What is the most crucial asset owned by an organization? In the modern business landscape, a company might possess a well-defined vision, mission, and set of value drivers, along with a carefully articulated strategy and aligned objectives throughout all levels of the organization. Nevertheless, employees may fail to adopt these values, as these are not inherently embedded in their actions due to the absence of a performance-driven culture.
Hence, the company must foster a culture that actively facilitates the execution of its strategy. This culture should empower every employee to operate in alignment with the established value drivers, behavioral norms, and competencies set forth by the organization to fulfill its mission while being consistent with overarching corporate goals.
Central to cultivating a successful performance-driven culture are leaders. They stand as key influencers, coaches, and role models. Organizations must shift their focus from having managers who assert authority to nurturing leaders who coach and guide. These leaders should serve as advocates for aligning and interpreting corporate objectives for employees at all levels. Proper training is fundamental in equipping them to effectively manage their subordinates.
To enable leaders to construct a thriving performance-driven culture, organizations can implement the following steps:
Build the desired organizational culture. Foran organization to define the fundamental characteristics of its desired culture, it must translate its mission and vision into tangible value drivers, anticipated behaviors, and needed competencies. These elements must be communicated extensively to all employees, ensuring their adoption, with an emphasis on starting this process with the leaders themselves.
Highlight a leader’s role in cultivating performance excellence. Leaders are essential in shaping the desired performance culture within an organization. They lead by example, embodying cultural values, behaviors, and skills. This sets a motivating tone for their teams and encourages others to follow suit. Effective leaders foster openness and feedback, which leads to transparency and collaboration. They recognize and reward behaviors that match the culture.
Additionally, they provide coaching and growth opportunities to empower employees. This creates an environment where everyone feels valued and engaged, forming the basis of a performance-driven culture.
Foster performance by promoting employees’ mental wellness. In creating a culture of performance, the importance of nurturing a healthy mindset and prioritizing employees’ mental well-being cannot be overstated. A positive mindset is crucial for a culture of excellence. Employee mental health directly affects engagement, productivity, and satisfaction. Providing resources like counseling, stress management, and flexible work options not only demonstrates commitment to well-being but also leads to a focused, creative, and productive workforce. A mental health-supportive culture enhances individual well-being and aligns employees with organizational values, ultimately improving performance.
Empower performance culture through data interpretation. Organizations have a wealth of data that offer insights into employee engagement, performance, and overall health. Leaders must use data analytics to guide culture development. By studying metrics like satisfaction, productivity, and alignment with values, leaders can spot improvement areas and measure initiative impacts. This data-driven approach refines strategies based on evidence, creating a flexible culture. Regular data analysis shows employees that their contributions matter, boosting transparency and commitment to growth.
Successful examples
Googleprovides a noteworthy example of a strong performance culture as exemplified by initiatives like Project Aristotle and Project Oxygen. Project Aristotle highlights team dynamics and psychological safety, fostering an environment where all members freely share ideas and take calculated risks. Meanwhile, Project Oxygen focuses on effective leadership qualities such as coaching, communication, and genuine care for team members. These initiatives underscore Google’s dedication to establishing a culture of collaboration, innovation, and leadership, creating a thriving workplace for both teams and individuals.
Another notable example is Netflix,which embodies a performance culture centered around “seeking excellence.” This entails encouraging each employee to excel and contribute to produce their best work. Netflix values individual responsibility and open feedback, creating an environment where high standards and innovation are prized. The company hires top talent and empowers them with trust and autonomy. This adherence to excellence shapes their decision-making and has contributed to Netflix’s success.
Creating the right organizational culture lays the foundation for success. Leaders drive performance excellence by setting an example and supporting their teams. Taking care of employees’ well-being adds to the positive atmosphere, and using data helps leaders make smarter choices. Combining these aspects builds a culture where everyone thrives, innovation flourishes, and organizations prosper.
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This article is written by Chadia Abou Ghazale, a seasoned banking professional with 24 years of experience and who excels in budgeting, sales performance management, data analysis, and resource planning. Beyond banking, she is a dedicated reader of self-development topics and passionate networker. Chadia believes that life’s purpose is the pursuit of knowledge. Her extensive expertise and unwavering enthusiasm are a dynamic combination, driving success in her career and enriching her life’s adventurous journey.
