Your colleague walks up to you and hands you a cute little red badge. You look up quizzically, and she says, “You did a swell job on that presentation. Made it so much easier for us to convince the client.” You recall the informal kudos you got after the presentation, only she was not even part of the team.
Not many of us are familiar with appreciation in this form. Feedback about our work is mostly restricted to our immediate team members and our supervisors; it comes in the form of appraisals once, or at best, twice a year. Some companies are changing that. Their performance management processes are reaching beyond KRAs (key result areas). Case in point Viacom18’s Red Ant awards, named after one of nature’s most fiery and industrious creatures. Its employees can walk up and present these tiny badges to anyone in the office — a colleague, a senior, a subordinate or even someone in another department.
Not just a 360-degree feedback system, companies are also trying to put a finger on that elusive emotional quotient that really separates the men, or women if you insist, from the boys and girls. All in an effort to make the feedback system fair and motivating.
Like many changes that India has leapfrogged, the whole process of appraisals is undergoing a serious rethink across organisations. Sangeeta Lala, vice-president, TeamLease, says, “Traditionally, companies have been target oriented and that is what their performance assessments have focused on. Now, with a large part of the industry shifting focus to services, appraisals are undergoing a change. A 360-degree feedback system with inputs from stakeholders such as customers is being weaved into appraisals.”
Performance appraisals, as they say, are only as good as your ability to give feedback to your employees. So while the formal assessment process is not being scrapped, companies are taking to mentoring and exchanging feedback and adjusting progress plans more frequently. Hastha Krishnan, president and director, Ma Foi Randstad, says, “Informal quarterly feedbacks maintain spontaneity without leading to chaos in a company.” While in ad agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather, feedback comes in as and when there are interactions with clients or consumers, at manufacturing and FMCG companies such as Maruti Suzuki and GlaxoSmithKline, it is a monthly or a quarterly process.
Helping them on is their move to take performance management, at least the tedious paperwork, online. Arun Sehgal, executive vice-president, human resources, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare (GSKCH), says, “At GSKCH, performance and development planning is a continuous process. There are regular checks and balances for transparency. It ensures conversations, which are timely and open, between managers and their teams. The input is not just based on the manager’s assessment but also on that of other stakeholders such as consumers and people with whom one interacts at work.”
Viacom18 has recently taken the whole feedback and appraisal process online to make it more constructive. SBI too is taking its employee-mapping process online to make the task of identifying the right person for the right job easier. But Abhinav Chopra, vice-president, human resources, Viacom18, warns, “Appraisals are just one part of performance measurement. They can’t answer all your questions.”
Businesses are becoming more flexible in the functional parameters they assess every year. They are tying them up with the company’s goal for the year. At Maruti, the business plan, once drawn up, is conveyed to the functional heads who then set goals for managers, according to SY Siddiqui, managing executive officer, administration, HR, finance & IT, Maruti Suzuki.
On its part, Viacom18, emphasises targets based on the business environment — when inventory spots are not going full, the target and hence assessment of the sales team would be based on filling the spots like it happened during the recent downturn and in the company’s early years. Once the ads started streaming in, the goal changed to media innovation and yield per spot. SBI too alters the quantitative assessment according to what the management decides to focus on that year. Arundhati Bhattacharya, corporate development officer and deputy managing director , SBI, says, “Earlier, profit growth would be the sole focus; now there are several others. We put a lot of emphasis on non-performing asset follow-ups and recovery, and encourage alternate channel usage. ”
Soft corner
Employers are rapidly subscribing to the need of emotional intelligence, popularly referred to as soft skills, especially in their team leaders. As a result, appraisal processes are also being redesigned to turn them from a passing reference into a parameter for scoring. Sehgal of GSKCH says, “Given today’s dynamic business environment, even when hard objectives are not met, the leadership characteristics an individual displays during a crisis are taken into account. It is more about ‘how’ to achieve rather than ‘what’ to achieve.”
