here.

Promoting excellence and improving performance happens at all levels. We oftentimes focus on employees, managers, and heads of departments, but we mustn’t forget about the upper echelon – directors, and executives. They represent the starting point for an organization’s vision, mission, and overarching goals.

If we were to take a look at many companies, a large percentage of the reason they became and remained successful is their leadership, specifically, the people positioned at the highest ranks.  

However, a number of organizations also failed precisely because the individuals at the helm did not know how to steer them in the proper direction, oftentimes swaying too much to one side or going completely off-course. 

Here at The KPI Institute, our belief is that no business should ever fail or steer off-course if it benefits from proper management. Many of our courses focus on ensuring mid-tier level or intermediate-level leaders receive the knowledge they need in order to stabilize, improve, or maximize the performance of their organization. With that said, we felt it was high time we also focused on a business’s zenith, namely its uppermost executives. 

The Executive Program in Strategy and Performance 

The Executive Program in Strategy and Performance is the most complex educational program in The KPI Institute’s portfolio.

It is designed for business leaders who are interested in strengthening their skills in strategic planning, performance measurement based on Key Performance Indicators, data analysis, and reporting, strategy execution in dynamic markets. 

The Executive Education Program is split into two parts: a postgraduate diploma course and a graduate certificate course.  

• The Postgraduate Diploma in Strategy and Performance spans over the course of 3 semesters, or 18 months, and covers 8 specialized learning experiences. Once you’ve finished all your studies, you are required to put together a practitioner portfolio that will focus on 40 assignments. This course also awards you 280 CPD points, for your CPD development portfolio.
  

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• The Graduate Certificate in Strategy and Performance only lasts 2 semesters, over a period of 12 months, requiring its learners to complete 4 specialized courses and put together a practitioner portfolio that will focus on only 20 assignments. This course also awards you 140 CPD points, for your CPD development portfolio. 

Out of the 8 specialized learning experiences, 6 are mandatory, while 2 are elective. The 6 mandatory ones are Strategic Planning, Performance Measurement, Performance Management, Strategy Execution, Performance Management System Audit, and Employee Performance Management. 

The final two are up to preference. You can choose whichever two options you wish, out of the following: the Balanced Scorecard, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Innovation Management Framework, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, or Benchmarking. 

Admission process 

The admission process for Executive Education Program is straightforward and only has 4 steps: 

1. You schedule an initial discussion with us, expressing your interest in this program 
2. You submit an admission file, which will contain your letter of intent (200-500 word), your CV, and all diplomas that reflect your educational background 
3. We will review your admission file 
4. We will schedule an interview with you 

After the interview is concluded, we’ll look to submit a final answer on your application process in up to 3 days’ time. 

Participant profile 

This course is primarily aimed at mid-tier and high-level leaders, from sales managers, chief accountants, production supervisors, and facilities managers, to directors, presidents, vice-presidents, and CEOs.  

Our intention is to focus on business leaders who wish to better their ability to plan ahead and strategize for the future, based on present data. We cover all aspects related to business improvement, from strategy execution, data analysis, and KPI measurement, to systems thinking, project management, and performance reporting. 

Competency framework 

Each of the courses covered in this program is intended to help you expand your competencies and capabilities so that you will become an integrated strategy and performance executive. The core of our Executive Education Program courses focus on the following:  

• The Certified Strategy and Business Planning Professional will augment your strategic planning capability, whilst improving your strategic thinking, stakeholders’ engagement, and communication competencies.
  

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• The Certified Agile Strategy Execution Professional will advance your strategy execution capability, whilst refining your systems thinking, project management, and leadership competencies.
  

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• The Certified KPI Professional will amplify your performance measurement capability, whilst developing your KPI selection, data collection, and data visualization competencies.
  

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• The Certified Performance Management Professional will elevate your performance improvement capability, whilst enhancing your data analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making competencies.
  

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• The Certified Employee Performance Management Professional will supplement and boost your knowledge on employee performance management capability, whilst progressing your employee performance planning, employee evaluation, and feedback sessions competencies.
  

