performance systems

Smart tips for HR professionals

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Developing employees is a critical skill set for all HR professionals. But how do you know which system is the best to develop your employees?

There are many different performance management systems. Like any other complex organizational issue, there is never one right answer to an HR problem. Most of the time the right solution is dependent on many organizational factors. The best an HR professional can do is to learn and analyze many systems, and then make a judgement call on what is the best intervention for their organization at that moment in time.

You may want to start looking at what is happening in performance management trends. It seems that many HR professionals and organizations are rethinking their annual performance review systems.

Jason Averbrook in his new book called, the Ultimate Guide to a Digital Workforce Experience – Leap for a Purpose, shares this thought with us: “Employees don’t want feedback, they want attention.”

The once-a-year performance review does not give the employee enough attention. Averbrook goes on to say that 60 percent of companies are beginning to reshape their performance review systems.

Click here to read more about Jason Averbrook’s ideas. 

For decades, organizations have been using the traditional annual reviews that rate and rank employees. These annual rating and ranking systems seem to be of less value as time moves on and as organizational needs and employees’ values change.  Traditional performance review systems focus on the employee’s past behavior, and not their current behaviour. Today’s organizational deliverables are changing rapidly; looking back over the last year of an employee’s behaviour adds minimal productive value to the HR equation and therefore adds little to the employees’ or organization’s performance.

If the annual employee performance review systems are no longer viable, HR departments must begin to implement new modern day performance measurement systems that meet the needs of the employees and the needs of the rapidly changing business world.  Here is a list of the some of the recent trends in performance management:

  • Frequent real-time feedback instead of one-shot annual reviews
  • Decoupling performance reviews from administrative practices such as annual merit pay or bonuses
  • Dropping the ranking systems: think of what an employee can do, not what they have done

Employees want more frequent and focused attention to help them develop and perform. HR needs to investigate these new trends in performance management, and then begin to implement new methods to keep improving performance results.

Discussion Questions

Research and identify three large organizations that are moving away from the annual performance review system, then discuss what they are using to replace it.

Does Someone Always Have To Be The Loser?

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Road sign with arrows - Winners, Losers
Source: Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

During the course of your studies, you may have experienced a class where your grades were bell-curved or ranked in comparison with everyone else in the class.  The rationale for imposing this kind of grade rating system usually comes with an explanation related to institutional policy or some complicated methodology based on academic requirements.  As a result, bell curving or forced ranking systems are not used as a common approach for evaluating student performance.  Nevertheless, they do exist and continue to be used with varying degrees of success.

Does this type of forced ranking system translate into effective performance management for employees from a training and development perspective?  Based on a recent article from The Globe & Mail’s Leadership Lab series, the answer would seem to be a resounding “No.”

Click Here to Read the Article.

As noted in this article, forced employee ranking ensures that someone must be left standing on the bottom rung of the performance ladder in comparison to everyone else.  This happens even though the individual employee’s performance may be the same as his or her colleagues’.  How can this possibly act as a positive motivator for performance improvement and increased employee engagement?

One of the common remarks about forced ranking systems is that they provide an un-naturally skewed picture of the data or the group that is being evaluated.  If the data is skewed, then it would seem that a response to that data would also be skewed.

Again, from an employee learning perspective, it is imperative that any training and development programs are built from a basis of actual employee needs, and not from a system that forces individual performance evaluation into a larger group ranking.

Discussion questions:

  1. As a Human Resources professional, identify three benefits of forced employee ranking systems. When would this type of system be useful?
  2. How would you respond to your performance being managed by a bell-curve/forced employee ranking approach in your current (or previous) workplace?
  3. Do you believe that a forced employee ranking approach improves employee performance and provides positive motivation? Why or why not?