The Brief
North Shropshire DC needed to raise their game. They were committed to generate sustainable improvements in service delivery and a better quality of life for the North Shropshire Community.

The Council Employees were under increasing pressure to improve their output, with an emphasis on measurable performance and quality initiatives. The management team needed support to introduce a completely different work ethos and to grasp control of increasing, and morale-sapping, absenteeism by certain members of their teams.

The Solution
The scope included performance management in its overall sense. We were asked to improve capability in both formal situations (such as Appraisal and Return to Work Interviews); and informal opportunities that occur on a daily basis (such as recognising good, and managing poor, performance). Outcomes included:

• To define what is meant by performance management in the North Shropshire District Council environment.
• To understand the link between performance coaching and results and to support the appraisal methodology (introduced recently) with a matching portfolio of core enabling skills.
• To be based upon a set of common principles, which can be used by individual managers to meet their specific needs.
• To identify and use suitable opportunities for performance management, to bring out the best in others.
• To improve your managers’ ability to give feedback to encourage individuals to improve performance.

The one day workshop, was followed by a half day surgery in order to generate sustainable people performance improvements. Each manager identified a particular improvement to work on, that could be measured through existing metrics, reporting back on progress at the ‘Surgery’.