New Perspectives in Performance Management: Appraising Employees Based on Computer Usage Patterns

Abstract

With or without their will, all nowadays organizations are involved in the daily quest for improving their organizational performance. Just as true, all organizations realize that people, their knowledge and skills are the most valuable resource an organization has. As a result, many of the organizational efforts are focused on enhancing the performance level of their own individuals and teams on efficiently assigning and evaluating work, on providing correct performance feedback for all employees, on determining complementary training and development needs and finally on distributing rewards based on meritocracy.

In such a context, the present article focuses on a new method for evaluating employees’ performances, based on technology driven indicators. The genesis of the article binds on an analytical research started in the context of the finding that the vast majority of employees of today’s modern organizations use the computer in their day-to-day work. As such, the use of computers facilitates capturing the entire activity of the employee for longer periods of time, so the captured information can be carefully analyzed in order to spot patterns which could have potentially driven the top performers’ results.

The aim of the research is to find a way to apply the patterns found in top performers’ behavior to all the other employees and analyses the gapping data trying to propose ways to either improve their performance, or simply reduce the gap between them and the top performers.