Viacom18 has recently built in four traits into its performance requirement of all employees — a creative bent, business application (not acumen, points out Chopra), adaptability (developing a product can trigger chaos and pressure, says Chopra, and the employee has to thrive in it) and a bias for action (getting things done rather than brood over a hurdle). These will act as filters in all its performance management processes including hiring new talent. “It gives development a new direction,” adds Chopra.
Agrees Navin Talreja, managing partner (Mumbai), Ogilvy & Mather, “Lately, we have started putting a lot of value on emotional maturity. We work in a high stress environment, with varying opinions because it is a creative organisation. For a person to align all the views and manage conflict and finally go out and handle the client, requires a lot of empathy. We don’t do it through any scores but the strength of relationships is a parameter that we judge.” Functional criteria for those at Ogilvy include revenue for account executives, awards won for creatives, proprietary studies for strategic planning members.
Bhattacharya notes for SBI, a PSU, “Soft skills earlier had to be assessed in a subjective manner. In the last two years, we have started providing keys. Such competencies are measured through behavioural cues for rating. We measure initiative, team building, customer awareness. Teamwork would just be described earlier by a ‘very good’; now we see whether an employee has expanded her area beyond a particular role, has been able to solve problems, how much time is taken to pinpoint problems, allowing team members to perform better.”
Manufacturing companies are stirring in some change as well. For example, Maruti Suzuki has come a long way from the confidential report system it had earlier. Over the last two-three years, the company has developed a set of behavioural competencies that need to be measured. “Forty per cent weight is given to innovation, flexibility, networking skills and speed, while 60 per cent is reserved for traditional functional competencies,” says Siddiqui. Rather than pay lip-service to innovation, the company expects a minimum of one suggestion from each employee every month. Till now, such suggestions have helped the company save Rs 147 crore in operations.
Today, it has an online two-way appraisal process which takes into account customer orientation and peer assessment, according to Siddiqui. He adds, “Peer assessment helps in ensuring objectivity in the process because it identifies inconsistencies.” The quarterly performance reviews don’t translate into monetary rewards but into gestures such as free movie tickets or mentoring where needed. Feedback is not restricted to the formal appraisals. Daily meetings and monthly interdepartment meetings keep a tab on performance of the different team members.
Objectivity is topmost on Google’s agenda. Since its inception, Google has been known to encourage open and flexible workplaces. Its two-way feedback which is ploughed into the performance reviews is calibrated on a global scale. Managers across functions and offices have a visibility of their team and others’ performance to compare their ratings. “The discussion among the group of managers ensures that calibration of performance is not done in isolation but is consistent across the organisation,” says Sunil Malik, HR head (sales), Google India.
Conversations and coaching help motivate employees. Like a lot of companies, Google too introduced anonymous feedback on managers by their teams about a year ago which are incorporated in the manager’s performance review. However, for organisations of the scale of SBI, trying a two-way feedback is a challenge, points out Bhattacharya. “We had piloted with a small group of people but we are not taking it forward. It is an annual appraisal for us. We are trying to make it half-yearly and the feedback is expected to be sent to the reportee.”
Open to change
Workplaces are embracing the concepts of flexi-timing and work-from-home, and we are not talking only about IT companies. Sehgal of GSKCH says, “The age-old beliefs of performance being linked to how long a person stays in office everyday have been thrown out of the window. We encourage employees to give equal emphasis to their personal goals. We employ people who are in various stages of their lives and careers and give them the chance to manage the requirements of these stages. The performance objectives are calibrated accordingly, with the challenges in mind.”
In organisations where this is not institutionalised, there is an informal system in place wherein a marketing executive or an accounts manager, for instance, can work from home on days she has a client meeting far away from the office or near her place of residence. Customer-facing businesses still require a person to show up at the counter on time.
