Dear Umer ,

For China . Normally , they appoint senior staff based on TRUST or loyalty toward the organisation. " Guanxi " is the major criteria to be success in Public organisation .So to Malaysia . This is why public are criticizing most of the business are taking up by cronies whom politically linked ! 

But, all these are slowly changing now .

I will propose , the measurement of integrity and Trust is the most important tool to be used . Beside this , Personality measurement to understand the background of individual also help !  But watch out the reliability of Personality Test , the supplement by observation and peer review also very important.

Last , I wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year ! look forward to have a prosperous year of the Goat !

Cheers ...

Dear Dr Yew

thank you for your kind answer .....

The practical steps to evolve a KPIs , is to start from the Annual Business Plan. To achieve this plan who are the contributors, What they need to do and quantification of their deliverable. In case of interconnected goals, evolve a "Who-What" Map validate and get concurrence of the stake holders. The key to success is on "continuous evaluation" with objectivity for sustenance.

KPI have to be derived from vision mission and objective of an oraganization. Derived until operational activities which usually using numeric scale 1 to 6 and divided by its operational uses.

Yes i agree with prof yew,in public organization its goes to cronies rather than clean sheet of performance base measurement and evaluation. It will be always there as long as it means politics as proverb says no mortal enemy and friend in politics as it always find a ways to preserve its power.

But some country are trying to use kpi as measurement and evaluation of its performance and target.

Dear Umer,

Let me start answering some of your questions in my view,

Yes, Performance can be measured. and whether performance and efficiency are the same, I've an article in 1991 by Jill Johnes and Jim Johnes, they state that performance is efficiency and effectiveness of an employee. and Honesty is just ethics and could be written as credo. I guess, the management knows about the workload of an employee comparing to the others, but for each position or job there should be a different KPI.

I recommend the Balanced Scorecard approach. See the attached file and my Research Gate.

In developing countries, there is a great challenge to implement the performance based evaluation due to cultural and political factors. For result-based management systems, each and every one has to work on KPI, and developing KPI in itself is a challenge. Salary and reward system has also to be adjusted in line with the performance based system, which is another challenge mainly in government and public sector organization. Countries like Australia and New Zealand have done changes in the public sector through NPM reforms. All is needed is the commitment at the policy and political levels.

Depends greatly on the nature of work. Here are couple of  my papers that relate to the issue:

Overcoming the specific performance measurement challenges of knowledge‐intensive organizations

Aki Jääskeläinen, Harri Laihonen

International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management 2013 62:4 , 350-363

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/17410401311329607

Measuring the productivity impacts of new ways of working

Harri Laihonen, Aki Jääskeläinen, Antti Lönnqvist, Jenna Ruostela

Journal of Facilities Management 2012 10:2 , 102-113

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/14725961211218749

Dear researchers all the research papers you have shared so far are excellent and speaks new vision for measuring the performance....thanks fro your contributions

Umer -

Having worked for nearly 37 years for the US Federal Govt in statistics and related applications,  I can tell you that one of the worst problems has been the pressure by the public and by some in 'upper management' to be 'more like private industry.'  I have seen many dedicated public servants doing very good work with little reward, while private industry might do any stupid and/or greedy thing to get ahead of their competitors this quarter, no matter the consequences later.  Before I retired last August, I worked in a US statistical agency where the head of the Office of Energy Statistics was formerly at Enron, and had repeatedly insisted we were not a statistical agency!  (I don't know that anyone knew what he meant by that.)  Obviously, no one should copy Enron! 

As for the goals of the organization, few managers seemed to understand them. But W. Edwards Deming found equally out-of-touch management in private industry, which seems as bad or worse now.

Regarding employee performance, everyone wants to say it is objective, rather than subjective, but that cannot be so.  The more complicated a performance rating system is made, in an attempt to make it more objective, the more opportunities there likely are to exploit the system. In places I worked where organizational goals were understood and striven to be accomplished most, the performance goals for each person were basically a formality.  We then did whatever creative things we could do to handle the challenges. However, by the time I retired, we were given more specific instructions and told that our ratings would be based just on those 'standards,' given at the beginning of the year. Handling any new problem that arose would not count. What kind of an approach is that!

Any large organization,  public or private, will have issues with which they may deal, not found in smaller organizations. But large organizations are often needed to solve certain problems or accomplish certain goals.  The key is both good managers and good employees, though in a scientific organization, I think management should be given less power, as a big problem is their lack of competence for decision making. To measure performance,  you have to understand what is good work and what is not good work.  Managers often lack the expertise to know. (Consider the work of W. Edwards Deming as evidence of the 'tip of the iceberg.') 

So performance goals should be made simple, just as a statistical model should not be 'overfit.'  One needs to be flexible and innovative.  A performance system should encourage this, not discourage it. Everyone should understand goals, and do what is necessary. More knowledgeable, less autocratic management would be extremely helpful.

Jim 

Dear James R Knaub

thank you so much for such a valuable reply 

Jim, having retired some years ago from a private research-based company I agree with everything you say. In practice, KPI may do nothing but encourage incompetent not to say aggressive management.

A friend, a remedial school teacher, was forced to retire early because his KPI depended on the pupil's knowledge being better at the end of the year than at the beginning. Unfortunately for him, a lot of the children were from a reception centre for refugees, where no-one stayed for no more than a couple of months while waiting for accommodation elsewhere...