Please share with us the reasons why Cheng & Co does performance assessments for young employees on their key performance indicator (KPIs) twice a year? – From Melody Tay, Cheng & Co’s Talented Staff – Batch 2016.
This is a pertinent question but first I would like to share an observation. Today, it’s great to see many workplaces – including Cheng & Co – with workforce that comprises of four distinct generations – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Y and Z. Some organisations even have members from the Silent Generation (Traditionalists) which is quite rare. I don’t think we have seen such workplace dynamics in decades past.
Each generation has its own outlook and expectations towards work and life in general so you can only imagine how challenging it is for management everywhere to provide the best possible working environment and practises to conciliate every one. Talking about generations, Cheng & Co puts a lot of effort and resources into developing our young employees because we firmly believe that they are our leaders of tomorrow.
By helping them realise their true potential, nurture their talents, grow and shape the path of their careers, we are not only developing highly capable individuals who could potentially take over the reins of key positions from our senior leaders in future, but also become the industry’s movers and shakers. Hence the launch of our leadership centres and numerous internal leadership development programmes.
Which brings me to the question that is asked in this edition of my column. At Cheng & Co, our KPI measurements differ for managers and above, and young employees. It is important that the development of young employees are carefully managed. Shaping them from the beginning is very important because tomorrow they will have the power of influence over others in terms of behaviour, soft skills, emotional intelligence, technical capabilities, etc.
The benefit of twice a year performance assessment is that it tracks your progress effectively and allows you to make corrective actions where necessary and still meet pre-set corporate objectives. Also, young employees stand to enjoy performance bonuses twice a year hence the need for a half yearly assessment. Performance is closely tied to how rewards and recognition programmes are executed.
Another point to emphasise is that to ensure the performance measurement of our employees and business clusters are fully aligned with our firm’s vision, mission and growth strategies, we officially implemented the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in 2014. It’s a crucial tool to initiate our business transformation as it provides important indicators on factors such as performances of employees, increased cost efficiency, and client satisfaction.
While KPIs are a performance measurement tool to measure continuous improvements, even more important is to realise that vision and mission are core components on which the foundation, growth, sustainability and success of an organisation is built on. In line with our ambition to transform into the leading home-grown international accounting firm’ with offices in 100 locations by the year 2020, we enhanced our vision, mission and core values and officially launched it last year.
The enhanced version was developed keeping in mind the role of the young employees in our organisation and how crucial they are to our future. To give them a purpose and motivate them to achieve success for Cheng & Co, and themselves. After all, it is our young employees who will eventually drive our vision, mission and success beyond 2020, by which time Cheng & Co would be established as “THE FIRM OF THE FUTURE!”