Today’s competitive corporate environment recognizes that employees are their most significant asset. Thus, onboarding new hires is vital to their performance and success. Employee onboarding is a strategic investment that prepares employees for long-term development and productivity. According to SHRM, 69% of workers are more likely to remain in a company for more than three years if that company has a robust onboarding procedure. The significance of effective onboarding and its impact on long-term performance will be emphasized in three important pillars throughout the article.
First pillar: communicating vision and mission
According to HBR, 90% of employees are willing to work for less money in exchange for meaningful work. Consequently, it is vital to adequately communicate the organization’s mission and vision to new employees during the onboarding process. Employees may attain a sense of purpose and tie their work to larger business goals by integrating their expertise with the company’s values. This shared sense of purpose fosters a strong work culture built on a common goal. Google, for example, ensures that new workers learn and accept the company’s ideals via its “Ten Things We Know to Be True” onboarding process, resulting in the company being widely and consistently regarded as one of the best places to work at year after year.
Second pillar: providing on-the-job training and required tools
Image Source: Campaign Creators | Unsplash
One critical component of the onboarding process is ensuring that new hires have the on-the-job information and tools they need to succeed, especially in the wake of global digitalization and the tendency to opt for online job training. Starting new employees with the correct tools and knowledge positions them for success and improves their performance. Unfortunately, 59% of the employees claim that they didn’t have proper on-the-job training. This should be rectified since training programs that target particular work needs and equip individuals with the appropriate skills and knowledge result in fewer errors, more accuracy, and better performance results.
Third pillar: building employee engagement
Image Source: Yan Krukau | Pexels
The new hire onboarding process is also important in building strong networks within the organization. Companies may develop a sense of belonging by encouraging interactions and team building, which has a direct impact on employee performance. According to the HBR poll, just 25% of respondents believe they are highly engaged in their firms. Addressing such issues throughout the onboarding process helps new employees feel valued, integrated, and motivated to accomplish their best.
Many corporations launched a “buddy program” to implement an employee engagement strategy from the first day of hiring. A buddy assists a new employee throughout the first several months, explains processes, and gets them acquainted with the culture. This will increase corporate profitability since Gallup research reveals that highly engaged units are 23% more profitable compared to other less engaged units.
To summarize, recognizing employees as valuable assets and investing in their onboarding process is critical for long-term corporate performance and success. Organizations may improve new recruit performance and contribute to a healthy work culture that supports overall productivity and profitability by successfully communicating their vision and goals, delivering thorough on-the-job training, and cultivating employee engagement.
In 2016, President Abdel Fattah El Sisi exhibited tremendous support for Sustainable Development Strategy: Egypt Vision 2030. Since then, Egypt has undergone a major digital transition to modernize its economy, improve public services, and boost digital literacy. To attain such goals, the country has invested heavily in education, research, and technical infrastructure. This article will analyze Egypt’s recent technological developments across three main pillars.
Infrastructure development
The Egyptian government has invested considerably in the development of its digital infrastructure to provide reliable and high-speed internet connectivity across the country, such as expanding its fiber optic network to connect more households and businesses to the internet. As of 2020, more than 70% of the country’s population had access to the internet. Egypt has allocated more than $1.1 billion for the development of 5G technology and infrastructure. Adopting new technologies, such as 5G, will provide faster internet speed and improve connectivity across the country.
E-government services
According to the ICT 2030 strategy, Egypt has made significant progress in digitizing its government services, which has made it easier for citizens to access essential services online. In 2020, the Egyptian E-Government Services Portal was launched, providing a one-stop-shop for government services such as applying for passports and IDs. The portal offers more than 100 services, and as of 2021, more than 6 million citizens have registered for the service.
Financial inclusion & e-commerce
Meeza card, a national electronic payment card launched in 2019, allows citizens to receive their salaries, pensions, and other government payments electronically.
