Your company?s performance management system is not just about annual reviews and bonuses, it is essential to implementing your corporate strategy. With many organizations currently tightening their belts and demanding high performance, how can you make sure that your system is optimized for results? An answer lies in using the balanced scorecard and recently developed software that easily creates such systems and enables organizations to stay on top of them.

Many organizations struggle with performance management because their system consists of little more than a form managers use to conduct annual employee evaluations. This doesn?t work because performance management should be an ongoing conversation between supervisors and employees that supports the accomplishment of strategic objectives. Rather than only considering the process once a year, managers should have a system to set clear objectives, evaluate results and deliver continual feedback to employees about their performance on a regular basis.

First, an organization?s strategic plan must give high priority to performance management, since their employees are the ones actually implementing the tactics necessary to achieve corporate objectives. A powerful tool for crafting a strategy that takes this into account is the Strategy Map, part of the Balanced Scorecard concept. The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic planning and reporting methodology that takes a company?s objectives and splits them between 4 equally important perspectives: Financial, Customer, Operational, People. Organizational objectives then cascade down those four perspectives, giving the company a clear path of implementation.

With objectives cascading down throughout the four perspectives of the map, a strategy is considered ?balanced.? The Scorecard portion consists of leading and lagging metrics that the company, or even departments and individuals can be evaluated on to determine whether they are on track. By forcing executives to put as much thought into performance management as the financial objectives of the organization and tying performance management goals all the way up to the mission and vision of the company the strategy map solves the performance dilemma.

Fortunately, online performance management software MyStrategicPlan exists to guide executives in crafting a balanced corporate strategy as well as managing performance management on a regular basis. Based on the balanced scorecard and strategy map, MyStrategicPlan enables any organization, regardless of size and budget, to build their comprehensive plan in a matter of weeks (or even days) and monitor implementation all year long.

M3 Planning, developers of MyStrategicPlan, is a strategic planning firm that works with growth-oriented organizations to develop and execute their strategic plans. Strategic planning helps you pave the most direct path towards your vision while driving growth and saving you time and money. In addition to their award-winning software, the company also offers strategic planning consulting and is a resource for other strategic planning tools, books, articles, workshops, and strategic planning facilitation.