Give your employees misleading information about how well they are performing. Keep them in the dark about suppliers and customers, both internal and external. Make sure poor performers get paid as well as good ones. Design the tools of work without ever consulting the people who use them. Give pep talks rather than offer incentives for individual and team performance. Design a job so that it has no future.

If you are trying to promote incompetence among employees, this is the way to do it. In promoting incompetence among your employees, you create an incompetent company, a company with no future.

In industries such as environmental services, competent employee performance is key in meeting and satisfying the changing environmental management needs of its clientele. It is important for companies not only to encourage employees to achieve their potential, but also to help them.

How, then, do we create competency among our employees? How do we improve employee performance? How do we produce valuable results?

Creating competency does require an investment. Therefore, it’s important to place the company’s investment toward improving employee performance in those areas that produce the most valuable results. In other words, you must look at the ratio of the value of the accomplishment to the cost of the behavior. Any rational company should be seeking greater benefits for the investment it makes.

Effective organizations know how to develop "human capital." They know how to take human potential and develop it so that it yields results. Organizations that are effectively developing "human capital" are doing a variety of things. These include:

• Promoting team learning
• Developing shared visions
• Developing knowledge capital
• Measuring employee performance
• Benchmarking and continually improving

While companies often measure performance and provide both financial and nonfinancial incentives, they often fail to provide adequate training to boost an employee’s competence to perform his or her job. Employee training is often the most expensive investment toward competency, yet it may not be the most effective if not planned appropriately. To create training opportunities that affect performance, organizations should consider the following:

• Align learning with the strategic plan of the organization.
• Gather input from employees and customers for use in the training design
• Measure the "Return on Investment" of learning
• Determine how access to information and learning opportunities impact performance.

Performance engineering encourages companies to offer a variety of environmental supports to help boost employee performance. They include:

Information: Providing employees with information on supplier capabilities, relevant and frequent feedback on performance, descriptions of what is expected, as well as clear and relevant guides to help them reach their expected performance.
The Right Tools: Effective tools and materials that are designed scientifically using ergonomics to enhance performance.
Incentives: Adequate financial incentives made contingent upon performance, non-monetary incentives and career development opportunities are all motivators for stronger performance.
Additionally, performance engineering also encourages companies to understand the personal dimensions that may affect performance, especially an employee’s knowledge, capacity and motives.

Performance engineering provides many advantages to companies. Scheduling can be adapted to match peak employee performance, training can be designed to improve effectiveness in measurable ways and recruitment can provide people who match the realities of the work situation.

Improve the results from employee efforts and ensure a strong future for your company. Learn how performance engineering can create a future of maximized performance and reward.