Recession has done at least one good thing for organizations. Shifting the FOCUS from Gut-feelings to qualitative and quantitative analysis of business performance and decisions.

“I think Steve is a great guy.” doesn’t work anymore. It has to be “Look at John’s sales performance report. It says he is doing great job.”

The next thing that comes into picture is Employee Performance Appraisals. More than ever organizations are looking to set SMART goals and conduct performance appraisals honestly. But does HONESTY itself gives accurate results?

Consider the case of three managers in the same department of an organization in Year 2007. The performance of the teams of these managers was at par with marginal differences.

Manager A: Ram is one of the youngest managers and hails from Generation Y. He is very optimistic and looks for positive side of the employees. He believes in motivating by carrots.
Manager B: Sonia is in the middle of her career. She has high career prospects in the company and looking for promotion in 1-2 years. She likes to play safe.
Manager C: Johnson is an ex-government employee. For him discipline and loyalty come foremost. He cannot tolerate any deviation from policies and authorities. He believes in the stick.

Here are the scores given by each of them to their team members on the scale 1- 10:

Ram		Sonia		Johnson
Name	Scores	Name	Scores	Name	Scores
Meera	10	Amar	5	Mohan	7
Scott	7	Steve	6	Lada	6
Sunil	8	Phillips	5	Harris	5
Tim	6	Lacey	7	Adam	4
Nita	9	Edwards	5	Mike	6
Peterson	6	Mary	6	Jackson	4
John	5	Kate	7	Reema	5
Rob	7	Seema	6	Sheela	4
Mukesh	8	Peter	8	Lucy	5
Sarah	9	Ramesh	5	Olang	7

If HR looks at the employee scores and rank performance according to the scores obtained in the appraisals, the following picture will emerge:

Top Performers		Mediocre Performers		Bottom Performers
Meera	10	Rob	7	Lucy	5
Nita	9	Scott	7	Reema	5
Sarah	9	Lada	6	Harris	5
Mukesh	8	Peterson	6	John	5
Peter	8	Seema	6	Edwards	5
Sunil	8	Tim	6	Phillips	5
Mohan	7	Mike	6	Ramesh	5
Olang	7	Steve	6	Adam	4
Kate	7	Mary	6	Sheela	4
Lacey	7	Amar	5	Jackson	4

Inferences that can be drawn from the above table are:

• Most of the top performers are from Ram’s Team.
• Most of the bottom performers are from Johnson’s Team.
• The best of Sonia and Johnson are nowhere near Ram’s team members.
• Ram has no bottom performer.

The questions that arise?

1. Is Ram performing because he has got all top performers?
2. Is Johnson such an effective manager that he can drive results even with mediocre and bottom performers?

The above table clearly shows that using the “employee appraisal scores as it is” doesn’t provide accurate information about an employee’s performance. It also indicates that there are personal biases/ nuances in the scores. It will, thus, not be prudent to plan succession, compensation and more importantly “Firing Decisions” based on these numbers. What’s Next?

There are two processes that can help remove the personal biases from appraisal scores: Normalization of Appraisal Scores and Relative Grading. Read more about Normalization of Appraisal Scores in a White Paper by Maj Gen Bhatia.

And watch out this blog later for a new blog post on Relative Gradings.

Source

EmpXtrack HR Consultants team has released a new case study on the Human Resource Management in Retail Industry. This case study covers the challenges faced by HR in management of employees in an organization having chain of stores in multiple locations.

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While reading Jon’s Carnival of HR titled ”Carnevale delle Risorse Umane: 18 February 2009 ” I realized how much clouds of sorrow surmount the Human Resources domain due to recession.

And why not, after all it is the Human Resource Department that is bearing the burns. HR has to do the most disgraceful job of laying off people, because Businesses can no more afford to pay them. Employees that are chopped off curse HR, even though most HR Managers will be at no fault . HR that used to be hero at the time of a flourishing economy is now suddenly considered a villain making plans and strategies to show door to people. Adding to the sorrow, HR has also been ordered to chip off salary packages, incentives and benefits, making the life tougher for those who are fortunate enough to remain employed,,and to bear their blames and curses.

