Nine years a contractor and nobody inflicted a KPI or an objective on me. Nobody called me in every six months and aligned me with the business strategy. I was never given a number that was supposed to represent how well I delivered for the company that period. And they paid me!
Up to GBP450 per day.
They renewed my contracts. Intelligent organisations like KPMG and Chevron.
Was it a miracle that I delivered to the company’s needs? Did I accidentally align myself with the company’s vision? Was there a secret device that caused my work to be of value to the organisation, a device that replaced objectives, KPIs and annual performance reviews?
Now I am an employee. And all of a sudden I get treated differently.
Why do we treat grown adults as if they were in kindergarten? How can intelligent people sit around and discuss whether another human being is a 3.2 or a 2.4 (out of 4, and nobody ever gets a 4!) and not get angry at the thought? By what Machiavellian path have we been led to believe that we cannot contribute to the company’s wellbeing unless we have a set of objectives (“We recommend no more than 5 or 6”) that are measurable (“Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Timebound”) that are thrust down our throat on a quarterly or half yearly basis (“cascaded objectives from the CEO, ensuring alignment”)? Where did we give up our right to be adult, to be aware of what is around us, to make informed decisions about the value we can and do add, to feel valued and valuable?
I am a business analyst. I work with other business analysts in a team of about 60 (depending on where the staff turnover tide is), some experienced, some fresh on the journey. We communicate requirements on projects, ensuring that everyone knows what needs to be built to make the company’s customers happy. We are expected to understand how the company makes money, what the needs of the customers are, how they will be best served by the software we are helping to build. We have intelligent conversations with senior executives about how best to help them make money.
And twice a year (they want us to do it four times, now, so people get regular feedback on how they are doing) we get to do performance appraisals.
I have a boss. There are six senior managers and one “Head of” in our team, an experienced bunch that I admire and respect, and get on well with. If I ever get confused about how our company makes money, I will go and ask them. If they aren’t available I will ask others in the team. And all of us, any of us, even those newest to the job, will be able to tell me that it is good to deliver our deliverables on time, and to quality. To work towards building a team. To manage our risk sensibly. To be cost efficient.
But that has to be built into my performance appraisal, so that I know what I should do this year.
And of course there is the MDs roadshow, where they tell us what we are concentrating on this year (pretty much the same as last year, only difference is our East Coast aggressive expansion strategy has been toned down). Which is repeated at the twice yearly IT roadshows, in the IT flavour, because there isn’t much else to say to six hundred people all in one room.
We waste time writing these simple, obvious things down. We meet and discuss and agree them. We inflict them on the staff, making them discuss and agree them. We “tailor them to the individual”. We put them away until appraisal time. We bring them out when blame is in the air “that was not in my objectives!” with a serious and righteous expression, removing all blame from us. We score them. And the company has a nice way to calculate the bonuses. Except that the answer is generally “something the company cannot really afford”. Come on, they reported them as “Provisions for bonuses” in the Annual Financial Statements, this isn’t a surprise event that suddenly fell from the sky on the management team when they woke up on bonus day.
We even had to rank the scores, applying a bell curve to our forty eight permanent staff (that was wrong because it wasn’t the curve “suggested” by Human Resources) and then applying the distorted bell curve “suggested” by Human Resources (that was also wrong as it skewed most of the population to “Meets expectations” and was therefore not a normal human distribution, but one tailored to saving the company money at bonus time). Is George a 3.7, who is superb at writing functional specs, better than Amy, who specialises in process improvement, and therefore Amy should only get a 3.4. Both get the same bonus, by the rules, but the curve has to be obeyed. At least they are at the upper end of the scale and will be encouraged. Those at the bottom will not even get that.
I don’t want to work with people that “meet expectations” (a 2 on the scale we use). They are boring and insipid, nebishes. I want to work with people who believe they are great, and only getting better. I want to work with people who are encouraged by direct and immediate feedback on the work they are currently engaged in, not by some “I cannot possibly be wrong, because then the whole command structure would crumble and collapse” manager opinion 6 months from now. I want to know from the people that matter, the ones that have shared my daily frustrations and struggles, the obstacles we have overcome to achieve that elegant and simple looking solution, the plans we have made to get it work, and work well.
I don’t have an issue with the place I work, specifically, because they are only applying industry “best practice” as best it is perceived. It is perceived by those that make the decisions as a great way to ensure that the company is heading in the right direction, that the people are given feedback on a regular basis and as a good way to motivate people, especially because it is tied in to bonuses.
But I do wish they would take a good look around and see that there is a better way, that treating people as adults and at the level that you want them to be operating from is far more powerful than having controls and checks and rules and alignment.
The challenge is convincing people to doing something different. Some of the people I work with believe that objectives are necessary. Mostly this appears to me to be for self protection, so that they have authority if the pawpaw (papaya for those not from southern Africa) ever hits the propeller. I suspect that a survey asking a question along the lines of “Should we scrap objectives and performance appraisals” would receive a majority “No” answer.
The HR people I speak to either toe the party line very convincingly or they truly believe that people are not capable of understanding the business and working effectively without a performance system of some description.
We are institutionalised in many ways that we do not perceive, and I think this is an example. We have been told so often, been through the ritual so often, seen performance appraisals in so many places that we believe this is an essential ingredient in keeping companies going.
The truly sad outcome is that these stifle organisations. Performance appraisals work against innovation, even when one of the objectives is to innovate. At best it is because I have performance targets – customer satisfaction, productivity, manage risk sensibly – that all encourage following the party line. These do not encourage attitudes of “Go ahead, make a mistake and learn from it”. They encourage conformance.
An organisation that has a profit motive is a psychopath – it has only one motive, to make money, and that motive is completely amoral. It is only the actions and decisions of the people in the organisation that move it away from being a psychopath. The people don’t always win, in fact it is very rare that they do, and mostly we are brainwashed into believing that the environment that we find ourselves in is true and just and has all the answers.
Well done for being one of the folk that is not sold out to the company’s way, for your integrity in remaining true to being a person (and a truly remarkable one indeed!).
I have arrived at a place that I believe allows me to maintain my integrity and to give the company what it demands. I openly and honestly state my disagreement with the process or rule, discussing with everyone who will listen my reasons for my position (and people in a performance review tend to listen), as respectfully as I can on a topic that causes a red mist before my eyes. I explain the way the rule is applied in practice as honestly as I can (for example, calibration decisions are rarely made on the basis of objectives, achievements and contribution) and then we generally agree to have a productive conversation and agree a score by some means that is amenable to us.
That way I have made my position clear, and we can get on and do the appraisal with honesty. I refuse to pretend to support something that I do not agree with.
So far I haven’t been fired.
Appraisals are mainly an opportunity to suppress people, which is in my opinion, an outworking of the psychopathic nature of an organisation. The money motive is a strong driver to tell people they are only doing OK. That way they don’t get a large bonus. The fact that it also acts as a major source of demotivation is not measurable, and therefore holds no force when the desirability of rating highly is discussed.
I can get really annoyed by these sorts of things, particularly when it is a manager or HR trying to convince me that the system is fair and has a positive impact. I am really surprised I haven’t been fired.
Charlie Wilkins - a smattering of writings 