It’s time to make a change

It was one of the biggest news the past week: “Accenture is getting rid of the annual performance reviews and rankings“. To me it was music for my ears! I would love to believe they’ve decided to change because they’ve read my previous post on “Ticking boxes yearly process“. (One can only hope!).

And now I have to quote something Pierre said which really explains precisely what I believe as well:

“Employees that do best in performance management systems tend to be the employees that are the most narcissistic and self-promoting,” said Brian Kropp, the HR practice leader for CEB. “Those aren’t necessarily the employees you need to be the best organization going forward.”

Although everyone should ultimately feel responsible for their careers, if we are talking about big organisations as Accenture is, ultimately the ones that get better visibility are those who work on it, not necessarily those who are doing the work for the company. I strongly believe a company’s performance should be measured on the results of the team working as a whole, it’s not good to have a system that encourages self-promotion – in most cases (I guess in a sales oriented environment you might need a bit of that). But having gone through this yearly ticking boxes a few times along my career, I can see what it does to people. It becomes a me me me exercise and I’m the best in town. Rather than encouraging people to share ideas and work collaborative on them together, it will encourage individuals to hold on to what they believe it’s a good idea and sell it internally in order to get more credits.

After all the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (Aristotle)

If there’s no benefit in promoting just the individual and the recognition comes from what the teams those, there will be more encouragement towards:

* Ensuring the good mix of the team – It doesn’t matter if you have a team full of stars, it matters what your mix can achieve when working together (I’m sure you can think of some football teams where they have really good individual players but then they don’t win every championship).
* Ensuring the objectives are shared and known by all individuals – These should be happening as per standard – but oh well – we know it doesn’t. It’s a lot easier to contribute and give ideas when you know you’re contribute towards something.
* Ensure more communication within the team and between teams – Which again should already be happening, but as stated above, if there is no benefit in working together and sharing, you will hold the information to yourself to use in your favour
* Works towards bigger projects and objectives – Having all the points above, the company will be able to address bigger projects or more complex objectives as everyone can feel part of the delivery and work together to achieve it.
* Do things out of the box – Ultimately it’s all about sharing ideas and how to do things differently and better will also ultimately help the company to grow.
* Having regular feedback will help individuals get better – If something drives me mad is the lack of feedback – honest feedback to help you grow. Many times it feels the employee needs to chase to get some feedback, which tends to come only via the annual forms. When they finally get the feedback and have the chance to do something about it, it will be too late. Most likely these individuals will end up leaving the company.

Some downsides of these approach
* Really good individuals and very hard-working might slow down because they might not feel directly recognised – but then again they can always help the team – and if they keep on working really good within different teams, if the feedback is consistent cross projects / objectives – I’m sure they will still be recognised in the end
* Promotion path might not be as straight forward unless supported by some kind of regular process
* I have to admit I can’t think of any other downsides, but hopefully you’ll be able to share some

Really curious on how will Accenture and other big companies change the approach and be able to recognise employees on a regular basis, especially around promotion and monetary recognition. If they also change the process to be more dynamic than once or twice a year would be really interesting! Looking forward to see what happens next

* Pierre’s full interview here

What’s your view on this process? Really looking forward to read different opinions.

Ticking boxes yearly process

Officially it’s called Performance Year Review, unofficially it’s most of all an administrative process which consists of trying to understand which boxes have been ticked along the year.
It’s quite a common organizational practice this days to implement performance management processes within the organization which ideally will help the employees grow, think about their own careers and reward those that have outperformed their peers.

Definitely has been quite an improving process along the years, and it’s way better than having nothing in place. But still, every time most people think about the performance year, they see it as a administrative process most of all: speak with people, populate a bunch of forms, put some objectives and in 1 year’s time get some feedback from the line managers. But why does it sound people aren’t getting motivated?
It’s the ticking the boxes… the one size fits all syndrome.

Well because it doesn’t, there should be more tools in place so that flexible adjustments can be made. For sure the peers need to be aligned and comparable, but what about during the rest of the year? It needs to be more an interactive process I would say:

* Define short term project objectives & long term ones (which should include personal goals) – after all self performance is important too

* Define steps to get there

* Regular catch ups with the line manager to assess and maybe review the objectives
Once project | objective is done close them and start a new cycle.

It doesn’t need to be all that formal, but at least the conversations should be happening. But wait, conversation means listening and I know it’s very tempting to get behind the huge to do lists and not speak with your employees. Mr Boss I can tell you you’re not doing your job! You should be making sure there’s regular conversations, that your team has what they need, either it’s more time, more coaching or more freedom to do what they have in mind. But if you don’t talk you won’t know will you?

There’s a big chance that if this process was happening and there was enough feedback along the year, maybe the results year end would be better understood and potentially perceived as fair. The worst thing that can happen is something like:

“Mr B. you’ve achieved a rate of Consistent with your peers”

“But I’ve done a lot of work and received very positive feedback from our clients. What was missing then?”

“You forgot to tick box 45, which says you should be doing more internal powerpoints to support the sales process”

Mr B sobs and goes away… “If only I had known….”

Note: This is not at all scientific, it’s all based on my personal opinion – it’s a blog anyway! I’m sure there’s loads of studies in the topic if you want something with more ground work.