The Hindu Business Line : Automating performance management

The year: 2012. The month: April. Rahul walks up to the automated performance management (APM) machine in Nagpur, where he is travelling on work. He punches in his employee code and confirms details of his work group and also his supervisor's name. The machine welcomes him with warmth and offers him several options:

Dear Rahul, good evening. What would you like to do?

Press One to view your current system generated absolute performance rating.

Press Two to view your current peer generated absolute competency rating.

Press Three to view your current consolidated and normalised rating.

Press Four to confirm your existing ratings

Press Five to flag a Level Three objection (A Level Three objection to the shared services unit will entail a personal meeting with a qualified shared services unit representative for resolution. A Level One objection will entail an e-mail response and a Level Two objection would entail a response from a qualified representative from the shared services call centre)

Press Six to fire a print of your consolidated performance profile. (Hard copies are couriered to your home address in two business days)

Rahul chooses option Three, views his normalised rating and then happily chooses option Four and confirms his ratings.

His manager, Satish who is tracking the PMS (performance management system) closure status online from his home in Bangalore smiles, happy that one more of his team members has confirmed the ratings. The APM is obviously working well he thinks !

Manager's dream

The bedside alarm rings and Satish wakes up with a start. He's been dreaming! He jumps out of bed and rushes to get ready. He has a long day ahead and several appraisals to close and confirm to the human resources (HR) department. The deadline is nearing. How he wishes that his early morning dream (fantasy) actually came true!

Satish's fantasy is every manager's dream today. Every manager who faces the onerous task of appraising performance and having a conversation in today's environment hopes that APM will liberate him from this unenviable task!

What has brought things to this stage? Who is to be blamed?

Most would jump to the conclusion that the manager is responsible for the current state of affairs.

It is my belief and submission that in the name of institutionalisation, automation and standardisation, and securing fairness and objectivity, business leaders and HR have inadvertently ended up marginalising the role of the manager in the entire performance management process.

Instead of feeling empowered to play his role well, he actually feels defensive and disempowered in the bargain.

If you were to apply Robert Simon's four spans model of job design (HBR, July-August 2005) to this specific situation and ask the four questions that he does, you will understand the plight of the manager:

What resources does he control to accomplish the task?

What measures are used to evaluate him?

How does he influence others to achieve his task?

How much support can he expect to accomplish this task?

In the interest of scale and growth, organisations have centralised many of the tasks that managers traditionally performed — central hiring, internal job postings, assessment centres to assess capabilities, central pay budgets, central normalisation policies and so on. There is little that he controls.

On the other hand, managers are held accountable for several things — he is expected to control attrition, give candid feedback, champion differentiation, obtain good scores in employee surveys and also come out well in his own 360 degree survey! A real superman is what we expect.

However, there is little influence the manager has over his environment. The greatest source of his influence is his own managerial skill to perform this role and this is often missing. The other is to do with the extent to which he can influence outcomes because, in many instances, HR mandates a normalisation formula. Managers quite often have little influence over appraisal outcomes too. The third aspect of influence comes from the depth of the manager's relationship with his team members. Given the transience at the workplace, relationships are weak too.

Finally, today's managers need access to and availability of HR in managing the performance management process. Thin HR presence and huge transactional demand is making HR availability a challenge.

Performance management

In summary, low control, low influence and low support, but high accountability for the process has ended up marginalising the manager's role. He believes that he is damned if he does and damned if he does not.

The end result is that performance management and its accompanying processes are viewed as one of the greatest ills of modern organisation life, especially by our young employees and their managers who have to manage it. To get out of this situation, we really have two options: We can go back to the drawing board and look at the way we have designed the manager's role in the process and do all that it takes to empower him. If that is not possible, we would do well to invest in building the APM! Anything in between will only mean disaster.

My own guess is that the APM might happen by 2012. What is yours?

(The author is the founder and CEO of Totus Consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm that designs and implements HR systems and processes for organisations across diverse industries)

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