• About

Rajneesh Rastogi

Rajneesh Rastogi

Tag Archives: Performance Appraisal

Maslow’s Hierarchy: Use it to shape your Organization.

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by Rajneesh Rastogi in Democratic Organizations, Learning Organizations, Management, Teams

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Democracy, Human Resource Management, Learning Organizations, Management paradigms, Organisation Structure, Performance Appraisal, Strategic Management, Teams

Maslow was a psychologist who proposed a hierarchy of needs. He categorised the needs as, a) physical needs that consist of need for physical well-being like food, water, clothes for protection from heat or cold and physical safety such as house, etc. b) social, psychological and emotional needs, that is, need for social recognition, inclusion, love, etc. and c) self-actualization, that is, realizing one own’s potential. Maslow believed that all human beings want to achieve self-actualization; hence move up the hierarchy of needs, and before a person could move to higher level, he has to master/satisfy his needs in lower levels. The hierarchy is shown in the figure below.

His premise was that as basic needs would be met with, the person would grow and develop social needs and finally go in for self-actualization. Subliminally he was referring to different classes in the society. A daily wage worker would be more worried about fulfilling his physical needs than social needs or self-actualisation needs as compared to a billionaire who has left all the insecurities behind him and now can work on what he actually enjoys and would help him achieve his potential. One of the examples is so many workaholic billionaires who work not because they have to earn a living but because that’s all they enjoy or find meaning in their life.

In life, every person is a discreet individual with his own needs; these needs may cut across the hierarchy (as proposed by Maslow). The priorities and needs of a person may change over a period of time depending on age, income levels and personal growth. Our behaviour and desires may express multiple needs at the same time. For example, when a person eats at a Michelin Star restaurant, is he fulfilling his physical need to eat or his esteem need or his desire to eat delicious food? Similarly, what needs does Ferrari fulfil? A person can be seen as someone with multiple needs, and these needs overlap with each other.

Every person has all the needs but the intensity of needs may change. For example, level of physical needs changes with earning levels of a person. People get used to a lifestyle and may feel insecure if lack of money may lead to decline in standards of lifestyle. The definition of what is essential or necessary changes from a person to person.

As the person grows rich or in stature, his insecurities may reduce and make him aim for self-actualization while contrary to expectations a person may also give up money for self-actualization. India has seen many spiritual Gurus, e.g. Prince Siddhartha, also known as Gautam Budh and Lord Mahavira who, though born in royal households and destined to be kings, gave up everything to find true meaning of life.
Maslow’s assumption that everyone would want to move up the need triangle is debatable and has been questioned. But for HR teams, it can be a good framework to understand profile of its personnel. It would help them in following ways:
– In designing incentive systems
– To define the profile for recruitment, but most importantly
– To shape the culture of their organisation.

Most firms design an incentive schemes that are mix of cash and recognition. For example, incentives most organisations have cash rewards, ESOPs or cash bonuses for their employees. The top performers may be additionally incentivised or rewarded with CEO’s or President’s Award, paid holiday tours abroad etc. These awards address primarily the physical and social needs. Rewards and incentives for top performers are aimed at esteem needs.

A founder who wants to develop a software development team or an ad agency that delivers high quality work, may want to hire a bunch of passionate persons and give lot of autonomy to the team(s). Same will be true for a band of scientists say who are working in basic research or cutting edge technologies. An example of it is Academic world, where most people are internally motivated and are provided lot of autonomy. They set their own targets, determine their own research and in some cases also decide on their research associates or assistants. Academic institutions are also characterised by less inter-dependency and hence allows for individual excellence. Things change in business world, where a person is expected to work with others.

Some of the ways of developing work places where employees could aim for self- actualization could be
1. Remove hygiene factors. