What performance standards are
Performance standards are written descriptions of the level that counts as acceptable in a particular job: what is produced, to what quality, within what time, and with what conduct alongside it.
Their distinguishing property is that they belong to the job rather than to a period. They stay as they are when the person holding the job changes, and they are read against whoever holds it today and whoever holds it in two years.
That property is what separates a standard from a target, and the separation is practical rather than verbal. A standard is a permanent floor: what is expected of any holder of the role in ordinary conditions. A target is set for a cycle and moves as the organisation’s priority for that cycle moves. The standard for a support specialist might be to close a complaint correctly within a published period, and that does not change from one quarter to the next. Reducing that period could well be the target for a quarter, and a target is set, reviewed and replaced. An organisation that keeps only targets leaves whoever met theirs with no answer about whether they did the rest of the job as the role requires.
Where a standard is derived from
The first source is an analysis of what the job actually involves, which reveals the tasks performed in practice and their weight. A standard written from the job advertisement alone measures what was announced rather than what is done, and the gap between those two is usually where the work of the role has quietly accumulated.
The behavioural side has a different source. It comes from the organisation’s competencies, and the requirement that page states is the same requirement that makes a behavioural standard usable at all: a competency is described as an observable behaviour at a stated level of proficiency, not as a general quality. A standard that says the holder is cooperative cannot be met or missed. A standard that says what cooperation looks like when it is present and when it is absent can be.
A workable standard is written before the period and known to the person it applies to, since a standard produced at appraisal time is a judgement applied backwards. It names the evidence that shows it has been met. It stays inside what the role holder controls. It stays few enough to be read. And it covers the method alongside the output, because a standard written for a number alone gets reached by routes that cost the organisation more than the number is worth.
One standard, written out with its numbers
Those requirements are tested by writing a standard rather than by agreeing with them. The figures below are assumed, and they are here to show what each requirement costs when it is turned into a number.
Take a support specialist, and the standard: a complaint is closed correctly within three working days, in 90 percent of the month’s complaints. What has that line decided?
- If 120 complaints arrive in the month, then 108 of that month’s 120 have to be closed inside the period, and 12 of them can fall outside it without the standard being breached. The denominator is the complaints received that month, not the complaints the specialist chose to work on.
- The percentage is not decoration. A standard reading “every complaint within three working days” is breached by a single unusual case, so it is breached every month, and the team learns that the standard cannot be met and stops treating it as one.
- “Closed correctly” is the evidence the second requirement asks for. Without it the standard is met by closing a complaint and reopening it two days later, and the number stays satisfied while the work stays undone.
The requirement about control is tested by the same arithmetic. Suppose one category of complaint cannot be closed without a reply from another department, and that department averages two days. The three working days the specialist is measured against then contain one day that is theirs. The remedy is either a separate standard for that category or a period extended by what the wait actually costs. Leaving the number where it is and accepting an explanation at appraisal time is not a remedy, because it moves the standard from the written page into the appraiser’s discretion.
The last requirement shows up when two numbers are set beside each other. A standard of 60 calls a day on an eight hour shift is 480 minutes divided by 60, which is 8 minutes a call. A standard of 45 calls a day with the request resolved during the call is 480 divided by 45, which is 10 minutes and 40 seconds. The difference is 2 minutes and 40 seconds, and that difference is the price of resolving the matter in one call. An organisation that picked the first number and then complained about customers calling back bought that difference in repeat contacts it never counted.
The standards list and the penalty schedule are two different documents
The heaviest error in this area is to read a list of standards as a list of offences, so that failing to meet one produces an effect on the holder’s pay or promotion. Those are separate doors in the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل), and the separation is stated in the text.
Where those doors are set out is not here. The articles that govern the penalties, their ceilings and the procedure that has to precede one are given at length in the guide to disciplinary penalties in the Saudi Labor Law, and what the regulation itself must contain is in the guide to the work organisation regulation. Anyone who has reached the point of imposing an effect belongs in those two pages. What this page owes the reader is the fence that keeps a standards document from becoming a penalty document, and that fence rests on three articles.
Article 66 of the Saudi Labor Law confines the disciplinary penalties that may be imposed to a closed list, and withholding or deferring a raise and deferring a promotion are both on it. Article 67 of the Saudi Labor Law provides that the employer may not impose a penalty that is not provided for in that law or in the work organisation regulation, and Article 13 of the Saudi Labor Law is what makes that regulation a duty: it is prepared in accordance with the template the Ministry approves and announced in a visible place for those to whom it applies. That regulation is the only route to a penalty Article 66 of the Saudi Labor Law does not name, within the limits Article 13 of the Saudi Labor Law sets rather than by agreement with the worker.
A performance standard is not one of those penalties, and describing an acceptable level in a job is not in itself the imposition of one. The consequence is the part a writer of standards misses. If an organisation answers an unmet standard with a sanction such as withholding a raise, and imposes it as a disciplinary penalty, it has reached the closed list: withholding a raise is item 3 of Article 66 of the Saudi Labor Law, for up to one year, and the rules that govern imposing a disciplinary penalty apply to it.
The working conclusion is a filing rule. Standards are written where standards belong, violations and their penalties are written in the work organisation regulation where those belong, and the first is not turned into a schedule for the second.
An internal standard and a market standard answer to different owners
Occupational standards are written at the level of a profession in the labour market, and they work as an external reference a job is measured against. Performance standards are internal by contrast: the organisation writes them for its own role, reflecting what it needs in its own conditions. Two jobs carrying the same title in two organisations can carry different standards, while one occupational standard sits above both. Neither displaces the other, and an organisation that adopts a market description as its internal standard has imported a reference without deciding what it needs.
The same distinction separates a standard from an indicator. Key performance indicators are what gets measured and reported; a standard is the level on that measurement at which the role is being done as the role requires. An organisation can have a full indicator set and no standards at all, and it usually finds out at the moment somebody asks whether a particular number is good.
Where standards fail
The commonest failure is that what is easy to count becomes the whole measurement. The call count becomes the standard, what was actually resolved drops out, and the team learns that the number is the requirement.
A second is that standards are written once and then left while the job changes without an announced decision, so the holder is measured against work they no longer do.
A third is that the standard stays a private understanding in each appraiser’s head, which is what performance calibration works on by settling the ruler before scores are confirmed, and which the design of the form itself can encourage or prevent, as the entry on the graphic rating scale sets out.
A fourth is less visible: the standard is raised whenever the team reaches it, so the acceptable level becomes whatever was achieved once. The standard then stops describing the role and becomes a moving instrument of pressure, and whoever reached it today knows they will not reach it tomorrow.
A standard describes the acceptable level and does not create it
A role without adequate tools, authority or preparation will not reach its standard however carefully the standard is written, and the fault then lies in the role rather than in the measurement.
That is why repeated failure across successive holders is read as a sign about how the job is designed, not about the people who held it. The measurement is doing its work in that case: it is telling the organisation something it did not ask.
What this page does not establish
We did not find, in our sources, a provision obliging an employer to write performance standards for its jobs, nor a prescribed form for them, nor a minimum number of them, nor a required cycle for reviewing them. What is described above about how a standard is written is practice, not a rendering of any text.
This page also takes no position on how a particular effect following an unmet standard should be characterised in a given case. The section on the two documents says only what follows if that effect falls within the closed list it describes, and anyone needing an answer in a specific matter should go to the competent authority and its own published document.
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