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•  The Certified Performance Management Systems Auditor will evolve your Performance Management System maturity model based-assessment capability, whilst intensifying your examination, analytical thinking, and solutions design competencies.
  

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Through the Executive Education Program, we aim to build a new generation of executives, one that is ready to surmount any business trials or obstacles, much like a seasoned general.

In the 21st century, it is unacceptable for a business leader to falter in the face of adversity when in this day and age, there are more tools and tricks available than ever before. 

At The KPI Institute, we believe that through knowledge, dedication, and hard work, any challenge can be overcome. Even though some hurdles are greater than others and may cause setbacks, many of the greatest success stories in history came from failure. 

It is high time we addressed the high rates of failure in strategy execution so often encountered in organizations. It is time you shape the future, by knowing exactly what needs to be done and how to generate changes in the strategy and performance management practices of your organization.

It is time to become the best version of your professional self that you can be. 

2020 is slowly, but surely, coming to a close. We are already halfway through November, with December creeping up on us. We can almost hear a distant, faint Mariah Carey, singing ”All I want for Christmas is You”.

We have had an extraordinary year, completely revamping our certifications and moving them into the online environment. What followed was simply astounding.

Our attendance numbers went through the roof. We began delivering around 6-10 courses a week, instead of our regular 3-4, and participants flooded our events, which was direct feedback that our mission was a success.

Whilst there are still a few weeks left in 2020 – 5 to be specific, we will continue to deliver the same level of quality content in all of our certifications, so if you have not had the chance to sign up for any of the courses, we highly recommend you give them a look-see HERE.

Up until the 14^th of December, we’ll still be going strong with numerous events, focusing on a wide variety of topics, from KPIs, OKRs, performance management, and supplier performance, to strategy and business planning, innovation performance, data analysis, and employee performance management.

Keep a lookout on our social media channels – Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, to always be updated on which courses are next, and how can you sign up for them, in the remaining 5 weeks.

Whilst 2020 has been a challenging year, we know we can finish strong, and look forward to a much brighter and better 2021.

Employee management represents a core element of a sustainable, proficient, and efficient performance management system. All aspects, starting with onboarding, continuing with measuring results & obtaining buy-in, and ending with a fair severance package, require implementing a first-class EPM system.

That’s where we come into play, with our Certified Employee Performance Management System (EPM) Live Online Course, hosted between the 10^th – 14^th of August, 2020, at 18:00 GST Time and 09:00-13:00 CST (US).

What will you learn?

• How to unravel performance management (PM) framework’s fundamentals
• How to trace your employee’s accomplishments, per each performance management cycle
• How to employ the right tools to gauge your employees’ results objectively
• How to deliver a well-planned employee appraisal session
• How to develop a Performance Management System business case

What’s in it for you? – Benefits

• Foster fundamental competencies, which will help you design, implement, monitor and evaluate your performance management cycle successfully
• Revamp how you approach visibility & transparency
• Clarify expectations and accountability related to performance
• Access some of the latest and most relevant PM tools, which will help you implement all of the knowledge gained during the course
• Pinpoint core corporate competency and skill gaps, in order to engender sustainable growth

Presenter profile

Teodora Gorski
Managing Director MENA
The KPI Institute

Teodora Gorski is the Managing Director MENA at The KPI Institute, as well as a Project Management specialist with experience in Research, Organizational Development, and Human Resources. As a Managing Director, Teodora leads organizational development initiatives, to support and enhance the organization’s strategic plan, and manages the development & growth of The KPI Institute’s MENA branch.

Some of Teodora`s most significant projects include designing and implementing various corporate expansion projects, as well as implementing performance management systems & business development strategies for the Middle East.

She also has experience in working with organizational design, in relation to managing structural change and developing organizational capabilities. Teodora has also been involved in determining companies’ needs for human capital development and building a company’s stock of HR, to support organizational strategies.

Knowing how to objectively evaluate our employees’ performance is the key to obtaining their buy-in and ensuring we maintain a sustainable employee performance management system. Our Certified EPM course will clarify key, specific, detailed concepts and will provide practical tools and techniques for achieving just that.

