Showing posts with label Hawthorne Effect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hawthorne Effect. Show all posts

November 14, 2013

The Backlash Against Performance Reviews

So there is big backlash against employee performance reviews. 

Bloomberg BusinessWeek declares the annual performance review to be "worthless."

The performance review ritual is traced back to the 1930's with Harvard Business School Professor, Elton Mayo, who found that productivity and satisfaction of workers improved when they were measured and paid attention to. This was referred to as the Hawthorne Effect because the study was conducted at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric outside Chicago.

Later in the 1950's, the Performance Rating Act institutionalized mandated performance reviews for federal workers, 

But studies in the last 2 decades have found employees (42%) dissatisfied with the process and even HR managers (58%) disliking the system. 

Clinical Psychologist, Aubrey Daniels, call the process "sadistic!"

The annual reviews are disliked for many reasons including the process being:

1) Arbitrary, subjective, and personality-driven rather than objective, meaningful, and performance-based.

2) Feedback that is too little and too late, instead of real-time when good or bad performance behavior occurs.  

3) A power tool that managers use in a "culture of domination" as opposed to something that really helps employees improve. 

4) Something used to punish people and build a case against employees to "get rid of you" rather than to reward and recognize them. 

At the same time, this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft and other companies are getting rid of forced employee rankings.

The ranking system was developed by General Electric in the 1980's under Jack Welch and has been referred to as ""Stack Rankings," "Forced Rankings" and "Rank and Yank." 

Under this system, employees are ranked on a scale--with a certain percentage of employees (at GE 10% and Microsoft 5%, for example) ranked in the lowest level.  

The lowest ranked employees then are either let go or marginalized as underperformers getting no bonuses, equity awards, or promotions. 

"At least 30% of Fortune 500 companies continue to rank employees along a curve."

Microsoft is dumping the annual quantitative ranking and replacing it with more frequent qualitative evaluations. 

UCLA Professor, Samuel Colbert, says this is long overdue for a yanking at companies and managers' jobs is "not to evaluate," but rather "to make everyone a five."

While this certainly sounds very nice and kumbaya-ish, it also seems to reflect the poor job that managers have done in appraising employees fairly and working with them to give them a genuine chance to learn and improve, before pulling the rating/ranking trigger that can kill employees career prospects. 

A bad evaluation not only marginalizes an employee at their current position, but it limits their ability to find something else.

Perhaps, this is where the qualitative aspect really comes into play in terms of having frank, but honest discussions with employees on what they are doing well and where they can do better, and how they can get the training and experience they need. 

It's really when an employee just doesn't want to improve, pull their weight, and is undermining the mission and the team that performance action needs to be taken. 

I don't think we can ever do without performance reviews, but we can certainly do them better in terms of providing constructive feedback rather than destructive criticism and using this to drive bona-fide continuous improvement as opposed to employee derision. 

This is possible where there are participants willing to listen to a fair critique and work together on getting to the next level professionally and for the good of the organization. ;-)

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Mediocre2010)
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November 2, 2007

The Hawthorne Effect and Enterprise Architecture

“The Hawthorne effect—refers to a phenomenon which is thought to occur when people observed during a research study temporarily change their behavior or performance (this can also be referred to as demand characteristics). Others have broadened this definition to mean that people’s behavior and performance change following any new or increased attention. The term gets its name from a factory called the Hawthorne Works, where a series of experiments on factory workers were carried out between 1924 and 1932. There were many types of experiments conducted on the employees, but the purpose of the original ones was to study the effect of lighting on workers’ productivity. Researchers found that productivity almost always increased after a change in illumination, no matter what the level of illumination was. They experimented on other types of changes in the working environment…again, no matter the change in conditions, the women nearly always produced more.” (Adapted from Wikipedia)

If the Hawthorne effect is correct, then User-centric EA may be a performance enhancer for the users and employees, simply by EA making information in the organization transparent and focusing on the users and their requirements. So aside from EA benefiting the organization through better decision-making as a result of information transparency, and enhancing productivity through improved business processes and targeted technology solutions, the Hawthorne effect indicates possible improved organizational performance simply as a result of management paying attention to the users and their needs.

So, the theory is that by simply by shining a light in the dark recesses of the enterprise, users will recognize the additional attention and respond to it with enhanced performance. What a nice additional win for User-centric EA!


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