Top athletes set good example for high performance

Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

Building a great workplace is imperative if employees are to meet high performance standards.

As New Zealand's athletes head off to Delhi and the 2010 Commonwealth Games, expectations are high. In fact, every successful athlete at that level will tell you that winning comes as a result of first setting high expectations for performance.

And if that's backed up with talent, smart training strategies, a great coach who gives honest feedback and lots of persistence and hard work, the chances of success are high.

It appears that many organisations could learn something from the approach that our top athletes take. Workplace survey specialist JRA has has completed this year's annual JRA Best Workplaces Survey.

"As we pour over the results looking at benchmark data and trends from previous years" says JRA consultant Jenni Blake, "one of the many insights is that most organisations expect high standards of performance from their people, but often seem to struggle with getting employees to actually meet those standards on a consistent basis."

For example Blake says, "the second-highest scoring item in this year's survey is 'This organisation expects high standards of performance from its people' with an average score of 80.9 per cent.

But when you then look at employees responses to how well organisations are doing in terms of supporting and equipping people to actually meet those expectations, it's a different story.

Items like 'This organisation rewards outstanding performance' only scores 65.5 per cent and 'Poor performance is dealt with effectively in this organisation' is in fact the lowest scoring item in the entire survey, at 57.9 per cent.

It seems that many organisations are getting the message when it comes to setting high expectations and performance standards; a vital component of building a great workplace. But that's the easy part.

The hard work involves developing stronger "reward and recognition" and "performance and feedback" strategies that equip people to actually deliver on the high standards being set for them.

Things like fairly assessing performance, giving recognition, valuing individual contribution and celebrating success will all go a long way to helping employees actually meet the high expectations being set for them.

The 2010 JRA Best Workplaces Survey is run in association with the Herald and sponsored by the Labour Department, HainesAttract, the NZ Chambers of Commerce and Kiwibank. Finalists will be honoured in November.

On the web:
www.bestworkplaces.co.nz