The real estate industry pulsates with the rhythm of performance. From agents closing deals to property managers ensuring optimal occupancy, individual and team success directly translates to organizational growth. In this high-stakes environment, a well-implemented Performance Management System (PMS) emerges as the conductor, harmonizing individual efforts and driving the symphony toward desired outcomes.
A PMS is more than just a goal-setting exercise. It is a comprehensive framework designed to establish clear, measurable objectives, track progress against those objectives, and evaluate individual and team performance throughout the journey. It fosters a culture of accountability and continuous improvement, ensuring that all efforts are aligned with the organization’s broader strategic vision.
The symphony of benefits in real estate
The implementation of a PMS in real estate unlocks a multitude of benefits, allowing organizations to:
Empower individuals and teams: By setting SMART goals(specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and providing regular feedback, the PMS empowers individuals and teams to strive for excellence.
Make data-driven decisions: The PMS serves as a reliable source of objective data on performance, allowing for informed decisions regarding resource allocation, marketing strategies, and talent development.
Drive client satisfaction: A PMS aligns individual performance with customer satisfaction metrics to deliver exceptional service and exceed client expectations.
Cultivate strong talent management: Identifying strengths and weaknesses through performance evaluations allows for targeted training and development opportunities, leading to a more skilled and motivated workforce.
Adapting PMS for diverse roles
While the core principles of a PMS remain consistent regardless of the industry, it is crucial to tailor the system to address the specific needs of diverse real estate roles.
Real Estate Agents:Some important indicators are # Listings closed, $ Average selling price, # Customer satisfaction score.
Property Managers:Crucial areas for evaluation include % Occupancy rate, $ Maintenance costs, % Tenant retention rate, and % Adherence to regulations.
Brokers: For overall portfolio performance, organizations can use % Return on Investment (ROI) and % Growth Rate. For team productivity, they can consider # Time spent per task completion, # Average time to close a transaction, % Tasks completed without errors, and % Lead conversion rate.
Appraisers:The key metrics to consider are % Accuracy of valuations, % Timely report delivery, % Client satisfaction.
Mortgage Loan Officers: Organizations can look into # Loan origination volume, % Loan approval rate, and % Customer satisfaction.
Leasing Agents:A few important evaluation points to consider are # Leases signed, % Lease renewal rate, and % Tenant satisfaction.
Facility Managers:The major points for measurement are # Maintenance response time, % Budget adherence, and % Tenant comfort level.
Building a sustainable performance culture
Implementing a successful PMS requires commitment and careful planning. Here are some key steps:
Define roles and responsibilities: Clearly outline expectations for each position within the organization, such as property managers focusing on tenant relations and leasing agents prioritizing property marketing strategies.
Develop clear and measurable goals: Ensure that goals are SMART and aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives, such as setting targets for property occupancy rates and rental income growth over specific time frames.
Choose the right tools and technology: Consider implementing dedicated software solutions to streamline the process, such as CRM systems tailored for real estate to manage client interactions and property databases efficiently.
Foster open communication: Provide regular feedback and encourage open communication to facilitate continuous improvement, such as conducting monthly team meetings to discuss performance metrics and address any challenges or successes in property management.
Adapt and evolve: Regularly review and update the PMS to ensure its relevance to evolving business needs and industry trends, such as incorporating new regulations or market demands into performance evaluation criteria and adjusting goal-setting accordingly. Moreover, companies can utilize real-time data analytics tools to monitor market trends and adjust strategies accordingly.
In conclusion, a PMS is not just a tool; it is the foundation for a thriving performance culture in the real estate industry. By aligning performance with desired outcomes, real estate companies can unlock their full potential and ensure long-term success in this dynamic and competitive landscape.
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About the Author
This article is written by Rami Al Tawil, the General Manager of Organizational Excellence at Al Saedan Real Estate Company. He holds a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology. With 19 years of expertise spanning strategy planning, performance management, business improvement, and more, he excels in aligning employees with strategic visions for consistent performance improvement.
Nowadays, effective workforce management is essential to success in the corporate world. In a time of swift technological progress, changing demographic patterns, and changing workplace dynamics, companies prioritizing workforce management stand to benefit greatly. To achieve sustainable development and competitiveness, the strategies and best practices for workforce management are examined in this article, focusing on their significance. There are two main categories for the workforce management, and they are:
Strategic workforce planning: Workforce management that considers the organization’s long-term goals and objectives is known as strategic workforce management. It entails coordinating the workforce with the strategy of the organization, projecting future labor requirements, and creating talent pipelines to satisfy those requirements.
