Case Study 2-2 DISRUPTED LINKS IN THE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT PROCESS AT "OMEGA, INC." Omega, Inc., is a small manufacturing company in all franchise offices, and each franchise owner whose sales success or failure rests in the hands of spoke with his employees about the contribution sales representatives employed by franchised deal made by individual sales on achieving their ers operating independently. Omega faces a chal mission. As a second step, the managers set lenging situation because it does not have control performance goals (ie, sales quotas) for each over the people working for the independent deal- employee. Then all sales representatives attended erships. It is the performance of these individuals extensive training sessions. The employees that dictates Omega's sales success. To make things received feedback based on their performance in more complicated, until recently there was no clear the training course and then were reminded once understanding of the role of the sales representa again of their sales quotas. tives and there were no formal sales processes in Back on the job, managers gave feedback to place. Sales representatives varied greatly in terms their employees regarding their standing in relation of their level of skill and knowledge: most put out to their sales quotas. Since the employees had no little effort beyond taking orders, and they did not way of monitoring their own progress toward their feel motivated to make additional sales. Finally, quotas, the performance feedback consisted of little franchises varied greatly regarding their manage more than a reiteration of monthly sales goals. ment strategies and follow-up with Omega. There was no performance appraisal form in place, Recently, understanding the need to improve so discussions were not documented. This lack of the performance of sales representatives, Omega feedback continued and, although sales quotas agreed to partially fund and support a training were being met for the first few months, franchise program for them. The network of franchise own owners received complaints from customers about ts in turn agreed to work together to implement the low quality of customer service they were performance management system. As a first receiving. Subsequently, sales began to decline. tep in creating the performance management Furthermore, many orders were often incorrect stem, the franchise owners conducted a job forcing customers to return items to Omega Salysis of the role of the sale representatives, While the new performance management rote a job description, and distributed it to all les representatives. The franchise owners also process was an improvement over no perfor- mance management (at least initially), the fran- opted a franchisewide mission statement based chise owners were still far from having a system imarily on the need to provide high-quality cus that included a smooth transition between each of mer service. This mission statement was posted the components of the performance management is case study is loosely based on J Swinney and B Couch, Sales Performance Improvement Getting ults Through a Franchise Sales Organization International Society for Performance Improvement Case dies (2003). Retrieved March 6, 2007 from ISPI Online at http://www.ispi.org/services/got Results/2003/ Results_Swinney.pdf 47 48 PART 1 Strategic and General Considerations process. Based on Omega's situation, please answer the following questions. 1. Consider each of the links of the performance management process as shown in Figure 2.1: a. prerequisites performance planning b. performance planning performance execution c. performance execution performance assessment d. performance assessment performance review c. performance review performance renewal and recontracting f. performance renewal and recontracting prerequisites Discuss whether each of the links is present, and in what form, in the performance manage- ment system described. 2. Given your answers to question 1, what can be done to fix each of the disrupted links in the process