Then there is also the issue of managing expats. At Maruti Suzuki, for example, the Japanese expats are appraised by their superiors based in Suzuki headquarters, bypassing any uncomfortable mismatch in expectations. At other places, Lala of TeamLease points out, inter-cultural sessions to sensitise both parties come in handy.
Chopra at Viacom18 has also worked on linking performance appraisal with rewards in a seamless process. “Employees can now calculate their own bonus from the ratings they have got. It has got a clear line of sight from what she does, how she is assessed to how she is rewarded. There are no ambiguities,” adds Chopra.
Increments and monetary benefits are increasingly being seen as one of many ways to reward employees in performance management schemes. Development in a non-threatening way is also on the rewards list at companies. Viacom18 sponsors training and education and contact programmes through its learning academy called Bodhi Tree. Ogilvy too encourages its employees to make themselves redundant in their jobs by handing the reins to the next set of stars.
Sehgal points out that at GSKCH, “Employees are expected to take ownership of driving their development objectives to move to leadership roles. While the organisation and manager will provide the resources and support, the onus lies on the employee. This is a departure from the erstwhile mindset of expecting the organisation to tell an individual what she needs to do.” The company also sets different development objectives. According to these, 70 per cent of the employee’s development is through on-the-job training, 20 per cent through mentoring and 10 per cent through formal learning interventions. At SBI, the possibility of the clerical staff to move up the ranks and become an officer has increased. Bhattacharya points out, “Apart from increase in scope, there is also the chance of working across functions.”
Performance appraisers face a lot of challenges, not least of them is the mindset of employees. Some resist setting down tangible measures for hitherto unmapped competencies while others worry about the system being somewhat subjective. While companies are already addressing these, there is also the new challenge of breaking the bad news to employees — there would be no rewards a particular year. Transparency regarding the company’s business expectations is the key, says Krishnan, while Lala adds that reaching down the value chain is what will carry the employees along.
| HOW TO CONDUCT A COMPENSATION ANALYSIS The basis for a good appraisal system is to have a well-defined job. The starting point is to ensure that the job description and key result areas — KRAs as they are commonly referred to — are well laid out at the start of the evaluation period for the employee or team. And this needs to happen early on so the employee is completely aware of the areas which are likely to affect her year-end feedback process. |
The typical key elements of the appraisal process include:
* Measurement, that is, comparing target objectives to actual achievement. Objectives should be divided into organisation, team and individual objectives.
* Feedback on the individual’s performance.
* Reinforcement on what has been well done versus not well done.
* Exchange of feedback on how performance can be improved.
* Agreement for the future.
It is not a good idea for managers to wait till the end of the year to evaluate their teams. Here are some suggestions for a sound appraisal process and for tackling the most common challenges:
* Assessment of actual performance: Focus on actual productivity, output, quality and other defined parameters than on personal traits. For instance, a project output than the flexi-timing options of a team member.
* Data-based assessment: Feedback and evaluation need to be based on data, not perceptions.
* Continuous feedback: One of the goals of an appraisal is to help identify and improve performance-related gaps; hence doing this only at the end of the year may mean nothing if the employee sees this as a do-or-die situation and walks out of the door.
* Integration into an overall career path: The appraisal process outcome needs to show the employee a career path to improvement.
* Focus across performers: An appraisal should be across performing and non-performing employees; in fact, it should capture the highlights of the best performers to set an example for the rest of the team.
* Address diversity: With companies going global and employing people across cultures, languages and backgrounds, appraisals need to tackle diversities at the workplace.
* Make it a two-way street: Create an environment so the appraisee is open to sharing feedback instead of being intimidated by the manager’s stance.
* Coincide with actual project or business deadlines and before the next cycle for maximum impact.
* Owning the people and process: Often the manager in a large team may not be fully aware of all her direct reports, their strengths and weaknesses, and highs and lows. Ownership of a team can be the key to avoiding favouritism; it also helps reach out to the team members on a continuous basis.
The author is vice-president, TeamLease Services
