Term of the Week: Human Performance Improvement

Why does a business professional need to know this?

In today’s highly interconnected, fast-changing organizational environment, addressing pressing challenges and opportunities requires a multi-faceted approach. Enter human performance improvement, a process that enables you to better understand root causes and deploy a systems approach to create end-to-end solutions that produce sustainable performance improvement.

Overview of the process:

• Clarify priorities: Define how the problem or opportunity fits into your strategic mission, what the desired outcomes are, what success should look like, and how to create alignment with strategic priorities.
• Conduct a root-cause analysis: Address the question of what the current performance problem is, what factors created it, and what an effective desired outcome looks like.
• Define key roles, stakeholders, and actions to build commitment: Lasting change comes from a coalition of stakeholders. Identify clients, sponsors, and key stakeholders, and determine their level of commitment to change.
• Create a project plan: Identify timelines, trade-offs, action steps, key resources and dependencies, potential risks and mitigation. Define shared responsibilities, expectations and clarity regarding how success will be measured.
• Implement defined solution(s): Keep stakeholders informed, identify key trade-offs, and be clear about what, why, how, and when each player contributes to change.
• Measure outcomes: Based upon agreed-to success criteria from the first step, capture data to tell the story of results achieved. Define what is needed to sustain success.
• Conduct an after-action review: Capture learnings from the initiative and use them to improve in the future.

Engaging in a human performance improvement project can solve organizational problems more effectively, build traction, and create productive win/win relationships.