Egypt’s digital transformation has paved the way for private companies to launch several mobile payment applications, such as Fawry, Instapay, and Vodafone Cash, allowing citizens to pay bills, transfer money, and make purchases using their mobile phones.
The following explains why Egypt’s case should serve as a model based on two main motives:
Economic growth
The digital sector has been one of the fastest-growing sectors in Egypt, contributing significantly to the country’s GDP. According to a report by the governmental statistics, the ICT sector contributed 5% to Egypt’s GDP in 2021, and digital exports reached $4.9 billion by 2022.
Financial inclusion
The digitization of financial services has increased financial inclusion among Egyptians. According to a report by the MCIT, 56% of Egyptian adults have a bank account. Moreover, the money wallet accounts are expected to reach 57.9 million in 2025, which is higher than the average for countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In conclusion, Egypt’s digital transformation has advanced due to government investments in infrastructure, education, and innovation.
Digitizing government services, increasing digital literacy, and the government is pursuing digital transformation to meet its long-term aims. Last but not least, a valuable resource for those seeking to enhance their knowledge and skills in strategy planning is The KPI Institute’s Certified Strategy and Business Planning Professional course. It is recommended to sign up for this course to learn more about strategy planning.
Any successful and developed performance management system must include the following main stages: planning, implementation, evaluation, and improvement.
Institutional performance management begins with the planning stage, which ends with the preparation of the strategic plan—a plan developed for several years that aims to bridge the gap between the current situation and the desired future vision. Determining the plan’s link with financial planning and the rest of the material, human, and technical resources and property, as well as at the planning stage there is a link with the general framework of risk management as it is necessary to determine the type of risk that could impede the implementation of the strategic objectives and how to deal with the risk during its occurrence, which requires the existence of institutional agility in leadership while dealing with it.
At this stage, the policy development guide is adopted, which is considered one of the basic capabilities to ensure the implementation of strategic objectives and government directions. Indicators and targets must also be set because of their importance in planning, monitoring and evaluation to see what has been achieved of the strategic objectives.
The execution phase involves ensuring the plan’s successful implementation of the strategy. This is where operational action plans are developed and implemented, which include strategic initiatives and projects that ultimately lead to achieving the results of the strategic objectives and bridging the performance gap in the strategic objectives that were measured through performance indicators. This phase also involves the application of a general framework for change management, which is designed to bring about a positive shift that moves the organizational unit and organization from one state to another in order to achieve the strategic objectives in an efficient and effective manner, which may deal with changing the organizational structure, policies, programs, procedures or processes in accordance with the application of the ADKAR model criteria for change management.
It is also possible to choose initiatives and projects (especially the strategy) from the reality of the organizational unit’s work plan, to which the concepts of change can be applied. At this stage, performance indicators are measured, the main purpose of which is to know the level of achieving the strategic goals. Therefore, on all indicators, whether strategic or operational, there are “Lead” indicators that measure efforts to achieve the goals or “Lag” indicators that measure the long-term results of the strategic goals, on all of them to contribute to achieving the strategic objectives of the organization. Any indicator that is far from achieving this should be excluded from the measurement.
Measuring performance indicators contributes to the enhancement of institutional learning, motivates employees to achieve higher levels of strategic performance, and enhances accountability and transparency in the institution. At this stage, implementation begins through the general framework of risk management in terms of identifying risk treatment options, the method of treatment, preparing a risk treatment plan, and following up on the extent of implementation of said plan.
Policies that support the realization of the strategy are applied through the preparation and development of an implementation plan that includes various resources, timetables, risk management, communication, monitoring, and evaluation. Monitoring is necessary to assess the effects of the policy so that there is a possibility to adjust the plan and methods of implementation (if required).
A policy follow-up mechanism must also be set up and this can be done by developing and measuring policy effectiveness performance indicators. Finally, at this stage, strategy governance was addressed, which is the framework for action that ensures the implementation of the strategy and the achievement of its objectives in terms of forming work teams, follow-up, review, accountability, reporting, and evaluation.
