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How Can An Agent Sustain `Exceptional Performance'? SEATTLE, WASH. -- 'Sustaining exceptional performance' was the topic at a session of the National Association of Life Underwriters' annual convention here, and [...]

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was involved with helping local schools build stronger partnerships with area businesses. We used an exercise in which school and business leaders were asked to imagine [...]

Teachers ought to have a greater part to play in the increasing number of standards needed to win promotion or gain higher earnings, according to the General Teaching Council for England. A new series of standards is being launched for those wishing to join an elite set of teachers with 'chartered' status in London and for subjects such as science and maths.

Q For the past year, I have been employed as a personnel assistant. To my chagrin, my most recent performance review was less than stellar. This surprised me because six [...]

Once again, the April issue of Government Finance Review is dedicated to a movement that continues to attract a great deal of attention among finance professionals--performance measurement. The notion of [...]

How are America's hotels faring financially? It's hard to tell because they don't measure their own performance accurately A Cornell University study shows that industry performance averages commonly used by [...]

Many managers avoid terminating employees who perform poorly in order to avoid a conflict, but not terminating a poor performer in a timely manner can have negative repercussions. Some of the negative consequences of keeping poor performers around are that other employees must work harder to take up the slack for the co-worker, the employee's bad attitude towards their work may spread to other employees, the company suffers through poor work and errors, and the manager's reputation and respect from subordinates for good leadership may be at risk. If an employee is given a poor performance review, and their work quality does not improve after a development plan has been made, the best plan of action for everyone involved is an expedient termination.

An analysis is presented of the world-class stature and success of Singapore Airlines through the study of its 50-year history. A comparison with other airlines is made and the marketing of the Singapore girl is discussed.

Quality PERFORMANCE APPRAISALS Performance appraisals are among the most controversial and stressful practices in organizations. Neither managers nor employees are ever totally satisfied with the appraisal system and reporting form [...]

Imperial Life Assurance Company of Canada has set stringent goals and guidelines throughout its organization. Realizing the tremendous amount of time and effort that managers spend training and supporting employees, Imperial Life increased its Career Profile rating cutoff point in order to be more selective in recruiting employees. During the recruitment process, recruits are required to set activity goals for their objectives and major responsibilities. If the branch manager believes that the recruit can achieve these goals, a letter is written to the recruit which not only welcomes the new employee but also indicates that the branch manager and the corporation expect recruits to stick to their commitments. Managers are expected to help determine the goals, obtain the commitment of agents to those goals, and train employees thoroughly.

One way for businesses to enhance their competitive positions and to be aware of competitors' weaknesses and strengths is to conduct competitor performance profiles. The profiling process can be accomplished using five steps, including: identifying four competitive industry strengths; selecting clear measures of excellence for the four traits; and determining connections between pairs of competitive strengths.

First Chicago's Trading Products Group has created a sales performance model that assists managers in analyzing the pluses and minuses of a sales group and helps to set direction for the group. The model has three parts which combine subjective and objective information into an outcome which can be quantified: the profit volume of instruments sold; the productivity of account relationships; and the product mix of the instruments sold. This model can be used as an objective addition to a manager's understanding of a sales person's performance over time.

Hotels should stop assessing its performance by comparing it with industry averages and focus instead on raising its standards. This shift in assessment standard necessitates the evaluation of senior management executives who will be held accountable for the optimization of profitability. This method will also create the need to develop a specialized training of unit managers particularly in areas of flexible budgeting, cost analysis, basic operating skills and penetration analysis., With the lodging industry moving forward at a healthy clip, profitability worries have receded for many owners and managers. Yet this is the ideal time to be preparing for the [...]

In the back of every employee's mind are these three very simple questions: 'What is my job?' 'How am I doing?' end 'Does anybody care?' The extent to which supervisors [...]

The British government and teacher educators are concerned about the inability of the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and other responsible institutions to deal effectively with the decline of qualified science teachers. Often TTA passes responsibility for improving the recruitment level to the individual institutions. Many of the causes, such as availability of better-paid alternative employment and underfunding of education, are beyond their control. The implementation of vigorous retraining programmes to raise the standards and the promotion of recruitment, can be possible solutions.

Traditional criteria, such as return-on-assets, are no longer effective employee performance measures. New standards for appraisal are needed. Both nonfinancial and financial goals should be included, and the standards must be specific and simple. Category weighting and short and long-term goals are also important. Indicators for key performance must be shown and incentive compensation needs to be linked to performance., As the banking industry continues to adapt to the unprecedented pace of change, managing people is becoming increasingly more challenging. The old performance measurement criteria, traditionally used to link rewards [...]

FE tables, published in Nov 1993, were criticized as useless and irrelevant and the inaccuracies in the tables led college principals to demand their withdrawal. Education Secretary John Patten has praised the league tables as conforming to the Citizen's Charter, but people in universities say that the new type of recruitment to FE makes the league tables totally unnecessary.

Where do British firms rank in an international quality league table? And how does European compare with US and japanese performance? So far judgments have perforce been based on indirect […]

SYSTEM OPERATIONS Can you measure your efficiency? Though measures used to moniter growth and profitability of cable operations provide an overall indication of efficiency, they don't point to specific areas [...]

They are coming, and there is nothing you can do to stop them. Like the giant irradiated ants crawling out of the storm drains of Los Angeles in the old [...]

How to Get on Top of Your Job 'If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.' How many times have you heard that old saw-and perhaps [...]

A better way to evaluate job performance 'I'm tired of hearing about the way I get along with my co-workers or the number of meetings I attend,' Lisa grumbled after [...]