In the end, he decided to let his students set their own due dates for submitting their work. Because they had committed to their own deadlines, all the students handed in their work on time. By allowing the students to manage their own timeline, the professor was able to achieve the outcome he wanted.

 

Can the same approach be applied to managing employee performance and relations? The answer is yes, said Dale Simpson, managing director of Bravo Consulting, an Australia-based human resource consultancy. Simpson, who has three decades of experience in human resources development and management, was speaking at a public talk, organised by Singapore Management University’s Wee Kim Wee Centre and entrepreneur network, TiE Singapore.

 

“If organisations are to tap the latent potential of staff, we will need to flip our knowledge about employee management around,” said Simpson. This means ditching the traditional top-down approach to managing staff performance and empowering employees to self-manage their careers in order to achieve better performance.

 

“Elite athletes are constantly on a quest to learn about themselves. They are always asking: ‘How did I do? How can I improve?’” he noted, adding, “As humans, we will never know everything there is to know about ourselves and the universe. But the more we know about ourselves, the better we can manage our own performance at work and in life.” So if an organisation is able to train staff to manage themselves effectively, then it follows that the performance of the organisation would improve over the long run.

 

However, if self-managed careers have such great potential, why aren’t more organisations adopting this strategy to improve staff performance? To begin with, both organisations and employees need to work together as a team to make self-managed careers a reality; and neither party seems to be ready.

 

As several participants pointed out during the talk, the lack of trust would often prevent employees from voicing any grievances about their jobs during performance appraisals for fear such feedback may be used against them in the assessment process. Likewise, a lack of trust also deters organisations from allowing staff to self-manage their careers for fear that employees may abuse such systems for their personal gain.

 

While Simpson agrees that these are valid issues, he also noted that challenges in the global business environment have made it more difficult, if not impossible, for any organisation to promise any employee a job for life. This has further eroded the level of trust between organisations and employees. “It used to be if we were good boys and good girls, the organisation would keep us and we’d have a job all the way till retirement. Now, organisations can no longer make this promise,” he said.

 

That said, even though it is now not possible for organisations to guarantee job security, employers can and should still offer other promises or incentives in order to foster better employer-employee relations. Simpson, who manages his own HR consultancy, revealed that he does not have employment contracts with his people.

 

“I have relationship agreements with my staff. We don’t have the usual terms and conditions in the agreement; we have promises instead: promises from the company to the staff; from the staff to our clients, and from our clients to us. How you link performance to promises for every staff is important as well. For example, I have a staff who prefers to have more money as a reward; so I give him a bonus if he performs well. Another staff prefers to upgrade himself through learning, so I pay for his course fees as an incentive,” said Simpson.