If you are called for your yearly meeting and are told that you haven’t scored very high in your key result areas, do not be dumbfounded. This simply means that you have not performed up to the mark in your result areas. You are required to adopt innovative business strategies.

Checking performance

This tool makes it easier to know whether individuals departments or even organizations have performed over certain measurable deliverables or not. You may find that KRAs are not so popular yet, but its awareness has a rising trend. More and more successful entrepreneurs are making use of it.

You may think it to be a performance measurement instrument at a broader level. For instance, while at a macro level, the performance of a whole unit would be KRA of the boss, the actual job might be distributed among the subordinates. Thus the individual targets would be each subordinate’s KRA that can also be measured. So, KRAs always cascade from the top to the bottom. This means that the benchmarks are mutually between the boss and his subordinates.

For example, in a hockey team, the winning of the match would be captain’s KRA, but defending the goals would be that of the goalkeeper, and attacking for making goals the KRA of other team members. Being role specific makes it easy to identify where what went wrong. In this way, identifying KRAs also help the individual’s team and work management style by focusing on the results rather than the activities. By aligning individual roles to the organization’s business or strategic plans, it’s easier to prioritize the various goals and objectives.

Sounds really simple. But behind the simplicity lies a really complicated strategy as our next discussion will reveal. Before one can pinpoint a KRA for each role in an organization, basics like an organizational structure and the role maps for the every employee have to be clearly defined.

Various types of KRAs

There are five types of KRAs that are applicable to companies. These are financial, customer-specific, society-related, employee related and project based. Depending upon the complexity of the role of the team member, he may have more than one key result areas. typically, KRAs capture about 80 percent of a work profile. The remainder is usually devoted to shared areas of responsibility such as helping team members and participating in joint activities. For example. the image of an organization is usually a very senior officer’s KRA, but all employees contribute to it.

The Implementation

It’s here that the HR personnel play an important role by providing the necessary framework for the implementation of the KRAs. The HR ensures that individuals are not saddled with too many KRAs. Further, each KRA is assigned a weightage. This weightage depends upon the performance roles of the employees. While more weightage is given to system development and strategizing at higher positions, those lower in the order are held responsible for actual implementation of the plan.

It is also helpful for HR to judge its own capability. Most companies use an employee’s KRAs to decide on what an employee’s performance-linked incentives will be. Its an opportunity to see whether the employee is constrained by the environment or whether he is simply the wrong person for the job.