Once again it’s time for me to finally wrap up my FY by profiling the performance review into Sime Darby’s People Talent Portal. It’s like a football season where everyone walks in and out the meeting rooms with shots of coffee and laptops projecting their performance progress for their management team to evaluate individually how they fared in their task. I must acknowledge that my company has successfully designed a great system to recognize their employee’s talents and performance in their respective division for these two years since it was introduced in late 2010. Before that the performance appraisals went through many facets of changes that kept us wondering what the HR guys were doing! Apparently they failed in their KPIs for not developing a good KPI system for their employee.
The onset of this Talent Portal, most of us was in ambiguity since we didn’t understand a single thing even after their road show to brief us on the use and reason on why the HR implemented this system. Again they failed! Eventually when we began using it bit by bit and understanding the different aspects of this portal as time goes by that we finally appreciated it. However good it can be but the mere thought of going through 4 quarters of performance review with a panel of managers, self rating for your performance review and justifications for your competencies of the entire FY and worse thing is the KPI calibration meeting (which managers try to pull us down/up based on their liking) is painful and insidious. I guess most of the employee faces this same nightmare regularly. But why is this happening?
Traditional performance appraisals don't work for lots of reasons. It is more like a corporate sham whereby the exercise is the most insidious, tedious yet it has been a must-have in every organization performance evaluation system. Everyone does it and I believe almost everyone who has gone through it hates it so much. Many times we being scientists have raised the questions regarding the unfair performance evaluation for R&D to our director during our regular ‘Teh Tarik session’. How can you gauge a research executive if we accomplish our task (research project) in time but didn’t obtain the deliverables that we anticipate? Do you penalize us for the nature of science or acknowledge the effort and contribution? Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect. Sadly, most managers are oblivious to the confusion they cause with performance reviews. To some extent, they don't know any better: This is how performance reviews have been done, and this is how they will be done. Since most bosses are told they can't give everyone top grades.
Ideally, a performance review is a key indicator of each and every employee’s performance objectively. However this is not the scenario in reality. This has become the practice of management domination where they send a message to their employees that the management’s opinion on our performance is the final call for career development, determinant of salary rise, perks etc. This exercise which was supposedly objective but I can tell you there is no such thing. For the past 4 years working in a R&D centre, I have experienced the totally different ratings of our performances simply when my department switched different managers (In the span of 4 years, my department was victimized with the switch of 4 managers). So where is the idea of fair and autonomous assessment? I don’t’ see it coming along over the years. All of us have prophesy that keeps ringing in our head that the bosses evaluation is really about their perception and subjected to nepotism more often than not. It is very unlikely for any employees to go up the career ladder if the managers does not ‘like’ you or even feels uncomfortable with you.
Obviously my company has a well established and efficient performance appraisal system, yet there are loopholes here and there somehow. Unless managers have some kind of strong intuition on how to spot an employee’s talents precisely and reward them accordingly, then it will be good. When HR came up with this idea of talent portal for their employees, transparency is the driving force to ensure a fair appraisal of their employees’ talent to be recognized. It is also meant to be the right platform for the employees to speak their mind to the bosses. However, any system implemented has shortcomings that affect us all in total. Some companies use the performance review session to point out employee’s weaknesses all the time instead of having a constructive session to find a solution to work it out. If a subordinate is not performing well, something is not possibly right. All talk and no action is pointless here.
During my KPI session with my boss, he didn’t not point out the weaknesses but rather told us that we are capable in what we are working on but learning is a process and we can spot on what are we lacking in terms of skills, knowledge etc and find solution to work it out as part of our people development which is more important than fulfilling the KPIs only. Well, it was put in a subtle way but I think it is true if you really give it a second thought. But my friends from other workforces are not so fortunate since their bosses tend to be too opinionated which on the long run it does ruin the confidence of employees on a personal level. Instead of being accountable for success only, the bosses should also be accountable for failures as well.
And the end of the day, performance review is a tool to blame the subordinates for any problems that is happening which I don’t think is fair. Eventually, it makes work lives miserable, the way it leaves employees feeling depressed and anxious. They end up having too little tolerance at home and that’s how family life becomes miserable too.
From my experience, my company has been a leader on leveraging technology to ensure synergy although they are some hitch. They have to make informed decisions and that can be a painstaking task if we can be in their shoes to understand. So both parties, boss-subordinate has to foster the communication and make efforts to reach a win-win situation. Only then the companies can tap talents and out of the box thinkers to reach the goal of the company. A constructive conversation is essential and it's become uncommon in workplaces these days. Only by hearing what the other person thinks, and putting that person's actions in the appropriate context, can you actually see what the person is saying and doing. This will lead to plans where together we can work towards the company’s goal in near future. The ultimatum will be drive towards results but not personality, ways to improve but not disapprove and last but not the least sustainability of the workforce. I believe performance reviews won’t get us anywhere (if the bosses persuade the subordinates to espouse their way of thinking) unless if it leverage on technology to provide more communication and transparency.
Time for new fiscal year performance plan architecture. Helluva work to come and I'm geared up for it!
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