That’s Lisa Rund on the right. Lisa works in the City’s Human Resources Division. She’s training a group of ten employees, including Dave Buswell on the left of our Assessing Division, last Friday afternoon on the City’s new employee performance management program called: The Performance Partnership.
Many cities, maybe even most cities, use some kind of performance management system with their employees. For some, it is as simple as sitting down with employees in the face-to-face style and talking about the year behind and the year ahead. For others, it might include a written performance review complete with numerical or descriptive ratings of various work performance qualities.
For Eden Prairie, it’s The Performance Partnership. What is The Performance Partnership, and why is it so important that I capitalize the T in “The”, you might ask? Well, The Performance Partnership (TPP)is our effort to recognize that success in the work world is a result of many factors, not merely the day to day performance of the employee. A productive employee poorly supervised is a wasted resource. A productive manager supervising poorly performing employees will not seem much like a productive manager. And you can have the most productive employees and the most productive managers, but if you equip and fund them poorly, then they will probably perform the same.
The Performance Partnership is our system of setting individual and organizational goals; measuring individual and organizational performance; planning for the future of the individual and organization; and reporting our results throughout the organization, to our City Council, and ultimately to our citizens.
The tools of The Performance Partnership are not particularly innovative or special. The employees write down goals. The managers write down goals. We compare them to each other and to the mission & vision of the organization. We put them together with other employee/organizational goals to form a coherent plan of work. Then we’re done, until it comes time to review the results, which entails all the same steps, only in reverse order.
The Performance Partnership is innovative in that it looks at employee performance in the context of organizational performance. We need both to succeed in order to produce success.
The City’s Human Recources Division staff, Karen Kurt, Lisa Rund, Jayna Kalkes, and Andre Simon, spearheaded the effort to create The Performance Partnership. This is some very good work, and it will be good for our employees and for our organization.
