Development Solutions Consultancy

As part of the public service reforms, the government has been pushing, with little success for over a decade, the implementation of an open employee performance appraisal system. Despite efforts to have the system implemented by government ministries and parastatal organizations, there is hardly any public organization that has fully implemented it, which can stand up as an example to be emulated. This failure begs the obvious question: why has implementation not taken root despite the talk? To answer this question it is important to understand that an employee performance appraisal is just a cog in a wheel; in order for it to succeed, there are other supporting systems that ought to be put in place too.

There are two key supporting systems or pre-requisites for the effective implementation of an open and objective employee performance appraisal system that have not been fully met under the current implementation environment. It is virtually impossible to implement the current employee performance appraisal system if these pre-requisites are not met. The first pre-requisite is the institutionalization of work planning at the individual employee level. At this level work planning is a consultative process between employees and their immediate supervisors to establish what is to be achieved and what is to be done including determination of individual work load and budget. Done during annual operational planning, individual work planning is also an integral part of delegation.

An important premise for conducting an employee performance appraisal is the existence of prior agreed work specifications. An agreement must be reached beforehand about what is expected of the employee. Individual work plans that clearly show the results to be achieved, activities to be implemented to achieve the desired results, the required performance standards, and the budget to execute the activities constitute performance agreements between employees and their immediate supervisors. These agreements also serve as a means for identifying competencies required of the employee to effectively implement the work plan. Owing to their specifications, performance agreements act as objective benchmarks for the ensuing employee performance appraisal. At an appropriate time, the employee is appraised for results achieved in terms of the expected quantity, quality and delivery time.

However, this first pre-requisite has not been met because work planning and budget allocation, at the individual employee level, has not been institutionalized. Currently, planning and budgeting takes place at departmental level without any detailed operational planning and budgeting at the individual employee level. Arguably, this type of planning is not the best for the department. A better approach is to derive the departmental work plan and budget from the plans and budgets of the staff in the department prepared on the basis of departmental priorities. It ought to be remembered that organizational performance is the sum total of performance of individual employees. Poor planning at the individual employee level leads not only to poor employee performance but also, ultimately, to poor organizational performance.

The second pre-requisite is institutionalization of an activity based budgeting and activity based financial accounting and management systems that ensure approved funds are safeguarded at the individual employee level. Such a computerized financial accounting and management system prevents overdrawing of funds from other activities and makes available activity based budgetary accounting information to budget holders so that they can track their own expenditure. In this way staff continue to plan and manage their own operations and budget during implementation. However, like for the first pre-requisite, this second pre-requisite also has not been met by public organizations.

Currently, public organizations lack computerized activity based budgeting and activity based financial accounting and management systems that meet the needs for providing essential budgetary performance information and safeguarding individual budgets. Problems of overdrawing whereby individuals realize at the last minute, when they want to undertake activities, that funds are not available due to earlier overdrawing by other funds users are all frustratingly too common.