True measure
performances, which is true in various organizations of which I had been a part. Performance management is, indeed, not an easy task, particularly if one is not familiar with the tools.
The article “Reinventing Performance Management,” which was published in the April 2015 issue of the
speaks of the challenge the global company Deloitte has to go through in undertaking its performance management. We’re looking at 65,000 employees all over the globe, thus while using their old system in conducting performance management, managers spend 2 million of work hours just discussing their ratings with the employees, along with their discussions with their fellow managers.
To rectify the situation, the company came up with four simple questions: (1) If the compensation is coming from the rater’s pocket, do they deserve it given the performance they recently did? (2) Will I want to keep him in my team? (3) Is the person at risk of low performance? (4) Is the person a good candidate for promotion today?
they utilized technology to show the power rankings of their people and the outliers, and each dot in the graph represents an click. Looks impressive. Did it cut the time spent? Yes. Was it easier for the rater? Yes. But why bother?
The article further argued that raters go through the “idiosyncratic rater effect,” which, according to an article published in the in year 2000, speaks of the variance between two supervisors, two peers and two individuals having different views on performance. This is not to be mistaken with what HR literature speaks of as the “angels” and “horns” effect, where the good deeds are highlighted while doing performance management or where the “grave offense” overshadows the stellar performance achieved during the past months.
Just imagine the 2 million company hours spent on doing performance appraisal, along with these idiosyncrasies in evaluating their people! How can such a global organization sustain its talent if its employees’ performance is measured incorrectly?
That is why going back to my premises above, debates in political circles are ongoing because what really determines whether a president is good or bad are not just the economic numbers. “Good” is indeed relative to one’s values and principles. What might be good in the eyes of an economist has no value to human rights advocates, and vice versa.