In a
previous post I had written about factors to be
considered before just doing away with the Bell Curve. Organizations need
to understand how it would impact them. In many organizations the data from
Bell Curve is used to drive many key HR processes therein... from promotions,
to rewards and compensation, career movements, attending key
exciting training programs and also your next transfer.... all these
possibly have been linked to outcomes of bell curve ratings. In short
some say.... "It's like a Visa to Many Exotic Destinations in the
organizational journeys". It is like the DNA that defines
genetic instructions for functioning of living organisms.
That's why many a
organization men hated it. It brought in a class system within the social
strata of organizations. One who was at the D end or left trailing end of
the curve ended up feeling left out. Also some managers took solace in
the fact that they were basically good to their teams but the damn bell curve
drove them to assess someone as "needing improvement" or "not
meeting expectations".
So what would life be after an
organization gives up forced ranking based on a Bell Curve?
a) For sure you will find that
unless you have factored downstream impact, most of the other processes
now see some challenge and their structure and form would be under pressure..... if you don't have other
measures and decision factors... beyond those which depended on inputs from forced
ranking ratings. So you would now need different yard sticks for
compensation, promotion, career movements and so on.. easier said than done.
If not taken care well at design you would end up by shifting the
irritant from forced ranking outcomes to something else that becomes the
dreaded word.
b) Distributing pay increases
would become the next big challenge. Today it was easy to promote a
culture of performance (at least that's what most said) driven pay saying that one section (lowest banding)
got zero increases or even saw a dip and to the other extreme you paid
our above average increases with the spread in between. Now with the
forced ranking buckets gone, managers would need to play the role of
clearly distinguishing performance, breaking the pie to be distributed
into seemingly appropriate bits that show a recognizable link with performance
and not border on egalitarian approach to rewarding employees.
c) Large focus will have to be
dealt on setting right goals, specific, measurable and verifiable (not
necessarily quantified in numeric). Agreeing what would be right goal,
achievable and doable would be the bone of contention. The disagreements
will shift from performance grade or class to goal appropriateness unless
handled well by managers and leaders. Goal setting and its evaluation
will have to be absolute.
d) There will be more openness
(have to be...) on sharing goals, creating awareness of one and others goals,
achievements and successes. This will be driven by the fact that
performance will be absolute so there would be focus on whether people are low
balling their goals (setting easy achievable one's designed to show your outcome
well)
e) End of the day performance will
have to determine salary increases if the designers don't come up with ways and
means to design compensation frameworks based on skill / capability capacity
and progression of the capabilities. Mantra of pay for performance alone
will not work. In fact if performance alone determines pay in the
new approach to performance management then it is going to be a failure since
the whole grouse of current forced ranking was about distributing pay and reward
with some people being at the receiving end vis a vis others.
In short the blame could be passed
by managers to the system of forced ranking in the current system but in the
new context that will not happen.... Managers and leaders doing evaluation will
have to take ownership and deliver lasting happiness among employees to feel
they go a fair chance at appraisals. HR and Organization designers would
need to understand models that will help better and alternative linkages to
promotions, career progressions as well
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