Throughout economic history, various management tools and business strategies have been created to equip management personnel with resources to develop corporate growth and improve their competitive standing. Several “cycles” have been developed as tools to review and improve on various aspects of business operations, including revenue and billing. The performance management cycle was generated to establish a process to manage both behavioral standards and production quota to measure and monitor overall organizational, departmental, or individual performance. While regulating revenue and evaluating billing operations are paramount to business development, incorporating a strong performance management cycle will contribute to maintaining a stable and productive labor force within an organization.

Performance management occurs in a cyclical fashion, following these five stages: Planning > Monitoring > Developing > Rating > Rewarding. In the next several weeks, this blog series will review each stage individually and offer detail on how incorporating these elements into healthcare management will improve both patient care and overall organization efficiency.  However, without a clear understanding for an employee’s corporate function and motivating factors, management will not be able to effectively utilize the performance management cycle tool. Healthcare management personnel should become intimately familiar with their employees’ positions, job responsibilities, working environment, and personal motivations and ambitions. Understanding employee perspective will allow healthcare managers to possess knowledge vital to making more informed decisions while undergoing the performance management cycle process.

Cycling through these stages will allow for continual performance improvement while simultaneously increasing employee’s job satisfaction and corporate efficiency through improved effectiveness. Once each stage has been incorporated and implemented within an organization, a natural cultivation of performance enhancement will occur. Individually, each stage appears self-explanatory and obvious, but difficulty arises when management must apply all stages in a cyclical manner and maintain a progression through the cycle. Management personnel or teams may already be integrating these concepts into their performance review process, but focus here will be on following all steps in their entirety instead of a disjointed piecemeal approach.

This blog series will help management teams and individuals develop their own performance management cycle tool for utilization in their organization, as well as, improve individual performance and, as a result, corporate performance in general.

Written By:
Allison Bahr
Associate Consultant
Medical Management Services