Our Processes

Managing Human Performance

What determines whether employees take initiative—or avoid it? How do employees choose between solving problems—or burying them? Can we influence whether employees seek out new opportunities or avoid change?

The choices employees make, the actions they initiate, and the behaviors they demonstrate all take place within an organizational context we call the human performance system. Like any other system that helps you manage valuable assets, it must be managed to achieve your organization’s objectives. Kepner-Tregoe Managing Human Performance is a systematic process for setting clear expectations for performance and helping employees achieve them.

Our approach centers around a performance system model that provides a practical, useful framework for understanding human performance. Using this model, managers analyze each component, for an employee, team, or work group, to improve and align it in support of the expected performance.

The performance system model has five components:

Situation is the work setting, which includes expectations for performance, performance triggers, and the overall work environment.

Performer is the person or group expected to perform.

Response is the behaviors or actions undertaken by the Performer.

Consequences are the events following those behaviors or actions that increase or decrease the likelihood that the behaviors will occur again.

Feedback is information received about performance that helps the Performer to maintain or modify behaviors.

This model provides the framework for a thinking process and sets of skills that can be used to analyze, improve, and align each component of the overall performance context. Managing Human Performance is a powerful process for affecting change in an organization, correcting deficiencies, and raising performance levels to previously unsustainable levels.

Results with Managing Human Performance

Managing human performance is critical to any step-change effort in an organization. Our process creates enduring value when used in concert with other improvement efforts to achieve significant results and lasting change.

• Managers of a computer service center needed a snapshot of current performance in order to make improvements. For each call that took longer than three or four minutes to be logged in, customer service desk employees were asked to record the reasons for the delay. Addressing those causes was among the critical actions contributing to a 20 percent boost in service center efficiency with 10 percent less staff, which in turn lay the groundwork for more comprehensive improvements.
• Frustration ran high with a performance system characterized by pointless, time-consuming meetings at the maintenance division of a major airline. Working with Kepner-Tregoe, a group of managers conducted an analysis of all meetings. Areas for improvement were identified and every manager was coached to improve meeting planning, to include the right meeting attendees, to set clear meeting objectives, to evaluate the results of each meeting, and to reward good meeting behaviors. The tangible results measured, as well as the enthusiasm for the new approach, spread to other divisions and to the company’s board of directors.
• When a government contractor adopted KT Project Management as the baseline approach for all projects, the process was captured in paperwork formats that were downloadable from the Web. Processing changes based on the easily accessible new formats cut processing time in half, saving time and money. Managing human performance to support the use of KT Project Management helped the organization realize significant improvements including a reduction in average project costs from an overrun of $120,000 to a $90,000 under-run.