Academic literature on the topic 'Performance Management; Employees' Performance'

Abstract The vital purpose of this research work is to examine the impacts of occupational health and safety management on employee's performance. It aims to investigate the nexus between the practice of OHS, safe working environment and performance of employees. The research work adopt a descriptive approach to scrutinize the contributions of provision of adequate health and safety equipment to performance of employees at Ardova Plc. Aside collecting primary data from the staffs of Ardova Plc in Lagos State cutting across diverse socio-economic class, simple random sampling was utilised in the study using 90 questionnaires to collect the primary data. However, descriptive data was therefore analyzed using Statistical Tool to show the Cross-tabulation, correlation and Chi-Square Test. The research study concludes that practice of occupational health and safety management can boost employee performance, and further suggest some policy recommendations.

The mining industry is experiencing challenges in attracting and retaining sufficient skilled employees to meet strategic aims and production objectives, despite offering relatively high financial incentives. Human resources management theory indicates that many factors contribute to employee motivation and job satisfaction, and that these in turn influence performance and employee turnover. Although financial rewards are recognised as major motivating factors in mining employee job satisfaction, non-financial motivators are also desired. This paper examines the use of non-financial incentives to improve performance and productivity in mine operational employees and identifies incentives that could achieve these goals. With few studies focusing on non-financial methods of improving personnel performance in mining, studies from other industries are considered and applied to the mining industry. The paper finds non-financial incentives are likely to increase the motivation of employees in the mining industry, and that incentives which improve the employee’s workplace experience are particularly desired.

In the growing body of research on gender and taxation in low-income countries, the implications of having more women in tax administration have received relatively little attention. Using data from employee records and key informant interviews, we examine the representation of women in the workforce of the Ethiopian tax administration, as well as their performance and their misconduct. The findings show that women dominate the overall workforce in most branch offices. However, women overwhelmingly occupy lower ranked positions and their engagement at the top level of management is quite limited. Our analysis of gender-disaggregated employee performance scores indicates that there is no conclusive evidence to claim women perform better than men employees, though most of the key informants tend to believe otherwise. However, misconduct records present a strong case that women employees are less likely to commit serious disciplinary misconduct, such as corruption and breaching trust, and more likely to serve for a longer number of years compared to men employees. We also present cross-country comparisons with Uganda and other ATAF member countries. Our overall findings underline the significant contributions of employing more women in tax administration and the need to further empower women through continued leadership training and mentoring programmes

People management has an important role to play in improving public agency performance. This paper argues that a ‘Route Y’ managerial approach focused on supporting the empowered exercise of employee judgment will in many circumstances prove superior to conventionalreform approaches steeped in ‘Route X’ monitoring and incentives. Returns to Route Y are greater when employees are or can become more “mission motivated” – that is, aligned with the goals of the agency in the absence of monitoring and extrinsic incentives. Returns to Route Y are also greater when monitoring is incomplete or otherwise likely to unproductively distort effort, thus lowering the returns to using performance-linked rewards and penalties. I argue that education systems are one (but far from the only) setting where Route Y is a lever worth focusing on in efforts to improve public performance in the developed and developing world alike.

In the growing literature on gender and taxation in low-income countries, little attention has been given to the implications of having more women in tax administration. This is even true in high-and middle-income countries, with a recent OECD survey of 43 countries reporting that in four out of every five cases studied, no analysis had been undertaken of the gender dimensions of tax administration. The gender imbalance in revenue administrations of low-income countries remains high though it varies from country to country. It is especially pronounced in senior management positions. This study aims to extend our knowledge of this hard-to-research area in the Ethiopian context, where evidence on the gender composition of the workforce and the performance and misconduct of women in tax administration is currently non-existent. We assess the representation of women in the workforce in the federal tax administration offices of the Ministry of Revenue at different levels in the hierarchy. We also examine performance, misconduct and turnover trends, as well as employees’ salaries disaggregated by gender.

We review the literature on people management and performance in organisations across a range of disciplines, identifying aspects of management where there is clear evidence about what works as well as aspects where the evidence is mixed or does not yet exist. We organise our discussion by four lenses, or levels of analysis, through which people management can be viewed: (i) individual extrinsic, intrinsic, and psychological factors; (ii) organisational people management, operational management, and culture; (iii) team mechanisms, composition and structural features; and (iv) relationships, including networks, leadership, and individuals’ relationships to their job and tasks. Each of these four lenses corresponds not only to a body of literature but also to a set of management tools and approaches to improving public employees’ performance; articulating the connections across these perspectives is an essential frontier for research. We find that existing people management evidence and practice have overemphasised formal management tools and financial motivations at the expense of understanding how to leverage a broader range of motivations, build organisational culture, and use informal and relational management practices. We suggest that foregrounding the role of relationships in linking people and performance – relational public management – may prove a fertile and interdisciplinary frontier for research and practices.

