Pay and Play LO4887

Roxanne S. Abbas (75263.3305@compuserve.com)
15 Jan 96 13:03:22 EST

Replying to LO4809 --

Barry contends that some good can come from a performance management
discussion and I don't disagree. My experience and research on the
subject leads me to conclude that it is not a value-added process. It's
simply more trouble than it's worth, even when done well.

One of my arguments against ratings is that they imply that employee
performance can be validly measured, which, I contend, is very rarely the
case. If the employee's job is to produce widgets, we can probably easily
count how many widgets he produces in a given time frame. But most
knowledge work is very difficult to measure. Barry gives this example
from his company's performance booklet:

"Josephine has mastered not only AS/400 O/E skills, but Fusion report
generation and some programming language." Then he states: These are
facts.

I would ask how mastery is defined. The above statement looks like an
opinion, not a fact.

Barry also asks how individual performance review would support individual
focus rather than a team focus. Good team performance is more than the sum
of good performance of all the individual members. In a system that
focuses on team, or organizational performance, we would concentrate on
measuring results of the larger unit, rather than each piece that
comprises the whole. If team performance is poor because one of the team
members is untrained or not producing, then the team addresses the issue.

I believe we each have our own mental model on this issue. I fought to
maintain the old paradigm for many years before I was ready to admit that
there might be a better way to look at this piece of the world. Now I'll
probably hang on to my new model with equal ferocity.

Good luck!

--
Roxanne Abbas
Abbas Compensation Strategies
Compuserve:75263,3305@compuserve.com>
Internet: "Roxanne S. Abbas" <75263.3305@compuserve.com>