From programmer to project manager (25): Tucao about performance appraisal
Yu Shiwei believes that the number one problem with Chinese people's attitude towards execution is that they "have no sense of execution deviation, nor do they think it is important." Therefore, no matter how SMART the task assigned by the leader, no matter how urgent the time requirement, the employee will always Work at your own pace without feeling nervous or uneasy. No matter how long this task lasts, he will always keep it secret and will never give you the slightest information about the progress of the work. Once the superior asks why the goal is not achieved, he will always have a variety of plausible reasons.
This may be an exaggeration, but it undoubtedly represents the working state of many employees. In the eyes of these employees, it doesn't matter if they are good or bad. It is this point that breaks the hearts of the company's leaders. He held up the "Sword of Damocles", used numbers to assess employees, and linked their income to this number.
However, the personal experiments of countless companies have proved that performance appraisal is not only a panacea, but may lead to many other more serious problems, such as causing conflicts between employees and the company, exploiting loopholes in the system, difficult to fair and objective assessment standards, and too much subjectivity in scoring. Although people have come up with various assessment schemes, very few companies have successfully implemented them, and many companies have lost their vitality due to assessment. Sony executive director Tianwai Shilang once wrote an article "Performanceism Ruined Sony", expounding the harm of performance appraisal, which made Sony dead and bureaucratic. It can be seen that performance appraisal is fatal to the culture of an enterprise.
The reason why performance appraisal has such a negative effect is that it has the following insurmountable problems:
1 . It is an external driving force
Tianwai Shilang believes that performanceism is "business results are directly linked to monetary rewards, and employees work hard to get more rewards." To put it bluntly, it is the management method of carrots and sticks, which was previously used for management The donkey's method is to hang a carrot in front of the donkey, which can never be reached, and whip it hard with a whip in the back. Treating people as animals, rushing for quick success, ignoring people's inner needs, ignoring the power of human nature, this is the "original sin" of performance appraisal.
2 . it's a cure
If everyone has high performance and high passion, who needs evaluation? Start-up companies generally have very passionate employees, so they never do performance appraisals, and everyone's performance is high. Therefore, those who are keen on performance appraisal are actually companies that lack vitality and low performance. This is because the leader is sick and makes employees take medicine. This kind of treatment is like a doctor who does not give a prescription to a patient, but says to his family: "If his condition improves tomorrow, I will reward you with a candy; if it worsens, I will spank you." , both are equally ridiculous. Not targeting the cause, but only treating the symptoms based on the symptoms, can only cure the symptoms rather than the root causes—in fact, even the “symptoms” cannot be cured.
3. Unable to be truly objective and fair
A fundamental point of performance appraisal is to use quantitative figures to evaluate employee performance. And everyone is so complicated and affected by so many factors, how can it be equated with a number? And quantification itself is a very difficult thing. Deming believes that only 3% of the really important things can be quantified. It is obviously difficult to be fair and objective, especially for software companies, to turn the other 97% into numbers.
First, one's performance is difficult to quantify. Whether it is KPI assessment, balanced scorecard, or 360-degree assessment, some absurd indicators are inseparable, such as communication skills, interpersonal relationships, leadership skills, administrative skills, attitudes... How to quantify these? Can anyone tell me how exactly one's attitude becomes a precise number? Is there really a difference between a 55-point attitude and a 60-point attitude?
Second, software quality is difficult to quantify. Software is intangible, and it is very difficult to quantify. Even if quantification is forced, the evaluation cost is high and subjectivity is strong. Therefore, many software companies ignore the quality factor intentionally or unintentionally when calculating project performance. For the project team, if you don't assess the quality, then I don't want the quality either. When the quality problem breaks out later, don't worry about it. Therefore, when many projects are assessed, they always win awards in the first half of the month, and spend the second half of their lives hard.
Finally, performance appraisal relies on the subjective evaluation of superiors. Shakespeare believed that "there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people", and everyone has different evaluation standards. How to reflect its objectivity? Each evaluator will be influenced by their subjective likes and dislikes when scoring, and fairness cannot be reflected.
4. Trigger the confrontation between the company and its employees
Performance appraisal will inevitably lead to a game between employees and the company. Of course, the company hopes that the higher the goal, the better, to fully tap the potential of employees; while the employee hopes that the lower the better, so that they can earn more bonuses. This irreconcilable contradiction will turn former close comrades into performance. Assess your enemies on the battlefield.
However, the company is always on the strong side, and in the end, employees are often forced to accept the goal. Over time, the employees will not fight. There is nothing more grief than death, and you can do whatever you like. As the saying goes, "If you don't keep your grandfather here, you will keep your grandfather." When you are in a hurry to punish your grandfather, is it okay for your grandfather to leave?
5. Destroys passion, unity and encourages bureaucracy
Tianwai Shilang believes that the biggest drawback of performance appraisal is that it "destroys the atmosphere in the company. The boss does not treat his subordinates as emotional people, but all looks at the indicators and examines the subordinates with the eyes of evaluation." ideas, forced to change to self-interest oriented. In order to make more money, employees will use their "crazy brains", such as exploiting loopholes in the system, bargaining with the company, and curry favor with their superiors, etc., while superiors hold great power and care about the results, regardless of the process, which undoubtedly contributes to the bureaucracy. The prevalence of these "unhealthy trends" will inevitably destroy the company's cultural atmosphere.