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Management Observation Program – Observations Change Behaviors
Admit it; you perform differently when your supervisor is watching you. Suddenly, all of the performance rules become clear and important. You feel a sudden urgency and compulsion to recall them.
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
The name, Management Observation Program, suggests that authorship of these documented performance assessments are or should be limited to those who supervise work. Yet, in a healthy organization, workers are encouraged to provide upward feedback and report conditions adverse to quality. All organizations should embrace a safety culture within which individuals are responsible for both their safety and the safety of their coworkers. (See StrategyDriven whitepaper, 
While management observation programs serve many purposes, they primarily exist to drive achievement of the organization’s goals in a manner consistent with its values. These formal, documented observations accomplish this by shaping and reinforcing personnel behaviors critical to supporting excellent operational performance. To provide adequate coverage, these observations should be performed on a recurring, situational, event, and random basis.
Most companies employ a periodic employee review program, typically comprised of a major annual review and sometimes complimented by a formal mid-year feedback session. Examination of these programs reveals most performance ratings are based on those individual behaviors, events, and accomplishments occurring within a few weeks of a review’s development. Consequently, employees achieving great success throughout the year, particularly those with significant achievements earlier in the period, feel cheated by a process that frequently overlooks these accomplishments.
Direct management observation and immediate feedback is the best tool for reinforcing performance expectations among employees. And while such reinforcement is optimally effective at maintaining high performance levels when given consistently over time, some management observation programs become a checklist task for executives, managers, and supervisors; resulting in the majority of observations being performed at the end of the observation cycle or in clusters during a narrow time frame within the cycle. Workers learn that standard adhering performance reinforcement only occurs during a very brief period within the cycle and that substandard work will typically not be observed and behaviors corrected the rest of the time. Work behavior quickly aligns with the pattern of expectation reinforcement; sub-optimizing overall performance and adversely impacting the observation program’s effectiveness.
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