During this 32-hour EPM learning experience, Teodora Gorski – management consultant at The KPI Institute, will offer our attendees exposure to best practices in the field of performance management and will teach them how to establish and use criteria for evaluating performance.

What will you learn

• Understand the fundamentals of the performance management framework;
• Learn how to track the employee performance during each phase of the performance management cycle;
• Apply key tools to measure employees’ results in a fair and objective manner;
• Learn how to conduct efficient performance appraisals;
• Gain knowledge of developing a Performance Management System business case.

What’s in it for you – Benefits

• Nurture core competencies in order to design, implement, monitor, evaluate and follow a performance management cycle in a successful manner;
• Improve the visibility and clarify accountability related to performance expectations;
• Implement the knowledge acquired during the training course, by accessing a set of performance management tools and relevant;
• Identify the necessary corporate competencies and skills gaps to generate sustainable growth.

Presenter profile

Teodora Gorski is the Managing Director MENA at The KPI Institute, as well as a Project Management expert with experience in Research, Organizational Development, and Human Resources. As a Managing Director, Teodora leads organizational development initiatives, to support and enhance the organization’s strategic plan and manages the development and growth of the MENA branch of The KPI Institute.

Some of Teodora`s most significant projects include designing and implementing various corporate expansion projects, implementing performance management systems, and business development strategies for the Middle East. She also has experience in working with organizational design when it comes to managing structural change and ensuring organizational capability.

Teodora has also been involved in determining companies’ needs for human capital development and building a company’s stock of HR to support organizational strategies.

Oftentimes, the Performance Management System is perceived as being the same thing as the employee appraisal system. While this is not an accurate interpretation, it nonetheless holds some employee-related value. It encompasses elements of strategy formulation and implementation, across the organization, all the way down to the individual level.

This is why we’ve designed our Employee Performance Management (EPM) training course to address concerns strictly related to the individual level, such as establishing performance criteria, setting up an evaluation cycle and creating an objective appraisal system.

Our management consultant, Raluca Vintila, has joined 17 members of Cambodia’s Legal Council Secretariat of Ministry of Economy and Finance, for the Employee Performance Management training course, in Singapore, between November 11^th – 13^th.

Course Journal

Day I

The training started after a short get-together moment, with a group exercise that would make everyone understand the role of the employee in the overall organizational picture. After that, we began incrementally narrowing down on this scope.

Afterwards, we focused on understanding the Individual Performance Management System Architecture, along with its corresponding tools and concepts. Given the public sector background of our attendees, we analyzed different employee performance management systems from other public sector organizations, such as those in South East Asia’s Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Day II

In order for participants to acquire a full understanding of what needs to be done, once they return to their organization, during the first half of the second day, we began working on the implementation project for an EPMS. Since we promote the evaluation of KPI results, competencies and behaviors – the second half was allocated to understanding the differences between these concepts and the tools that govern them.

Moreover, we practiced how to set up KPIs, and how to define competencies and behaviors in a coherent manner.

Day III

On our last day in Singapore, we reached the simulation stage, during which participants had to apply the best practices they had learnt thus far. They calculated results with different methodologies, and gained a more in-depth grasp over the differences & importance of elements (KPIs, competencies and behaviors), ending the official course day by simulating performance appraisals, with each attendee playing a different role.

The training session was finalized just like any other learning experience delivered by The KPI Institute, with a Learning Assessment Quiz.

Oftentimes, the employee performance evaluation is done just to comply with legal requirements. We believe that the Performance Management System should embed the employee appraisal component, in a manner that transforms the “just because it has to be done”, into “let’s make the most out of it”. In the end, it’s a matter of perspective and mindset.

February 18^th, 2014, Melbourne, Australia – The KPI Institute, the global authority on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) research and education, announces the launch of “Performance Management in 2013”, the second from a series of annual publications which provides an overview on the state of the discipline.

Performance Management is continuously growing in popularity and maturity, assessing the exact position and development of the discipline each year is essential. The report Performance Management in 2013 is the result of a qualitative research study conducted in the period of September 2013 – January 2014, by The KPI Institute. The research study used both primary and secondary sources.

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