Written by Anthony Mok, HR Leader from Singapore
As a talent management leader, I am responsible for conducting routine performance appraisals. There are many individuals who don’t look forward to these reviews and, because this makes me curious, I took a systemic overview of promotion and reward systems in school and in business to see if I could uncover the core problems and issues.
Employees at my company are rated on a scale of 1 to 5. A score of 3 equates to “a job well done” and shows that the work is completed at 100% of expectations.
So I find it odd that employees who receive 3’s on their appraisals often feel slighted or disgruntled.
A reason for the sour attitudes may be traced back to the way employees received grades while they were still in school. I believe the answers I uncovered are especially true in Asian societies where there is a very strong emphasis on academic achievement during the child’s formal education through primary and secondary grades, and even into higher education.
Let’s examine why this may be true. During the formal schooling years, students who excel and perform at 100% by the end of school year get promoted to the next grade and typically receive some nice accolades. Those who perform at 80% also get promoted to the next grade. These individuals may also receive accolades. This cycle of performance, whether at 100% or 80%, is reinforced and reaffirmed over 12 years of formal schooling. Although there is a 20% differential in performance, the ultimate reward –passing or being promoted to the next grade—is identical.
These students graduate and make their way into a workforce that rewards accomplishment and promotes individuals in a completely different way. However, an emerging labor base that has grown accustomed to getting promoted for simply doing ‘adequate’ work may expect that performing at 80%, will be rewarded the same way it was in school, i.e. continual advancement. But the rewards that accompany adequate performance in the workplace have little or no resemblance to the accolades and promotions students were given in school.
When employees discover that an 80% rating does not warrant a promotion, attitudes tend to sour and performance may even drop further. And this pattern can last throughout an entire career.
This has left me wondering, is it time to revisit the systems of rewards and promotions in our schools? Should we instead create workplace performance management practices that work more like that of the school system? Or, is it time to completely do away with performance appraisals altogether?
Eager to hear what you think.
About Anthony Mok –
Anthony has dedicated his past 14 years as an internal HR / Talent consultant in various industries and global locations. Industry coverage: Finance, Military, Oil & Gas and Insurance. Country coverage: Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Qatar, UK.
He is presently the Regional (Asia) Talent Management and Learning & Development Lead at Marsh, a Marsh & McLennan company, based in Singapore. He has a strong passion for people development and spends his free time thinking about creative solutions to help others reach a “a-ha” moment; especially against the likes of “It can’t be done” and “We’ve tried it before”.
Related articles
- Delivering an Effective Performance Review (blogs.hbr.org)
- How to Align Performance Management with Key Business Objectives (tlnt.com)
I was intrigued by Anthony Mok’s post.
But what he says is only partially true – at least with US schools of recent years. I spend time in both the business and education arenas, so there is some experience here.
I don’t know what age bracket Anthony is in (I’m in the 50-60), but his description of school scoring/advancement dates back to my era.
Today, students get ribbons for 10th place – or even just participating. There is no “failure” in that they are given an enormous amount of credit for just “trying.” With self-esteem being the mantra in the classroom for over a decade, and students constantly being told that they are the best, it is difficult for them to process being even “average” in the workplace. So in the real world, a performance value of “3” (meets expectations) can be emotionally devastating.
And I’m not even going to get started on some of the useless “majors” that institutions of supposedly higher education offer these days – unless “Do you want fries with that?” excites you.
But I digress.
Anthony’s assessment is spot on, and he gives us 3 choices (with my commentary on each):
• Revisit the system of rewards/promotions in our schools – This is the best option in that it better prepares students for what the real world will be expecting of them. However, you are going to have some “culture wars” to overcome the current practices that have become so engrained in our current educational system. Today “Failure is not an option” does not imply that we need to prevent failure from happening. It literally means that the option has been taken off the table completely – so you don’t have to worry about it!
• Create workplace performance management like that of school systems – Only if you want mediocre performers and mediocre performance. If the school grading/promotion system is working so well that it should be emulated, why are so many business leaders decrying the “workforce readiness” of recent graduates (and we have a blog site called “Reviving Work Ethic”)?
• Completely do away with performance appraisals – Dicey. An organization is measured on what it does and how it does it. The old adage “that which gets measured gets done” still applies, because its antithesis is also true – If you don’t measure it, don’t expect it to happen. You need some form of “tension” (goals, deadlines, etc.) to overcome the inherent inertia. If your performance management system says “Here are the goals for this (period), and here are the behaviors/competencies we expect you to demonstrate in the process,” you still need some end-of-period evaluation to see if the goals were met and the behaviors were demonstrated – with positive/negative consequences to be applied. Otherwise nothing will be taken seriously.
While the first option is the best choice, that is going to take a while. The second option will only exacerbate the problem. And the third option does not meet shareholder expectations. They regularly perform organizational performance appraisals with their wallets, so the process is not going to go away any time soon.
So let me add a fourth option. Sometime during the recruitment/interviewing/on-boarding process someone should take the candidate/new hire aside and say:
“Here is what our performance management system looks like and what you can expect from it – including ‘3’ being ‘OK’.” I realize your school did not prepare you for this process, so if you are going to have a problem with it, please tell us now.”
OK, that last part will have to be massaged a little bit (not to damage their self-esteem), but you get my drift.
John Lake is owner of JDLake Communications, LLC (www.jdlake.com) – a business culture consulting firm dedicated to helping organizations “retain the talent they don’t know they are about to lose.” For more information about this subject and the concepts of “Whole Business Thinking,” you can contact him at john@jdlake.com.
In my opinion, it is a matter of making known what is expected of the individuals based on the key performance indicators (KPI) they are being assessed on. Often these indicators were not made known to the employees in companies.
My sister-in-law mentioned to me that they are told that their KPI will be affected if they do anything wrongly and that includes anything wrongly done even if you are helping your colleagues. When I asked, “To what extend does you company define wrong?”, she said, “As long as anything is done incorrectly.” Done things incorrectly can range from minor typo errors to major errors causing loss of potential clients. This has led to selfishness in the company with peers detering from helping one another. I asked if her boss had given them the indicators they are being assessed on, the answer was “No”.
I mention this because employees are often ignorant of what they are being assessed on and how they can achieve the 4s or 5s instead of an average 3. Little do they know what they need to do in order perform out of expectations because this is subjective based on the person assessing.
In schools, the results are justified based on the number questions answered correctly. Even when marking scientific reports, students are given the set of rubrics they will be assessed on in order for the marking to be fair. However, when we talk about performance, unless the indicators are clearly made known to the emplayees, it is sometimes difficult to justify that an employee has performed better than another.
A very interesting observation & thought from Anthony!
Spot on Anthony. From on my own experience, I do get disappointed when given a rating of 3 when I have been told to be performing well. A 3 rating does not garner any recognition other than you did your work. I personally think that since this is an issue current in the work place irrespective of previous schooling system, it is a change that companies have to make to re-engage their staff. Perhaps rating from 1 to 4 is sufficient. That way the performers that meet expectations feel they are in the same bucket of success to those that excels. Just a thought.