In a competitive market, how do companies make sure they are staying ahead of the curve and succeeding in providing the best possible service for their client? “If you’re without any benchmark, you really don’t know how you’re doing,” says Albert Chen, CEO of Telemon Corporation. Performance management is simply a way of measuring and ensuring success, and it’s essential to growing any small MWBE business. “If you don’t have set targets and you don’t have goals, you can’t grow. It will just be a one-shot deal, it doesn’t have true scope and span,” says Katherine McConnally, president and CEO of KKM Telecom. - By Maggie Frank

Companies most successful at performance management know they must set expectations, monitor their performance with weekly, monthly and quarterly updates, rate their performance and devise solutions for areas in which they perform poorly. “In order for us to be successful, we can’t just get a scorecard and say ‘from 1 to 10 you have a 7.’ Really you sometimes need to indicate how to improve the poor performance portion,” Chen says. Monitoring performance is the first step in growing a business. Once the business knows what is working and what still needs work, it can go forward. In an effective organization, employee developmental needs are evaluated and addressed. Developing is helped along through training, giving assignments that introduce new skills or higher levels of responsibility, improving work processes, or other methods. Providing employees with training and developmental opportunities encourages good performance, strengthens job-related skills and competencies and helps employees keep up with changes in the workplace, such as the introduction of new technology, according to the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management performance management overview.