Comments on: Book Review: Stress Free Performance Appraisals

By: Gabriel C.

Gabriel C. — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:17:00 +0000

Probably we should start trying to see why have ratings 🙂
(specially for technical people whose main motivation is the work itself)
Anyway, if you have a “weak” member, and the team can’t help him improve… why keep it in the team?
The more I think about it, more sense I see in team ratings… maybe I should do a blog entry about it.

By: David

David — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:31:00 +0000

Gabriel...yeah, but do you *really* want to rate the whole team together? I think like it would be pretty awful to be an excellent member of a team that gets the job done *despite* a weak member, and then having him get the same rewards as everyone else--not to mention having him tie up a position that could go to a competent individual.

It sounds like the forced rankings distribution is doing serious harm, both in your case and in the case of Evil HR Lady. I question to need to micromanage performance appraisals in this way. There is obviously a need to prevent "grade inflation," but normally this is taken care of by:

1)Having competent managers who do honest appraisals
2)Having one-over-one managerial reviews of all appraisals
3)Tieing appraisals and salary increases together, so that the average increase targets act as a brake on excessively-high ratings.

For a manager to be afraid to give honest feedback to an employee throughout the year because of the peculiarities of the appraisal system is a terrible thing; it defeats a major purpose of having an appraisal system in the first place.

By: Gabriel C.

Gabriel C. — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:05:00 +0000

You’re right, I was thinking on the stereotypical salesman who work alone on his “territory”. I got it wrong anyway, but you reinforce my point: how you can rate individual performances when there’s a big interdependency and without killing the team spirit?

By: David

David — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:33:00 +0000

"if the work doesn't depends on others (like salesmans, but if they perform better, they have more rewards in commissions)"...sales work is actually dependent on others to a much greater extent that often recognized. In a B-to-B software business, for example, the sales rep is typically dependent on:

1)Headquarters sales and legal, for timely and high-quality response to nonstandard RFPs
2)Product management and software development, to keep the product saleable
3)Other sales reps, for the handling of global accounts
4)Finance, customer service, etc, for not pissing off the customers too much

Sales work *is* quantitatively measurable in a way many other jobs are not, but it is not free of dependencies.

By: Gabriel C.

Gabriel C. — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:15:00 +0000

I worked in a company who also had forced rating distribution, and because of the lack of correlation between my performance and the final rating, I basically give up, and did just enough to be average (is not what they looking for? mostly “average” performers?)
I don’t believe too much in individual performance appraisals. I understand it if the work doesn’t depends on others (like salesmans, but if they perform better, they have more rewards in commissions), but if you work in a team, splitting it and grade the performance of each individual is the fastest way to “teamicide”.
I work in software development, so maybe I’m little biased on the “team” side: a gelled and motivated team can be highly productive, even more than the “high performers”.
I understand that companies need some objective (???) data to base some decisions, but I feel that they do more harm than good.
Luckly I’m not the only one: the total quality Guru Dr. Deming said of Performance Appraisals: “Stop doing them and things will get better.”