“Bye-bye to the
bell curve” – These words will sound
like music to employees and managers who have long been ‘victimized’ by the
unfavorable wrath of the %s defined for the appraisal bell curve. Lately, all
of us have heard in the news about major organizations including Infosys,
Accenture, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, Kelly, and the likes having axed the bell
curve out of their performance management process.
However, in conjunction, there have been muted
questions on how the new system will work? How will we differentiate between
performers and non-performers? Will there be any sort of documentation of facts
/ evidence on which the performance appraisal was based?
I had written on the need for bringing in leniency in
the percentages defined for the bell curve based on organizational performance
a few years back “Is the bell really tolling”. However, what we are witnessing
today is the complete junking of the annual appraisal process and renewed focus
towards quarterly discussions and the hope that these will be more productive
and lead to greater employee motivation as well as developmental input. While some
organizations (like Infosys) will still retain the ratings (eliminating the
strict %s for the bell curve), others like Microsoft have chosen to follow a
completely new system for evaluation of employees.
While this is a fresh new perspective on the way of
looking at performance management, it does rely heavily on the maturity of the
managers conducting these discussions. The role of HR here becomes even more
important here as the onus of maintaining a system which is perceived to be
unbiased falls completely on them. Evaluating managers will have to be
constantly goaded and trained on the sensitivity of the discussions and a need
to showcase unbiased performance orientation in all their decisions (whether it
is of promoting someone, or deciding the pay for others). However, this is
easier said than done. And hence the need for HR to be present in all performance
discussions till the time this process stabilizes and gets institutionalized.
We need to get answers to two basic questions from the assessing managers,
albeit, in a sensitive manner:
·
Would you want the
employee in question as part of your team going forward?
·
Is he / she ready
for the next step towards greater job responsibility?
The answers to these will give us valuable data which
can then be used to take other employee decisions in the performance management
process.
This is a fresh change and we are hoping that this
gives us what we have been vying for all these years through the use of the
bell curve – employee performance orientation and clear differentiation.