The third stage is the evaluation stage, and it includes auditing processes, which aims to provide accurate data on how to implement the main stages of the general framework for operations management by defining, designing, documenting, applying, measuring, and following up on the performance, improvement, and development of processes. Institutions can also measure the maturity of processes through several criteria, namely: strategic alignment, culture and leadership, personnel, governance, methodologies and methods, and information technology.
They can also evaluate services through several criteria, including: linking services to strategic directions and goals, focusing on customers, defining performance standards and indicators for services to reach customer happiness, evaluating service delivery channels, measuring and evaluating customer happiness and adding value to them, and evaluating the human resources that provide services. This stage also includes evaluating indicators and targets, as well as evaluating policies and measuring their effectiveness.
The fourth and final stage is the improvement stage, and it includes reviewing and updating the strategic plan. There are two types of review and update of the plan: periodic annual review and comprehensive update of the plan after the end of the plan period of 3 years or 5 years. This stage also includes updating and improving operations, and there are 7 main steps to do so. The processes are: selecting the work team, analyzing the current process, developing indicators of the results of the process, determining the extent of process stability, determining process viability, and determining the feasibility of an improvement.
This stage also includes the improvement of services as the mechanism for improving them depends on various improvement sources, such as suggestions, complaints, satisfaction studies, studies and analyses, the results of measuring service performance indicators, and others. As for the steps and stages of improvement, they are: describing and analyzing improvement opportunities, identifying improvement action, evaluating the priority of applying improvement action, and evaluating the possibility of applying improvement action.
And here comes the role of benchmarking, which is the process of searching for and implementing best practices that increase the rate of improvement by providing the finest models and achieving improvement goals that lead to creating outstanding performance for the organization. It is a systematic and continuous process of comparison, measurement, learning, and continuous improvement by studying different models inside or outside the entity to reach the same level or excellence by applying the developed methods based on the results of the study. Comparisons are also one of the most important drivers of change in organizations, particularly when the outputs of comparison are employed in offering initiatives and innovations that improve previous work methods or lead to unprecedented successful methods which achieve pioneering in various fields.
Finally, analysis and improvement tools must be used to analyze all the problems facing the organization, including those related to the results of performance indicators. And in addressing the cases in which analysis and improvement tools are used, some important tools in analysis were explained, such as: Pareto analysis, mind map, brainstorming, the Five Why tool, and others.
About the author: Dr. Hisham Ahmad Kayali is a Strategic & Performance Management Specialist who has worked with the Dubai municipality. He participated in the full cycle of updating Dubai Municipality’s strategic plan based on balanced scorecard (BSC) perspectives. That included linking the strategic objectives to critical success factors, key performance indicators, and initiatives for the cycles of 2010-2014, 2013-2015, and 2016-2021. He has a Phd in Economic Science at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics.
Editor’s Note: This piece was first published in the 22nd PERFORMANCE Magazine – Printed Edition. The KPI Institute’s Business Research Analyst Aida Manea discusses in this article how AI supports decision-making by eliminating biases and diminishing the number of human errors.
Through a variety of ways, artificial intelligence (AI) can help organizations enable and focus on better decision-making. AI could take over administrative roles and allow humans to prioritize more valuable things that require more time. The intelligent agent can take over manual tasks and enable process automation. AI can also plan decisions or predict results based on historical data.
That holds true even at the departmental level. Freeing managers from worries related to repetitive, administrative, and employee compliance tasks gives them more time for performance management activities. This is reflected in the use of AI as a behavioral assessment tool, data-driven processes where teams are coordinated through feedback, and more opportunities for meaningful human interaction.
AI in Performance Management
According to a study conducted by the University of Twente, there are two ways to implement AI in an organization. On a small scale, AI can assist a manager in improving small parts of the system, like inventory optimization. On a larger scale, AI could play a role in redesigning core processes at the organizational level.
One thing to pay attention to is knowing which type of implementation to choose. In an environment where human interaction and feedback are essential, it would not be the wisest choice to go for the second option as it could affect human connections.
The best-case scenario is to benefit from an assisting AI as it would help the manager make decisions while the assistant processes a vast amount of data. This will not only speed up the decision-making process but also guarantee the data veracity.
