Employee Evaluation: It is not just Performance

The distaste in professional life, is that performance alone doesn't matter in retainer-ship of employment.

The blog Why Haven't You Fired Him Yet? , is a very good read. Good performers should also be good at creating deterrents around them from being tossed out as fantasized in my earlier post.

The blog is truthful about the practical fact that to a certain level, we tend to expect a mandate and homogeneity from fellow colleagues with our own internalized systems, while becoming uncomfortable with little threats to the thought process. In our management circles, we discuss an employee viability in cost terms, and performance is always a second priority (not without reason). The costs are:

1. "Management Overhead Cost": Inclusive of performance is the analysis of the fact whether the resource needs to be managed not only for work, but for the self-team-organization balance. It many times, unfortunately, means and is used for "falling in line", when it actually should be used to analyze, the management attention created to address a probable negative impact. For example, a resource is self managed, goes about the job in a routine fashion, and completes the job allocation in their own style. They should ideally be more, right?

But if there is a mandate that knowledge sharing is a need and must, and the cultural aspect is neglected for personal gains, then the management over head in ensuring the cultural balance is prominent than performance required.

Similarly, there is something in the mannerisms that the next level performers find choking in the superlative performer, the management over head to elevate the next level performers to the superlative league is a crucial factor in the evaluation.

1. "Peer Value Cost": This cost is measured in comparable terms. Again, it is often than not, misused, as a favoritism, while it is to be measured to value the attention(brags/self mentions)-attraction (perks/salary) -assertion(Choosing work, being finicky of others work ) ratio vis a vis performance.
   

This is typically manifested in teams where employees come from different profiles: Some working their way up through experience, while others have a degree to boot at the same level, or in some instances, the variable attention just for the prestige associated with the school.

In a team of equivalent talented great employees, the overhead of giving disproportionate attention, attraction and assertion to a particular employee would mean other equated employees would leave/live with heart burn that would affect the morale, brand of the organization.

Hence while it is important to lay down the performance parameters, it is equally important to be conscious of the associated costs and keep them to minimum for a self-standing success.

Your suggestions required!!

With my friend today, there was an interesting point of discussion.
Need your views as well. Please post them as comments to this post.

You like to work for a boss, who
a. Keeps a safe distance from team.
b. Comes across as knowledgeable and has all the answers when you approach them.
c. Shares their knowledge and enables others to do their work better.
d. is a liberal and does not give tough feedback.

There can be more options, if you opt for it. Please post them as well.

Make it Visible

My parents have always drilled the fact that hard work pays. Well, they held me in good stead till my first job and my formative years.

After a certain threshold, they do not hold the same weight. More than work, making the work visible, is what pays and rewarded for a long time. Rather, work is to complete the projects/tasks and hard work is to make it visible !! (is it dad/mom?)

A casual chat with my sister also revealed a similar story. Her work is fine, confident, doesn't make mistakes with numbers, the work is strong support and aids well to superiors, but she feels lack of appreciative comments that she needs more often. What our parents said to us, if were true, this couldn't be the exception.

A similar tone was set in today's meeting when our head addressed my team.

"Make it Visible" was again the "parrot line" here.

A common crib was that we are not looking out for international work true to our abilities. If our hard work was to pay for us, then we ought to have scaled up dramatically with just good references created in each of our engagements.

What was lacking is the ability to ask for audience and speak of ourselves to them and give them their benefit. The audience would not come on their own. It took so much time for me to understand this point. You need to seek out your own audience one person, one company, a time to make your own mark.

How ? I am yet to start on this journey. How have you made your work visible to world and what have been your benefits?

Paradox that Collaboration is still an Issue

Paradoxically, in this age of twitter, blog, wiki, portals:
1. email usage has not come down. People still send attachments when they can upload and share a link.
2. Top management still address cross-team dysfunctions due to lack of information flow between groups.
3. Information and knowledge hoarding is still prevalent and is considered a strategy for safe employment.
4. Employees still rely on newspaper and finance portal to get "breaking news" stories of their own company.
5. Innovations, rewards are at group/division level improvements and not at company level.
6. Training sessions are still around, when a team of trainers could put together a You-Tube learning program for users in a span of hours. "Best of" series is never commissioned in organizations.
7. Presentations still have text text text. Why not publish a book, instead ?
8. When you can get slick and multi sensory medium to tell stories, why still stick of PPT and Word or their open office equivalent?

hmm. Be serious to look at platforms and distributed communication solutions for a revived organization.

Open all doors. Do not be Translucent in the name of transparency.

Practice Eco System - Support Systems

A practice or a young organization exists for servicing a particular need in a narrow area. It is easy at start. You quickly build trust with the single trusted source(for your revenue and existence) and so assemble a team who share the same spirit. You go to great lengths to keep them satisfied and get few more orders based on this work and relationships.

Over a period of time, you move into domains that are traditionally not your fort, but you still know it is doable given the experience you havehad with past projects and processes.

As a coincidence, a project comes in, which is typically skewed, towards higher price figure, and it demands you ramp up team and also need them to work from day 1 in the unknown yet optimistic allied sphere. This is where the problem starts. The talk of this project consumes you completely and make you leave other priorities behind.

This is when support systems, if carefully managed and tuned to anticipate this day, will you show your mettle. To do business as usual when you explode with big orders, it is necessary to evolve with support systems than organic hiring and growth. To integrate multiple partners, vendors, service providers, contractors, part time staff, administrative staff, for bringing a service closer to customer needs requires enough maturity in processes and concern for their well being in not only you, your bosses, but with the organization itself. For pointers I would like to see implemented for good support system would be:

1. Give a differential badge when they enter your premises like "Participative vendor", "Esteemed service provider", "Our Customer" and treat them better - subject them to lesser queries, attend to them faster, give a recognition smile, etc. And please, use a better quality paper than normal visitor tag card.

2. Typical description of support system is that monetary consideration are the fundamental priority over relationships. They start with relationships and would continue long after the professional engagement, but when they become your support system, they need money - simple. So my wish list is to clear their payments immediately or within 7 days than make them give credit and service together.

3. Make legal life simpler - Legal teams are well within their roles and I respect the people in this field who suspect and prevent liabilities and would like to spin their command on language in the stamp paper. But your support system gives you life support and it is important that legal gives in win-win clauses than just look at preventing liabilities at the cost of other. Many a times, my major frustration is in crossing this hurdle.

A good "practice eco system" with support system being the central pillar and other pillars being

1. Your employees

2. Your processes

3. Your IT infrastructure

4. The project management team and

5. Your administrative Team

will deliver the transformation from a cost center to a profit center.

To ensure deliverance in a harmonious ecosystem, you need to cultivate it with Focus, Discipline, Course correction with love for co-existence than as a self contained unit..

Start, Stabilize, Explode

Did you guess the missing word in the title ? Well, it is fine and this is the way it should be.

If you feel that instead of Explode, "Grow" must be the word, then you are right, as far as mental models go. However the reality in business is not to "Grow" but explode after a certain point of time.

Growth is very static as the graph rises steadily. But with competition, changing business landscape and above all team and management changes, the graph slopes very lean, that there is hardly any excitement in growth phase. Explode on the other hand, gives your professional career a meaning and reason to stay on against all odds and weaknesses inherent in the company.

"Explode" brings along its disruptions that consumes your attentive mind and body, that it is important to explode on every year. Money with disproportionate lower risk is always better - right. When you explode, the amount of money vs risk of downside is disproportionately low.

We are exploding right now. Challenges already started. What is happenning with you?