High-quality official statistics--from inflation to poverty rates--are essential for effective policymaking. Yet, little is known about the statistics officials who produce this statistical data. How competent are they at statistics? How motivated and ethical are they when producing statistics? And do National Statistical Offices (NSOs) manage them effectively? The answers are central to improving statistical capacity. Nonetheless, NSOs have not developed systematic measurement instruments to identify them. This pioneering publication addresses this gap. It presents the results of a survey of 13,300 NSO Employees in 14 Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Findings show that statistics officials and their characteristics matter. For instance, greater competence of statistics officials correlates with greater statistical performance of an NSO. Findings also show that most statistics officials are motivated in their jobs and committed to their NSO yet many struggle with basic statistical competencies and are not satisfied with their remunerations. Beneath the surface of average findings, however, lies a landscape of substantial variation among NSOs and within different departments inside the same NSO. These disparities are driven in part by differences in human resources management practices. Certain practices, for instance related to merit recruitment, adequate pay and performance feedback, are associated with greater staff motivation, integrity and competence. The report thus provides a data-informed roadmap to manage NSOs better and a survey instrument to help NSOs around the world measure their own management and staff.

Over one million firms around the world have adopted a Quality Management System (QMS) that conforms to ISO 9001 certification in 2015 and recent figures show that certifications have rapidly increased in emerging economies. ISO 9001 is considered a signal of high quality for products or services in markets with large imported competition or firms competing in international markets. However, implementing ISO 9001 certification entails large costs to companies for documentation of operating procedures, training, internal auditing, and corrective action. The impact of QMS on firm performance is unknown in developing economies and is still under-researched for more developed countries. This paper takes advantage of unique data on the status of certified and non-certified manufacturing firms in Colombia (an emerging economy) and matches it with firm performance. In 2006, the Colombian government launched policies to reduce the cost of adopting certification. We use this change to implement a difference-in-differences specification on panel data of certified and non-certified firms by matching samples at the year 2003, three years before the policy change. This is the most comparable data possible. Our findings suggest that firms that adopt ISO 9001 certification increase labor productivity (measured as added value over labor) by 12 percent, and sales per employee and wages by 8 percent. The effect is larger for firms that adopted certifications two years after the new policies compared with firms that adopted them immediately. The potential mechanism to explain gains in firm performance is human capital because, prior to the changes, firms with more temporary workers could not take advantage of certification.