Forecasting the demand requires understanding the full strategy picture so that organizational goals are properly measured. At the same time, to ensure that strategic workforce planning is effective, it needs to be measured against key performance indicators.
Operational workforce planning: Operational workforce planning enables the organization to achieve short-term outcomes. This level of workforce planning involves keeping track of day-to-day operations, assigning people, and addressing ad-hoc changes.
Analyze the current workforce: This involves assessing the workforce’s current level of skill and capabilities as well as any gaps and the skills required to accomplish the organization’s long-term objectives.
Identify target needs: This includes a strategic analysis of the company, market forecasts, and industry trends. The organization can determine the precise skills and competencies needed to satisfy those objectives once it has a clear picture of what it will need in the future.
Develop strategies: Developing strategies involves filling up the gaps and preparing the workforce for the organization’s future demands. This entails creating targeted initiatives and programs. Programs for training and development, recruiting drives, and succession planning are a few examples of this.
Implement strategies: This entails implementing the identified techniques and assessing their effectiveness. To ensure the tactics are producing the intended effects, it is critical to regularly review and monitor them. The tactics can be modified as needed to increase their effectiveness. Workforce planning is an ongoing process that needs to be included into the organization’s larger operational management and business planning initiatives. Organizations can ensure they have the appropriate people with the right skills in the right location at the right time to fulfill their goals by proactively approaching workforce planning.
Monitor and evaluate: Workforce planning must include both monitoring and evaluation. Organizations may determine what is effective and what needs to be improved by tracking and assessing the workforce strategy’s effectiveness, efficiency, and appropriateness.
In a case study featured on AIHR addressing the strategic workforce challenges faced by ProRail Traffic Control, the main concern revolved around the imminent transformation of jobs for 700 Train Traffic Controllers and 150 operational planners due to increased automation. In response, the organization developed a 10-year vision named “Digital Vision” to digitize the traffic control process and accommodate projected capacity growth. To assess the workforce impact of these changes, the management initiated Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP).
Guided by principles such as business continuity, re-schooling, turnover, cost-effective growth, and technology integration, the SWP approach involved a data-driven analysis by a core team comprising HR and external consultancy experts. The quantitative model generated insights, including the anticipated retirement-driven employee departures, a natural turnover exceeding the reduction in required operators, and the feasibility of adjusting workstation numbers over time to align with technological advancements, ensuring operational continuity and job security. The study emphasizes the importance of aligning workforce planning with technological advancements to achieve long-term sustainability and adaptability.
Conclusion
Growth is ultimately fueled by a workforce that is aligned and can carry out the organization’s strategic goals. Organizations may create a culture of innovation and continuous development as well as react to the changing business environment by taking a proactive approach to workforce planning.
In essence, ensuring growth in an organization requires a workforce that is aligned with the appropriate skills and competencies. For organizations to achieve their objectives, strategic workforce planning ensures that the appropriate people with the right skills are in the right place at the right time. This encompassing method of managing the workforce fosters long-term success and flexibility in the dynamic organization setting.
An aligned workforce with the skills and capacities to carry out the organization’s strategic goals and objectives is a workforce that drives business growth.
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Nawaf Al Omari boasts over a decade of experience in optimizing teams and driving project management success. He excels at forecasting staffing needs, resource management, and fostering collaborations, with a 40% increase in stakeholder satisfaction. Prioritizing data-driven decision-making, he is adept at mitigating risks, tracking KPIs, and achieving cost reductions. Nawaf is strongly committed to delivering results and operational excellence.
Outstanding performance that can sustain positive results in the future is one of the key elements of organizational excellence.
Considering organizational excellence as what can drive organizations to a brighter future in terms of more profits, cost reduction, more customer satisfaction, referrals, better net promoter score; it is important to highlight the three pillars of the excellence model from the EFQM model 2020; direction, execution and results.
Having this in mind, the model stresses the need for methodological approach where we develop practices and processes, integrate them into the organization towards agile, effective, and efficient execution, in order to achieve better performance results internally (strategic and operational) and externally as perceptions from stakeholders (customers, citizens, and beneficiaries), which can sustain positively in the future.
The third criterion of the model, namely “Engaging Stakeholders,” focuses on ensuring continuous and positive engagement with all key stakeholders of the organization including employees/public servants. Employees are therefore seen as a key stakeholder, and having them as an integral part of any organizational excellence model emphasizes the need to shift the public sector’s focus from the traditional way of operations, in which public servants are only there to process the requests of citizens, try on their own to be energetic and efficient, awaiting their retirement, to a more competitive way, in which they compete with the private sector’s staff in terms of service excellence.
