? Performance review hooey LOOK AT ALTERNATIVES TO ENHANCE EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE By Kevin Herring I t’s that time again when organizations are bustling with performance grading, self-reviews, rank ordering, goal setting, final performance evaluations, and merit pay raises, all in the name of managing performance. The amount of activity and anxiety the performance review process produces create stress for everyone involved. So what is all the fuss about? they say that if managers don’t do annual performance reviews, people won’t work hard enough at their jobs; it’s a last ditch effort to hold people accountable. really? is that what we believe about our so-called, “greatest assets”? Well, not everyone. and get this: some of those doubters are the same zealots who hound you to turn in your performance reviews. While hr leaders clamor for you to do performance reviews in order to hold people accountable, they secretly report in national surveys that they really use them to justify pay increases. in fact, any reasons they give relating to managing performance end up at or near the bottom of the list. how ironic! apparently, when it comes to performance reviews, some hr leaders are feeding managers a bunch of hooey. fed up with it, companies like lockheed, adobe systems, and nasa have pulled the plug on performance reviews. after calculating the time, expense, and lack of return on investment, the leaders of these companies decided that resources drained by doing reviews could be better used in more productive activities. of course, not everyone is ready to break with tradition. a hurdle for some is feeling they have to plug the hole that remains when the forms are gone: they are left not knowing what to do instead. historically, the old review process has been a way to check up on supervisors who weren’t doing their jobs. bad supervisors had to be told to track results, give feedback (particularly when things weren’t going well), and prove they were complying by turning in a form for each employee at the end of the year. letting them off the hook by 34 hbma billing • march.aPril.2013 telling them that they no longer have to do reviews seems risky. if they stop doing reviews, how would supervisors be held accountable for holding everyone else accountable? Well, to shift to an appraisal-less workplace, we have to first stop thinking of performance management as a way to hold people accountable, and then we must change how we are managing. it sounds strange, doesn’t it? isn’t holding people accountable the boss’s job? the problem is, holding people accountable simply reinforces employee compliance at the expense of commitment. it’s this “hold them accountable” mentality that causes organizations to define performance management as an extra half a percent raise or one-point drop on a rating scale as if personal fulfillment at work can be reduced to a level of cheese and electric shocks in a lab experiment. but meaning and purpose – commitment – aren’t produced from simplistic rewards and punishments and holding people accountable for compliance; they come from a sense of ownership for something bigger than oneself. how do we help employees shift their energies away from complying with boss expectations and toward committing to business unit success? how do we support them taking on meaningful improvement initiatives as their own? Four Leadership Practices Will Help: 1. create team meetings where everyone comes together and determines what the team can do better to confront challenges and contribute to business unit goals. facilitate rich, collaborative discussions that identify critical team outputs and actions that team members need to take to succeed. 2. help both the team and individual team members develop commitments that combine to improve overall team performance and contribute to business unit goals. establish defined goals and tracking mechanisms for commitments. 3. make commitments and metrics visible by posting
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