Industrial development is central to Cambodia’s economic development as it plans to upgrade the country’s status to an upper-middle-income country by 2030 and to a high-income country by 2050. Equipping the workforce with the skills and competencies that match industrial needs requires a great deal of continuous efforts and resources. In this regard, this paper aims to look into the linkage between skills and transformation based on employers’ perspectives. It explores insights into how companies perceive and use the skills and qualifications of their employees to overcome changes in technology, products and work organisation. These new insights will enable TVET providers, policymakers and other key stakeholders to develop a holistic skills development intervention that is responsive and relevant to the Cambodian labour market. This paper is based on the analysis of data from 36 qualitative interviews with managers and production heads or representatives from 18 companies in the electrical and electronic (E&E), garment and food processing sectors. Nvivo 12 software was employed for coding and thematic analysis of the employers’ perceptions of skills and qualifications in relation to job requirements, the relationship between skills and transformation, and human resource strategies to cope with the skills requirements posed by transformation. General perceptions on skills and qualifications of the workforce Most companies experienced skills shortage and recruitment difficulty when it came to high-and mid-level employees. The skilled labour shortage was worse for some companies located in the provinces, compared to those in the vicinity of Phnom Penh. The reported skilled shortage could be due to companies setting high recruitment requirements with specific skills and knowledge for higher positions, while applicants’ skills and knowledge were lower than those requirements. For low-skilled positions like general workers or operators, recruitment was usually easier as companies did not require them to have any specific TVET qualifications; also, those low-skilled employees could be trained in-house to operate machines manually. However, when a large number of those workers were needed by many companies at once, labour shortages also prevailed in some cases, especially in the provinces. The quality and level of education and training were generally low among workers in the selected companies. Moreover, skills training programs were less relevant to the skills needs and requirements of most companies, and not many of those programs were available across the country. For instance, E&E and food processing companies found the available skills training programs unable to match their expectations and requirements in general. While struggling to get enough skilled labour, most companies agreed that having many employees with better education and training could help introduce new products, adapt to technological change and reorganise work systems. Because most companies lacked trust in the quality of education and training, they prioritised practical skills, knowledge and work experience for recruitment or promotion, while in-employment and internal training were widely valued and adopted as a main source of their employees’ upskilling and reskilling. Transformation and its implications for skills Major changes in technology, products and work organisation were reported in some companies in the selected sectors and these changes were driven by different internal and external factors, including market factors, increased product quality and quantity, skills and knowledge improvement, and labour and cost reduction. Particularly, those changes in the interviewed companies were believed to be intertwined with their employees’ skills, knowledge and experience. However, hiring high- and mid-level employees with the required skills did not have an impact on many companies changing their production machines or product types. Rather, these changes were introduced and facilitated by the expertise of their parent companies abroad, machine suppliers or main buyers. This might be because the skills, knowledge and experience of their high- and mid-level employees were lower than those of the technicians and experts from their parent companies or machine suppliers. It could also mean that the installation and maintenance of those machines required higher skills and experience, which were not available within the companies or the Cambodian labour market. The enhanced skills and knowledge of employees were to some extent related to new technology, product types or work organisation introduced in companies. Changes in technology, product types or work arrangements required a certain change in employees’ skills and knowledge. Put simply, any employees involved in such changes had to adapt to those changes and improve their skills and knowledge accordingly over the course of those introduced changes. However, the interview data shows that only a few companies in the E&E, garment and food processing sectors clearly indicated an improvement in their employees’ skills and knowledge, and that, in the case of improvement, the additional skills or knowledge were acquired through peer learning. As the changes were introduced, existing employees could also be affected physically or emotionally depending on the magnitude of the changes in terms of reduction in labour and costs for production improvements, employees’ increased skills and knowledge, increased workload and job responsibility, and management change. Most garment companies initiated an incentive platform or a reward system that was intriguingly motivational for all operators and employees. This bonus setup could enhance employees’ work performance, leading to productivity growth as well as employees’ upskilling and reskilling within many companies. Strategies for overcoming skills challenges and problems For dealing with the skills problems and challenges posed by transformation, companies used different strategies or methods, including outsourcing of technicians and experts, recruitment of new employees, internal promotion, and internal skills training and development. The outsourcing of technicians and experts was commonly found among many companies, as most companies were less likely to rely on their internal technicians, mechanics or engineers for the introduction of those changes, while also avoiding any recruitment of new employees or requirements for new, additional skillsets. Moreover, as the recruitment of new employees with skills and qualifications could be difficult and costly, most companies alternatively promoted their current employees based on work performance, practical skills and work experience in production. Internal promotion was widely used in all the sectors, and especially in the garment sector. Importantly, while internal training and development were heavily employed in all three sectors, formal training was scant and only happened in some large companies, for instance, in the E&E sector. High- and mid-level employees including managers, supervisors and some experienced team leaders who had strong foundational skills, knowledge and experience with production, and who had been with the companies for a long time, transferred their learned skills and knowledge to operators and general workers through peer learning, on-the-job training, work guidance, observation and practice. Implications for policy consideration Based on the employers’ perceptions of and experiences in skills and transformation, this study puts forward the following implications for policy consideration. 1. Promoting school-industry linkages through ensuring mutual benefits Promoting school-industry linkages would help in bridging the skills gap between skills training programs and industrial skills requirements. Such collaborations should be sustained by ensuring mutual understanding and benefits between partners. The models of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the local Kirirom Institute of Technology exemplify a strong university-industry collaboration, allowing students to experience the best training programs and benefiting all the parties involved. The government should also initiate, coordinate and finance this collaboration model between TVET and respective industries to meet industrial skills demand. Furthermore, establishing TVET parks and/or training centres in industrial and special economic zones could help maximise the use of training facilities and company trainers through school-industry cooperation, while enhancing and expanding the training activities and services of the existing TVET parks and training centres would help reach out to more companies and beneficiaries. Therefore, cutting-edge technologies and facilities could be shared among companies and TVET schools offering practical skills training. 2. Increasing employment opportunities Increasing employment opportunities could allow senior students and new graduates to learn from, adapt to, and experience real-work problems and workplace learning. This could be done through internships, apprenticeships and probation programs. Internships allow companies to observe whether students have the potential to be employees. An apprenticeship scheme should be mandatory across industries. In Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and South Korea, apprenticeships allow students to learn practical skills in the workplace, while participating in theoretical training at school. Such models are a win-win contract between schools, students and companies, but they need piloting or testing in Cambodia, where the current education and training system is different from those of the developed countries mentioned. Companies should also recruit employees with TVET skills and qualifications on a probation basis so that they can learn and adapt to the workplace. 3. Amplifying investments in generic and specific training A certain number of supervisors and team leaders should be given more opportunities to have generic and specific skills training leading to certifications or qualifications. Moreover, companies should systematise their in-house training with appropriate and structured training content and levels, and keep records of the names of participants and training courses for further training or potential buyer requirements. Companies could issue certificates of attendance or participation. They should also work with relevant ministries, such as the Ministry of Labour and Vocational Training (MoLVT), and their development partners to develop a comprehensive skills certification/recognition system, allowing workers from industries to have their prior learning recognised. MoLVT and relevant line ministries also need to incentivise companies that have skills training to work in cooperation with TVET schools. Companies should develop an incentive or reward system that motivates workers to participate in skills training and to enhance work performance at all occupational levels. This incentive system should be a strategy to retain and promote employees to a certain level of management, while reducing unintended employee turnover and recruitment costs. Furthermore, equipping the existing and future workforce with fundamental technological skills and competencies is also an important task that companies and TVET schools need to do as Cambodia prepares to embrace the emerging fourth industrial revolution.

