To say that a performance assessment cycle triggers an anxiety amongst employees and managers alike is to put it in a very light perspective. Employees have to complete their self-assessments while managers need to provide each of them with a ranking, feedback and areas of improvement, if any. While most corporates follow an annual assessment cycle, some brave hearts follow a half-yearly cycle too!
Employees indulge earnestly in completing their self-assessments and generally end up having a field day in creative writing. No jokes here, but truly they do remember to put in every aspect of their achievements, peppered up with a little extras to prove that they met or overachieved their goals. In the process, they tend to set up a very high expectation for themselves while at the same time, subtly providing ample hints to the manager.
Let us now look at the plight of a manager heading a contact center and is required to assess the performance of a team of a dozen employees who perform identical activities – like responding to client calls and emails, where goals are the same, daily targets are the same and everybody achieves their targets by end of the day.
Now, here comes the sledgehammer. The company insists that assessments should be managed within the famed ‘bell-curve’ concept. Now, what is a bell-curve? It is an assessment activity that requires managers to identify just a couple of members who are ‘non-performers’ and also a couple of them who are ‘top performers’. The rest will obviously form a bulk of the ‘average performers’ category. If we plot these numbers on a XY-Axis chart, it will form a shape of a bell and hence its name.
Illustration:
(Source: Google website- TrumpExcel.com)
This is where the nightmare begins for the manager. How can one fit a contact center team in a bell curve where everybody achieves their goals? This situation might be true for any other function as well where apart from the above situation, external forces like client requirements, business environment, market demands, support systems, financial conditions, etc will play a vital role in their performance. All cannot be measured with the same parameter. Bell curve concept does not explicitly provide measurements to rate employees into the suggested ratings. Will the manager then not start to look for paltry or pardonable mistakes committed by team members to categorize them so?
One might argue that other behavioral skills such as attitude, attendance, client feedback, teamwork, etc are also measured along with business targets. Since achieving business targets are top priority for success of any business, teams should be measured on this parameter alone at the end of the year. Behavioral skills can still be monitored throughout the year and managed with proper training or counselling. If individual business targets have been achieved, all deserve to be recognized equally.
Managers should judge each team member according to their achievements rather than force-fit them in a matrix, perhaps much against their own will & conscience. They would find it really tough to explain such rationale to impacted team members. Bell curve concept should be treated only as a yard stick to guide managers to judge employees fairly but not as an imposition. Otherwise, this could be a root cause of employee disgruntlement or demotivation leading to ‘real’ poor performances. Skilled resources might want to leave the organisation thereby burdening the company with costs, time and effort to replace & train new ones.
The oft-repeated maxim ‘Employees leave because of managers and not the organisation’ may not be so true here.
