Accenture ditching performance reviews
Thursday, July 23, 2015 Today I read the news that Accenture has finally decided to get rid of the dreaded annual performance review process.
Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco and Juniper have already done that. Anyone who is remotely familiar with how annual appraisal process works, will appreciate the management's decision. This will also result in huge saving of billions of productive man-hours otherwise wasted by employees, supervisors and human resources team in the meaningless appraisal process.
For those who are not familiar with the appraisal process, here is how it typically works. Every company has the appraisal season. When this time comes every employee writes her own yearly achievements, provides necessary exhibits and supporting documents (e.g. an email from a client praising her work, any internal award, any significant instances etc), provides 'self-rating' and submits it to the immediate supervisor for approval. Supervisor reviews the appraisal, provides his own recommendation, rating and comments and hands it over to his supervisor or head of department for final approval before submitting to HR.
Once the appraisal goes to HR, the infamous bell curve comes into picture, where they try to compare performance of an employee sitting in Pune with someone sitting in New York and try to plot these performance ratings on a bell curve. Once the plotting is done, you can identify high performers and low performers. They key part in this plotting is, there can be only so many people as high performers. So naturally the ratings are adjusted to fit the desired normal distribution. This is all good in theory, but adjustment of ratings is not an easy thing to do. There are lot of backroom negotiations going on between the HR and departments. Each department tries to push as many people as possible as high performers.
Once the final ratings are disclosed to employees, its the doomsday scenario. Almost everyone is unhappy with the final rating they receive. You can literally smell the resentment in the air. Instead of being an appreciation and motivation process, appraisal becomes a consolation process.
I think this is a great move by Accenture management.
Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco and Juniper have already done that. Anyone who is remotely familiar with how annual appraisal process works, will appreciate the management's decision. This will also result in huge saving of billions of productive man-hours otherwise wasted by employees, supervisors and human resources team in the meaningless appraisal process.
For those who are not familiar with the appraisal process, here is how it typically works. Every company has the appraisal season. When this time comes every employee writes her own yearly achievements, provides necessary exhibits and supporting documents (e.g. an email from a client praising her work, any internal award, any significant instances etc), provides 'self-rating' and submits it to the immediate supervisor for approval. Supervisor reviews the appraisal, provides his own recommendation, rating and comments and hands it over to his supervisor or head of department for final approval before submitting to HR.
Once the appraisal goes to HR, the infamous bell curve comes into picture, where they try to compare performance of an employee sitting in Pune with someone sitting in New York and try to plot these performance ratings on a bell curve. Once the plotting is done, you can identify high performers and low performers. They key part in this plotting is, there can be only so many people as high performers. So naturally the ratings are adjusted to fit the desired normal distribution. This is all good in theory, but adjustment of ratings is not an easy thing to do. There are lot of backroom negotiations going on between the HR and departments. Each department tries to push as many people as possible as high performers.
Once the final ratings are disclosed to employees, its the doomsday scenario. Almost everyone is unhappy with the final rating they receive. You can literally smell the resentment in the air. Instead of being an appreciation and motivation process, appraisal becomes a consolation process.
I think this is a great move by Accenture management.