Sad, but it triggered me to search for the rays of hope that prove that Recession will not last long. Here is my list:

Hope 1: Determination of Leadership

There is a very strong determination amongst the political and business leadership to curb the recession. Never in the last few decades we saw such a global and massive effort to fight economic crisis. This determination is sure to find ways out of the recession and foray into another blooming decade 21st century. I think recession is the birth pang of human society into a new era.

Hope 2: New Thoughts on Management

The past and current failures have triggered new thought processes against the current business practices. A new thought to bring better management practices, more financial transparency in the businesses, more control over the plans and strategies and an improvement in global business culture is conceiving in every mind.

Hope 3: Emergence of New Leaders and Think Tanks

The sudden failure has also given an opportunity to those taking the back seat with their innovative ideas (as nobody considered these ideas during the flourishing economy) to emerge out of their shell. Not only there is a shift in economic centers, there is a shift in the power of various thought-schools. Those who were champions of anarchic freedom have stumbled and those calling for a controlled and consistent growth are emerging as the new think tanks. If it is happening at your organization, do you have right tools to measure?

Hope 4: History of Men

If you think recession is a big accident, think about the damage done by World Wars, Epidemics, Great Depression, Hitler and so on. You will find recession is too small for men to overcome. This is merely a small puncture in the economic wheel and the speed has more of corrected rather than frozen. There are still companies hiring. Ask recruiters, they are still unable to meet their goals. Hence, in a year or two this too shall pass.

Hope 5: New Developments in Technology

The major difference between different eras of men has been technology. Pre-historic man had no technology, just a human body and a small animal like brain. Discovery of metals opened the door to new tools and men could construct houses out of stones. When wheel was invented, long distances became short. Invention of steam engine and ships shortened the distance between continents. Invention of Aeroplane made the world just a few hours long. With each technological advancement human society met the specific challenges. In regards to HR Domain, technology is developing at a pace like never before, to improve performance of people and the profits. And leaders know that new performance improvement tools can make a big difference in meeting new challenges.

So there is really no reason to be sad. Its time to stand up, shred the dust and start running once again towards our goals. And this makes me sing these motivating lines:

We shall overcome, we shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We shall overcome some day.

Note: Please add as a comment what you think are the other rays of hope for HR out of this recession.

Source

Prayag Consulting, a leading technology marketing firm, recently interviewed President of Saigun Technologies and the Chief Architect of EmpXtrack, Tushar Bhatia, regarding the trends in HR Technology, the future of HR Management and entrepreneurship. Here are some excerpts from the interview that appeared in their newsletter Focal Point.

What the future holds for HR Technology

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One of my HR Community friend Basheer wrote to me:

> Dear Mr. Gireesh Sharma,
>
> When most people consider traditional performance appraisals a time consuming and expensive task, I also believe they are ineffective in the present work culture of organizations.
>

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While, I was organizing a software training workshop for a major Electric Power Distribution Corporation in New Delhi, I asked Vikram Singh, one of the participating Senior Managers, who has a team size of 150 employees for performance review, “What is the bigger problem when conducting employee appraisals: managing appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?“.

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Sometimes back I wrote a post ‘What’s in the name? SuccessFactors for HR‘ where I mentioned the special skill of an HR manager who knows every employee by name. While I was reviewing a new feature in the software EmpXtrack, called Employee Hierarchy (similar to an Organization Chart), I recollected a motivating incident.

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During one of my conversation with a CEO of a start-up company the discussion turned towards Compensation Planning to motivate employees, especially the talented ones. It was agreed that the most talented ones need a continuous motivation to maintain their momentum. During the discussion, the CEO narrated one of his bad experiences about one of his talented employees, whom he admired, wanted to reward, motivate and compensate appropriately.