For this shift to happen, the key players are the employees, who will need to feel the need, accept and change towards a different mindset where they consider themselves not just as public servants but as drivers towards the public sector’s and country’s prosperity.
Leaders need to approve such a shift, align it with organizational purpose, direct it internally and externally, support it with the right values, allow change management to tackle all what needs to change step by step, and catalyze it with motivational culture.
A motivational culture can help public servants create ideas to improve, and innovate in the direction of efficiency and agility, so that they can get recognized internally and externally. Motivate them to be proud ambassadors for the country’s welfare. Motivate them so that they can understand and fully believe that they are the primary drivers of success.
Although motivation is one word, thousands of research papers have talked about it! So, let’s get back to the foundation of human beings without further complications: aren’t we survivors? Haven’t we gone through so many crises and changes in this world and made it safely in 2022? Accordingly, the desire to see what tomorrow holds for us and to consider what we may do now to get a greater return tomorrow is what drives us to get out of bed each morning in search of a better tomorrow.
Finally, I would like to refer to the very significant connection between motivation and sustainability. Motivation is one of the components of sustainability, which ensures that resources are preserved for current generations as well as all future ones.
Will sustainability direction, focus and efforts succeed? It will all depend on whether we, people, feel ourselves part of it and we are motivated enough to invest in it. How to feel this way and how to be motivated? Simply by ensuring our sense of belonging and our ability to effect the necessary change, both for our benefit and the benefit of all future generations.
Does your organization adopt an employee or customer-centric operating methodology? For decades, the main focus of businesses in the Middle East has been on the customer, embracing mottos such as “The customer is always right” or “Customer comes first,” with the primary objective of attaining high customer satisfaction to expand market share. While this remains a universal goal, the approach to achieving it varies among companies, with some prioritizing employees over customers.
Employee performance management has gained increased attention in recent years compared to previous decades. This shift is largely a result of a changing mindset in both the private and public sectors regarding core business principles and operating methodologies. Companies have started to be more aware that what leads to customer satisfaction is a happy workforce, prompting them to focus more on managing employee performance.
Business magnate Richard Branson encapsulates this shift with his statement: “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” This shows us the importance of transitioning towards a more employee-centric business model to keep employees satisfied and engaged while achieving business goals. For all these reasons, employee performance management plays a pivotal role.
To better understand what employee performance management entails, it is important to examine its sub-processes:
Employee performance planning: The planning phase is a prerequisite, establishing the groundwork for the entire process. It is imperative to clarify roles, responsibilities and competencies by having the proper job descriptions and competencies framework developed based on the market’s best practices.
Employee performance measurement: This phase teaches the creation of scorecards at the employee level, guiding the assessment of competencies and behaviors. It also delves into the advantages and disadvantages of creating a final performance index for each employee, incorporating clearly defined criteria such as objectives, KPIs, competencies, and behaviors.
Employee performance review: This phase details organizing and conducting employee performance review meetings, ensuring value for managers and employees. During meetings, managers transparently discuss employee performance, acknowledge achievements and progress, and highlight improvement areas.
Employee performance improvement(talent management): This phase emphasizes the right course of action after the performance review meeting and the enablers of performance improvement. It guides the addressing of low-, medium-, and high-performing staff members, underscoring the importance of a monitoring process to ensure the effective implementation of corrective actions.
Performance recognition: This process guides the creation of rewarding models for acknowledging high-performing individuals and teams, enabling the design of a sustainable reward system encompassing financial and non-financial rewards.
In 2023, several aspects of performance management, especially employee performance management, have evolved. This shift is a response to the so-called “post-pandemic new normal,” forcing businesses to rethink survival strategies for 2024 and beyond. Six main trends have emerged:
A noteworthy change is the evolution of the job landscape. Financial security, which once deterred employees from leaving their jobs, is no longer the sole factor. Jobs now offer employees opportunities for growth, continuous feedback, flexible working hours, remote or hybrid work options, and comprehensive benefits, enhancing their work-life balance. These trends underscore the imperative for businesses to shift towards employee-centricity to achieve strategic objectives and foster sustainable business practices with reduced turnover.
Employee performance management will witness further changes, particularly in performance review and goal-setting. The workplace will increasingly focus on personal and professional goals, transforming performance reviews from a process into project-based evaluations, enhancing the workspace and contributing to a more sustainable business.
To prepare you for the year ahead, The KPI Institute can equip you with the industry-leading tools and skills required to nurture employee performance. Sign up for the Certified Employee Performance Management Professional and Practitioner courses now and secure your slot here.
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.
