DM tries performance evaluation of leadership

It is a new system for performance management to determine the objectivity and progress in dealing with the employees of the Municipality.

This system, known worldwide for performance evaluation of leaders and supervisors in their organizational units, aims at enhancing their performance and knowing the strong points to benefit from them and also to find out further opportunities for development and its requirements for each of them separately.

Humaid Saeed Al Marri, Director of Personnel Department said that the general objective of implementing this programme is to create a corporate culture for the Municipality, where the individuals as well as working groups take up the responsibility of constant development of the operations of the civic body.

It also focuses on objectives and plans instead of general details and increasing motives and also the commitment of the employees by providing enough opportunities to express their expectations and ambitions about the work and also their participation in formulating the goals and exchanging opinions and evaluating supervisors.

The system is an organized management and professional development program that addresses specific managerial skills identified in the Checkpoint as needing improvement. It also enables managers to pursue self-improvement in the areas most essential to improving their job performance.

The system provides sound and clear-cut basis for performance evaluation and specifies the relation between productivity and rewards, in addition to helping in planning the movement of employees based on best benefiting from their capabilities and potentials. Apart from that the system plays a good role in planning the training programmes that help enhance the capabilities and skills of the leadership as per healthy bases.

Al Marri explained that the system carries out evaluation of all those persons who are working in supervisory jobs such as directors of departments and heads of sections as per the following four aspects: personality evaluation of leaders as per the approved standards, evaluating the heads in the descending order also on the same standards, then evaluate the colleagues horizontally who are in the same administrative level who have strong control over their work and lastly evaluation in the ascending order by those who are led by them so that they are given an opportunity to participate in the decision making process.

The results of the evaluation emerge from adding up all the four aspects and taking the average to get the degree of performance standard. After that the performance level can be determined as per the system. Based on the results of evaluation obtained by the employee appropriate actions will be taken to reward and development.

Al Marri said that in order to have transparency in applying the system, an external agency has been approved to conduct the experiment on all heads of sections in the Municipality and they are doing the study after the results are out. He said the experiment will be extended to all supervisory levels.

Al Marri said all support for this new system is being given by the Personnel Department and a workshop is being conducted before starting the experiment for all the directors of departments and heads of sections and those who participate in the programme in the presence of the Director General of Dubai Municipality. All procedures are explained to the participants in the workshop.

Checkpoint 360 Competency Feedback System is a multi-rater feedback process that provides managers and leaders with an opportunity to receive an evaluation of their job performance from the people around them - their boss, their peers, and the people whose work they supervise. From this feedback, managers can compare the opinions of others with their own perceptions, positively identify their strengths, and pinpoint the areas of their job performance that could be improved.