AI makes its mark on performance management systems through digitalization. Real-time feedback is important now more than ever due to the changes within performance management. The traditional yearly review is now being replaced by more frequent and informal check-ins as this would enable the shift from talking about people to talking with people. The 360-degree feedback practice focuses on asking colleagues for feedback on an employee’s performance.
Another strong point of AI is that it eliminates the biases toward individuals by assessing patterns and historical data with no opinion that might dilute decisions. While the line managers or HR may have their personal opinions about employees coincide with their responsibilities, AI supports decision-making by eliminating biases and diminishing the number of human errors.
AI for HR
At the HR department, the implementation of an AI system will not only process the data faster but will also deliver robust data collection, frequent fact-based performance, and improvement discussions. HR managers are responsible for their teams’ attitudes and behavior so that they can truly contribute to organizational goals.
In 2018, IBM realized the need for AI in mitigating biases and improving departmental performance. This is why IBM Smarter Workforce Institute wrote the paper “The role of AI in mitigating bias to enhance diversity and inclusion,” in which practical recommendations are offered for organizations that are looking to adopt AI in their HR daily activities.
Efficient and effective recruitment – A recruiter’s main challenges are prioritizing all the roles they are responsible for and finding a way to differentiate among candidates that applied for the same position. Deploying AI determines how long a job requisition will take to fill based on past data so that recruiters can prioritize the roles available.
Moreover, AI can predict future performance by determining the match between a resume and the job requisition and filtering candidates. The challenge in IBM regarding effective recruitment is to help HR managers surface the top candidates for the open positions and prioritize the most important requisitions. Their solution is IBM Watson Recruitment, an AI system that assesses information about the job market and past experiences of potential candidates in order to predict the necessary time to fill in positions and spot the most suitable candidates.
The huge advantage for recruiters is that they can focus on building and nurturing relationships with applicants. At the same time, AI collects the demanded skills from job requisitions and generates a score against skills mentioned in resumes. Finally, IWR watches over the hiring decisions to make sure they are free from bias and turns the candidate and recruiter’s experiences into better ones.
Enhancing motivation – At IBM, the individual needs of employees are essential, and managers get alerts about it. For example, the manager is alerted when there is an employee with years of experience in the company, has skills, and is ready for a promotion. The same applies to the case of employees with a higher propensity to leave or when employees from a specific department are at risk of missing their targets.
Through this alarm signal, managers are able to make decisions over the organization’s talent management approach. Another AI implication is the chatter analysis used to capture the top three internal issues from social media sources. Leaders can receive personalized recommendations to increase the team’s engagement. Other benefits brought by AI can be smarter compensation planning and career development.
The drawbacks of AI systems can be avoided by making sure the data is never used as a sole determinator in decisions.AI initiatives can barely break organizational barriers, based on a survey conducted by Harvard Business Review in which only 8% of firms engage in core practices that support the adoption of Artificial Intelligence. The shift towards AI should start by aligning the organizational culture and the internal operating ways to support digital transformation. Here are the three main actions to scale up AI:
Replace siloed work with cross-functional teams collaboration. The mix of perspectives increases the impact AI has over the processes as it ensures that projects address broad organizational concerns and not just isolated ones. Moreover, if end users are required to test what development teams work on, the chances of adoption increase.
Abandon the top-down approach. Integrating AI into processes will increase the trust of employees in algorithms. They are the ones who will ultimately make a decision based on the algorithm result and their experience. Once they feel empowered to make decisions without having to consult a higher-up, they will get a taste of what AI can offer: freedom of action.
Embrace an agile, experimental, and adaptable mindset. The idea of having an idea baked before it is deployed must be replaced with a test and learn vision. This reduces the fear of failure and allows companies to correct minor mistakes before they become costly ones by receiving early feedback from users.
AI’s ability to promote automated processes, analyze data, predicts trends, and even build frameworks helps the organization in its strategy and business planning. In order to maximize the product and effects of AI, it is essential to establish a strong strategy mindset.
The KPI Institute offers a program that would help you design an organization’s strategy and plan your business using a strategic framework. Enroll now in the Certified Strategy and Business Planning Professional Live Online course! For more details, visit The KPI Institute’s website HERE.
