Sometimes you may feel that staff members come up with more reasons not to participate in performance management than reasons to participate. This is particularly true of individuals who would rather criticize an initiative than participate in its implementation. Here are some common complaints about performance management, as well as some suggested responses.

We tried it before, and it didn’t work:

It’s been said that the definition of insanity is when you keep doing the same thing and expect different results. But science and public administration require experimentation. If something was tried in the past, that just means one particular approach didn’t work. If you can identify the methods or approaches that were problematic, you can avoid those in your new implementation.

This is the priority today, but next year it will be something else. (We’ll just drag our feet and wait you out!):

Yes, there’s a long history of management strategies, from managing by objective to total quality management, reinventing government to Lean Six Sigma. What is important is not the name, forms, or procedures, but the fact that all are focused on better understanding your operations. Even if a new approach comes into vogue in the future, collecting data now will give you the baseline for comparison with that future performance.

There are too many unmeasurable outside factors influencing our performance:

This can be a particularly touchy issue with those who work with unwilling or adversarial clients, such as in human services, criminal justice, or code enforcement. Similar issues can also be raised in departments where the workload is driven by customer requests or incidents. Proponents of this argument suggest that because some factors are out of your control, nothing is worth measuring.

This argument ignores the fact that many factors are within your control—case management, property inspections, enforcement procedures, fire prevention, response time, public education, and permit streamlining, for example. You may not be able to control how many fires occur or bring developers to your doorstep, but you can influence the likelihood of fires and the community’s attractiveness as a business location and work to improve the quality and efficiency of your performance.

The elected officials will still make decisions for their own reasons:

Democracy can be messy and inefficient, but it also ensures that everyone can have a voice in their government. That may mean that some decisions still get made without regard to the data, but if you don’t gather the information in the first place, then a data-informed decision is not even a possibility.

You’re just doing this to cut or punish staff:

Staff cuts are an unfortunate and often unavoidable part of financial retrenching. Without hard data, the cuts that get recommended may be across-the-board percentages that make the situation worse. For instance, if a tax auditor’s office actually generates revenues from its review and enforcement actions, cutting its staff by 10 percent could worsen the financial picture even further. With performance data, you can see where prior cuts in staffing may have resulted in slower response times, declines in service quality, or higher capital costs due to deferred maintenance.

As for the punishment argument, the programmatic scale of most performance measurement makes it a very crude tool for individual vendettas. If an employee is not fulfilling his or her job responsibilities, you’re more likely to address this through his or her supervisor or annual review. Performance data might tell you how the work group is performing, how the department goals are being accomplished, and where there may be gaps to address, but it does not work like a radiation dosimeter badge that suddenly turns red when an employee needs to be disciplined. That “hammer” approach can actually be counter-productive, because it may discourage accurate data gathering in the first place. If the performance measurement is geared toward better understanding and improvement of operations, it stands the best chance of success.

The media will have a field day if our performance isn’t the best:

The straightforward response to media criticism is: “If we didn’t measure, we wouldn’t know where we’re falling short, and we’re committed to both addressing those situations and openly sharing that data with the public.”

You can’t compare us to other agencies, because we’re not like anybody else. 

For more on responses to this argument, as well as more general advice on performance management, check out the e-book Getting Started: Performance Management for Local Government, available free of charge for ICMA members.