We study four methods: the zero-dispersion wavelength (ZDWL) transmission, the dispersion management, the optical soliton transmission, and the midway optical phase conjugation (OPC), for upgrading installed electronic repeater-based optical fiber transmission system to optically amplified system. We derive the optimum design rules for each scheme to achieve the maximum transmission data rate. The 1,318-km-long Thailand-Malaysia (T-M) submarine fiber-optic transmission system is used as the system model. Firstly, we give the basic knowledge about fiber characteristics and their effects to signal propagation, and review the concepts of four upgrading schemes. Then, the numerical simulation is used for studying the signal distortion induced from the third-order dispersion and the Kerr effect in ZDWL transmission system. When the ZDWL transmission is employed to upgrade the T-M system with our optimum design guidelines, the possibility of increasing data rate from 560 Mbit/s to 80 Gbit/s is shown. For the dispersion management, the transmission data rate can be extended to 100 Gbit/s for single channel, and to 6 x 10 Gbit/s for multi-channel wavelength division multiplexing. However, when the soliton scheme is employed to improve the system performance, the numerical result shows the possibility of increasing data rate only to 20 Gbit/s because of nonlinear signal distortions. The highest data rate in this study is obtained from the system upgrading using the midway OPC. By following our design strategies, the possibility of increasing to 200 Gbit/s is numerically shown.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are an important set of metrics used to assess various aspects of photovoltaic (PV) systems, including their long-term performance, economic viability and carbon footprint. Technical KPIs support data-driven and informed decision-making when optimizing PV systems and provide a comprehensive overview of how PV systems operate across different conditions and climates. Different KPIs are commonly employed throughout the entire value chain of PV projects and can be categorized into technical, economic and sustainability aspects. In this work, a set of best practices for handling PV system data to reliably calculate relevant KPIs is discussed. While most technical KPIs are generally well-known among asset owners, EPCs, O&M providers and consultants, not all stakeholders in the financing-to-operation chain are equally aware of the nuances and consequences of certain decisions, which are based on how technical KPIs are operationalized, i.e. translated from contracts to how and where raw data are stored, which data cleaning and imputation techniques are used, to how the technical KPIs are calculated and used for subsequent decision-making. In many cases, the decisions made in the development-to-construction phase, will affect the asset for a significant part of its lifetime. For example, the resolution at which data is measured, which data are stored, or whether data back-ups are on-site or in the cloud, can all affect how KPIs are calculated, affect future modifications to contractual clauses, or the need for SCADA upgrades. Hence, this work aims to provide all stakeholders deeper insights and a shared understanding of the most important technical KPIs. The work is divided into three parts, each addressing different aspects of KPIs, data management, and their mapping potential