{"id":153,"date":"2021-08-18T08:46:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-18T08:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/?p=153"},"modified":"2021-08-18T08:46:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T08:46:00","slug":"what-next-for-the-broken-appraisal-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/2021\/08\/18\/what-next-for-the-broken-appraisal-system\/","title":{"rendered":"What next for the broken appraisal system?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Both Harvard Business Review<\/a> contributors, Alessandro Di Fiore (right) is the founder and CEO of the European Centre for Strategic Innovation (ECSI) and ECSI Consulting<\/a>, while Marcio Souza (left) is the President and CEO of Praxis Precision Medicines<\/a>, a biotech company focused on innovative therapies for brain diseases.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea of abandoning the traditional appraisal process may seem daunting, but Di Fiore and Souza argue that this will be the best thing for your company. As they see it, the traditional appraisal system is broken \u2013 for three fundamental reasons.
 
Firstly, they believe the system is biased.<\/strong> Within the traditional appraisal system, \u201cmanagers are sacred\u201d. According to Di Fiore, this means any performance evaluation is susceptible to the bias of one person. From personality biases to experiential biases, relating to recent events in the workplace, assessments are ultimately skewed. Souza underlines that in this new way of working, \u201cco-creation with team members has become more important than a view from a manager only.\u201d
 
Secondly, the slow pace of feedback means a build-up of performance data.<\/strong> Annual performance reviews mean data performance is therefore used mostly as compensation, a leverage for career progression rather than effective employee development. As Di Fiore puts it, performance reviews \u201cbecome more about playing poker than having a healthy personal development discussion.\u201d Indeed, the system therefore rewards political versus practical behavior.
 
Thirdly, annual reviews are too infrequent.<\/strong> \u201cHow can a team develop if feedback is only received once a year?\u201d Di Fiore asks. \u201cAll feedback should be frequent and context-based. This can be monthly or quarterly \u2013 but the more frequent, the greater the value.\u201d Souza concurs \u2013 \u201cif the objective is to improve the person and the teams, it\u2019s paramount it happens in real-time not once a year\u201d.
 
For Souza and Di Fiore, frequent appraisals mean greater employee proactiveness: individuals can work on their feedback without delay. Real-time feedback, in hand with mutual feedback, can lead to greater openness between the employer and employee and encourage faster employee development.
 
Moving away from traditional appraisals, Di Fiore and Souza have proposed a different method: a \u201csocially-based\u201d feedback system (SFS). The \u201csocial\u201d nature of this feedback is demonstrated by the peer-to-peer structure, in which employees are assessed by a multitude of people, ranging from peers to senior managers. As Di Fiore states, it is widely accepted in society that the \u201cwisdom of the crowd\u201d is statistically more accurate than the individual \u2013 so why is it not the same for appraisals?
 
SFS also tries to increase the frequency in receiving feedback. The duo emphasize how employee development can benefit from receiving more feedback at more data points in the year. This allows room from an employee \u201cto improve, reinforce or correct their course of action\u201d when you receive endorsement and feedback more frequently.
 
While the tide is slowly turning against the traditional system of appraisals, with the likes of Microsoft and Deloitte leading the way, the shift in process is \u201cvery hard to change\u201d. According to Di Fiore and Souza, many employers don\u2019t have the courage to leave behind their legacy systems, comfortable with their traditional habits. 
 
There are also challenges in the implementation of an SFS. Di Fiore points to the social issues peer-to-peer feedback can cause. Indeed, asking employees to provide the feedback on their colleagues is difficult: the employee knows that this feedback is reviewed by HR and could impact the development of their colleague, both positively and negatively. The employee will therefore eventually become less candid because they don\u2019t want to be \u201cthat person\u201d. Di Fiore and Souza believe the lack of openness and frankness in company culture means it\u2019s harder to achieve honest and candid peer-to-peer feedback.
 
According to Di Fiore and Souza, the solution is greater education and cultural change at a companywide level for feedback givers. Feedback givers, particularly peer-to-peer, need to be \u201cbrutally candid\u201d while at the same time \u201cnot becoming a jerk\u201d \u2013 starting with leadership.
 
New problems have arisen for companies who adopt a team-based organization, or \u201cagile development teams\u201d in the workplace. In this structure, it becomes difficult to assess the contribution of an individual within a team. The objective is to deliver on the need of customers, not to satisfy an internal system or line function. For example, if a company has an effective team of eight and reaches all their targets, but of those eight, seven are mavericks and one is lazy, all achievements are shared across the whole team. To capture the individual contributions within a team, the SFS fits the needs well.
 
In parallel, with multiple autonomous teams, companies need to think about interdependencies, and how to manage shifts in \u201cpriorities between a team-to-team in terms of resources and budget\u201d.
 
This requires a new governing system to coordinate the process, otherwise you risk \u201chaving multiple teams going in different directions. Ultimately, Di Fiore argues that these teams must be coordinated \u201cto ensure that they are aligned to the company\u2019s strategic priorities\u201d and \u201cthat teams are adapted by resources at a higher level\u201d.
 
As Di Fiore and Souza argue, the current system must change. Failing to do so ultimately damages both the company and its employees, fundamentally undermining the objectives for implementing appraisals in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The broken traditional appraisal system, the merits of peer-to-peer and real-time feedback and future opportunities for companies to embrace team-to-team performance evaluations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[32,27,16,33,35,34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewshub.com\/theloop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}