Management Control for Performance Management
Even though you do not need to micromanage all the employees, at the same time you cannot leave employees without any control and check points. This makes sense when you are focused on improving your current performance.
Developing efficient management control, for example strategic goals and objectives, business operational plans or employee management instructions, would help you move forward. These kind of checkpoints, guidelines, procedures and management control will guide employees instead of only limiting them. They will focus on those business activities that create value for the company.
Management control incorporates creating various guidelines, processes and protocols for directing the job, employees and business units. Those management controls could involve establishing guidelines or rules for financial data, attendance, results driven incentive plans, employee behavior and particular strategies and tactics.
Typical internal management control will be managing financial processes. This can help improve the existing communications, lets managers establish if the work will be meeting the monthly objectives, and stops any scams and mistakes daily.
Those controls involve requiring every department leader to have specific updated budget, establishing control on who could write for example purchases and checks, and at the same time requiring big purchases to be authorized by upper managers, maintaining frequent audits and doing frequent budget variance analysis to spot potential issues before even they get beyond control.
Management accounting controls could as well involve the creation of frequent management reports like financial reports, management scorecards and excel dashboards and cost dashboards.
Management control frequently needs most decisions related to products and pricing to go towards the marketing department first for authorization. This can help avoid sporadic marketing messages, like advertising manager offering one thing and sales reps offering the same thing for different prices.
One of targets of management control would be to help teams work better along. You could do this by establishing particular communication processes, weekly and monthly meetings and frequent emails.
To increase the individual employee performance, the management control may involve sharing key KPIs and metrics on dashboard reports used by all employees. This lets everyone know about the performance level, what is important and what should be improved.
Management control will be just theory without specific and reliable measurements. For each employee, team and department there should be goals, target and metrics. They all can be reported by using excel dashboards. This helps managers save time on management reports and concentrate on their real business – growing the performance of the business.