Pastel makes performance management easy for SMEs

Softline Pastel, leading South African developer of accounting, payroll, and business solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), believes performance management, normally the preserve of the human resources departments of large corporates, is an essential growth-enabling tool for SMEs.

Pastel managing director Steven Cohen says: "Empowerment and performance management are a continuum. Without empowerment of staff, even the smallest of businesses will struggle for sustainability. And the only way to truly empower staff is through performance management - which is really just a very effective way of helping people identify and fulfil their potential.

"Realising that many of our customers think performance management is a complex, time-consuming, and expensive discipline that they simply can`t fit into their normal working day, we decided to show them just how easy it really is - and just how much it would benefit their organisations."

In a series of seminars hosted by Pastel and presented nationwide by Mark Deavall, managing director of Merit Business Institute, during October 2007, SMEs were shown the difference between "delivery management" and "performance management", and how much more effective the latter is in terms of enabling the achievement of business strategy and objectives.

"What most organisations do is agree on specific deliverables with their employees, then monitor them to see if they deliver as agreed, and, if they do, pay them the agreed amount of money (salary)," Deavall says. "That`s delivery management, and it works in an extremely limited way and has no power to retain real talent.

"Performance management, by contrast, is when an organisation agrees on expected levels of performance with an employee, then ensures the employee has every possible resource to help him or her reach the agreed levels of performance, and when those levels are reached, rewards the performance beyond the agreed salary. This process also helps in retaining talent.

"It`s important to realise that a reward is not an incentive. An incentive is something you work toward, like a salary. You know you`re going to get it and it relates directly to specific deliverables. A reward, however, is something you`re not expecting. And it comes only when, because of the pride you take in what you do, you have delivered more than you were asked to do, and the employer says 'thank you`.

"In other words, true performance management is based on getting people not just to do a particular job but to express their creativity, initiative, and determination fully in order to be the best people they can. An automatic outcome of that is a job executed well beyond expectations and, therefore, profit and growth for the business.

"In delivery management, a manager is essentially a policeman with a big stick. In performance management, a manager or a business owner is an 'empowerer`, offering employees every opportunity for self-actualisation and making a long-term positive impact on their lives."

In Deavall`s words, performance management is essentially a `soft`, yet vital discipline. But, as Cohen points out, "it`s the soft issues that differentiate one business from another. For example, when you have two companies making the same products for the same markets, the one with the best customer service is the one that will maintain or grow market share over time. People are the constant in any business transaction. Money and products may change hands, but it is people who are doing the deals.

"That`s why, although our business at Pastel is the development and sale of accounting software, we ourselves always go beyond accounting - to help our customers do better and grow their businesses. And that is why, with Merit Business Institute`s Performance Management Unplugged seminars, SMEs were shown how to go beyond delivery management to performance enablement and the profitability and growth that flows from it."

SMEs attending the seminars were given performance management manuals, showing them, step by step, how to achieve optimum results.