Bye-bye to the bell curve

“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. 

Do we trust our employees!!

We all have seen elaborate HR manuals and policy documents specifying strict rules / procedures / systems around what an employee should do or not. Enormous amounts of time, money, and human resources are being used to set these systems in place and to efficient execution and strict adherence. But do we really need these?

Can we not ‘trust’ the people we hire?  If that’s the case, are we hiring the right set of people? And if either is not true, then why waste humongous resources to act like watchdogs over them.

Some simple examples:

• Leave – Most organizations have a standard range of Privilege Leave, Casual Leave, Sick Leave, Maternity Leave, Paternity Leave, Study Leave, etc etc. Why not treat your employees as mature adults and let them decide when and for what they want to take leave?

• Work Hours – Does this concept exist anymore? With technology and mail-on-the-go, the ‘seven day weekend’ can also be read as the ‘seven day work-week’. With almost all of us being available for office work during our waking hours, and work interspersed with our personal lives, are we not eligible for time-off during the so-called work hours. Are your mature and adult team members not smart enough to figure what and when something is important and needs to be completed?

• Attendance – Organizations have evolved biometrics, mobile check-ins, swipe cards, and lots of ‘sophisticated’ technology to track this. Why not have the default as the employee being ‘present’, and have systems to let employees inform only if they are absent.

• Travel & Stay – All Policy manuals have specific limits defined as per the level in the organization. Why not have the employees themselves decide how they want to travel and where they want to stay.

• Performance – Months and months of employee time is spent on assessing the performance and documentation of the results. Most of the times, the results are in your face and everyone knows where they are in the ‘normalized’ curve. Should this not be an ongoing exercise and a developmental one rather than focusing on the ‘rating’ and the related increment / promotion.

I admit that you will have 5-10% of the population taking advantage if you do not have the ‘watchdog’ systems in place. But I’m sure these 5-10% employees will be visible to everyone over a period of time. Does it then warrant subjecting the other 90% to painful approval processes and impediments for simple things? Is it fair to not ‘trust’ them? Think for yourself.

Facebook and Twitter – Should they be blocked in office !

A vociferous NO!!

There are numerous times when we see the page shown below (or something similar telling us that its against organizational policy) in our offices when we try to login to Facebook, Twitter or any of the other social networking websites.

The traditional arguments supporting the blocking of these pages have been:


i) Employees will waste time on these rather than doing actual work – My take on this is that employees are an innovative lot. If they HAVE to waste time, they will find numerous ways to do it. The analogy to this could be that you do not provide telephones at workstations because employees might call up their friends during the day and waste time!!!


ii) Employees might leak confidential information – First of all, employees are not stupid and they understand that this will not be taken lightly by senior management. So they will be extra careful. And if you really have an employee doing this deliberately, then he really has no business being part of the organization in the first place.


Even if organizations keep banning these websites, smart-phones are an obvious option that the employee has to access them 24x7. Smart-phones have penetrated deep into the Millennial and the Gen Y population and are no more restricted to the corporate boys, as signified by the new Vodafone-Blackberry ad.


From the business point of view, I will take the example of 2 types of organizations to push my case for NOT banning social networking websites and how these could help in the long run:

• Service based Organizations – It is critical that these types of organizations keep an open ear to what is being said about them in the marketplace. And Facebook is the biggest marketplace in the world today. Last heard, if Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd biggest in the world. So that’s the size we are talking about. Consumers who thrive on sharing information are on the rise and they do not hesitate to put real time feedback on Twitter for ex.,
• “Having Cappuccino at XYZ Coffe Place..the service sucks!
• “The new XYZ mobile service rocks!....Just had a smooth conversation in a lift 3 levels below the ground floor ”

One can imagine the kind of impact these simple tweets can have on the group of people listening to this conversation on the web.

• Sales based Organizations – With social networking websites garnering huge membership figures, it is essential that the conversations in these maintain a positive note. Any negative discord has to be handled quickly and efficiently. These websites have taken word-of-mouth publicity to levels never ever imagined a few years back.
  
  
  
  
  
  Just imagine if a marketer was listening to the natural conversation above…

And users consider this publicity GENUINE, simply because it is coming from people they know and it is taking natural conversations onto the cyber space. Apart from the genuineness, marketers can use these to increase visibility as well as get on-the-spot feedback on what people think about new schemes/ launches / products, etc.


In effect, what I am trying to say is that these websites can actually add value to the business. And my belief is that the HR function’s role is complete only when it can help in adding value to the business.


So we need to come out of the old mindset and start exposing employees and our marketers to this ongoing revolution and modify our policies to accept these changes. The insightful Dilbert sums up my discussion: