Abstract
Employee performance is a key factor for the success of any modern organization. Employees are an asset that cannot be imitated by the competition, and therefore should be considered the most valuable resource. Unfortunately, they are also the hardest to control. Previous studies in manufacturing organizations have proven this. Performance improvement initiatives with a wide range of approaches are used in an attempt to improve employee performance. Motivation or organizational commitment are some examples of such programmes. However, the clear majority do not focus on the bigger picture. A conceptual model through system dynamics of the factors that affect employee performance and the different improvement initiatives is presented in this paper.
7. Conclusions and future work
A model was developed for simulating the impact of improvement initiatives on the employee performance. Such model can be used for comparing scenarios and help decide which one(s) to implement. In the current version, the model requires information to be collected from the company in order to inform the stock and flow equations. A number of assumptions are in place that will be further considered.
Indicatively, aspects than need to be further modelled include:
• The turnover of staff will affect the performance changes. Employees leaving or joining the company will affect performance differently depending on which level of performance they were in or they start in
• New employees commonly go through a training period (different from the training initiatives in the model). While they are integrated in the company, the effects of the initiatives on them will vary
• The external environment was not considered, but its potential impact on an employee’s performance should not be disregarded.
• The sustainability of the initiatives depends on the extra resources generated by the high performers. However, these will change depending on the general business condition.