Tom worked with John, the CEO of the company, and was a very talented employee who worked diligently. John being happy with the Tom’s work, rewarded him with a cash prize of $ 1000 (which was a significant amount ), in anticipation that Tom will be motivated to perform better. He also had lots of plans for Tom in the back of his mind. Both Tom and John seemed happy and thought that they did a good job.

Contrary to John’s belief Tom submitted his resignation within a much shorter span. During his exit interview, Tom did not state any specific reason for his resignation too (although, it was found later that he left for a better compensation package). His resignation came as a shock to John, who was genuinely interested in retaining good employees and did all what he could do to ensure it.

‘Where was the mistake?’, questioned the CEO to himself and to me too.
As I did not know much about the employee, it was inappropriate for me to come to any conclusion. But the question always remained behind the back of my mind. I always believed that it had something to do with appropriate compensation planning and rewards.

Here is a relevant a research paper by Rick Garlick, Ph.D., Director of Consulting and Strategic Implementation, Maritz Research titled ‘Individual Differences in Reward Practices‘.

The objective of this research was to find out what motivates different employees and to define some general categories of employees with specific reward or compensation aspirations. Here is an abstract of the research.

While everyone understands intuitively that we are not all motivated equally by the same rewards, you might not know it by the way many companies manage their incentive programs. Many times, human resource managers assume that what is rewarding to them will be rewarding to others as well, which may be a false presumption.

As Maritz Inc. was interested in understanding how the workforce is segmented on its reward preferences, it conducted an online Maritz® Poll of 1,003 North Americans. An analysis of participants’ recognition preferences identified six distinct reward profiles, along with some of the more common characteristics of people that were most likely to fall within each ‘reward’ segment.

Reward Profiles

Awards Seekers (22% of the general population, rounded to the nearest whole number): Awards Seekers want incentives that have both monetary and trophy value. These individuals are highly motivated by gift cards and travel awards. Awards Seekers also place higher value than most others on status awards. They are far less motivated by things that might take time away from their normal routines such as the opportunity to mentor other employees, the opportunity to work with people outside their own area, or the opportunity to take on particularly challenging new projects.

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Difficult economic times call for tough calls, and, downsizing is one of the toughest calls that leadership and HR have to take. Though downsizing is the most hated task and nobody wants to do it; it is a necessary evil for saving a company from an economic collapse.

With little efforts organizations can minimize the effect of downsizing on economy and employees to a some extent.  Here are 10 tips that one can consider while downsizing:

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Every body talks about the best HR practices, it is good, but merely bringing in the best cannot give the desired results if some Bad HR practices co-exist in the organization. So what are those Top Ten Bad HR practices which caution & alert an organization.
1. Employee has no access to [...]
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The world economics went through a big turmoil during the third/fourth week of September 2008. The news of debacle of major financial giants like Lehman Brothers, AIG and Merrill Lynch scared event the most patient investor across the world.
In the middle of the same turmoil (whether somebody noticed or not) TT Ram Mohan, Editor , [...]
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I posted one of the Talent Junction blog posts to CiteHR.com titled “How HR Manager can improve Performance“. It was very well received by the HR community (Read by 2,879 HR professionals and 54 posted thank you comments and still continuing.) One of the HR professionals on reading this post sent a very [...]
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I was invited to a attend a seminar conducted by a local chapter of a management group. The conference was titled “Budgeting for Growth” where experts and industry leaders were invited to share their views on optimizing budgets for Marketing, Infrastructure, Information Technology and HR.  Since my interest is in the area of HR, the [...]
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Thomas, Karl, Steve, Martha, Matthew, Bill and so many others in the organization complained of work pressure, unachievable targets, peer pressure, time management and loss of work life balance. Despite working hard, their performance was going down and impacting organization’s bottom line.
Who is to blame for poor performance of employees and business? Ask line [...]
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After spending a lot of time working on HR technology, I have just tried to collaborate some of the technology knowledge that any HR Manager should know.
1. The Era of Excel is over, its no more the most Powerful tool.
There was a time when Excel Geeks were highly in demand. Everybody will approach them [...]
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