If you believe what you’ve been reading in many business publications over the last year, the individual performance appraisal tool to assess performance and deliver pay is on its way out in many large organizations.
It turns out, the headlines don’t quite tell the whole story.
I recently attended the Talent Management Alliance’s (TMA’s) sixth annual summit on Assessing and Developing Potential and Performance in Chicago. While there, I watched presentations by General Electric, Gap, Pfizer and Deloitte and from the titles of those talks, I assumed I would hear all about performance management’s demise in these organizations. One of the discussions was called “Blowing Up the Traditional Performance Review” and another was “Fueling Performance at Deloitte Through Reinvented Performance Management and Leader Development.”
I’ll come back to what I heard in a minute. The whole notion of performance management systems and how to make them more effective reminded me of my “opportunity” to do so many years ago. Performance appraisals are one those things that everyone, whether you deliver them or receive them, loves to hate.
The system I was asked to “improve” had been a one-page, check-the-box form that measured only five-10 characteristics. It only looked back over the past year - not also forward for the next 12 months – and included an overall rating. Everyone involved felt this form opened up the potential for reviewer bias, since that reviewer could structure responses to come up with whatever rating he or she wanted for an employee. Simply put, it was very subjective, indeed.
This new system applied to 40,000 employees - from individual contributor to senior manager - and involved several different business units.
After much discussion with a sample group of 500, representing the larger organization we agreed to:
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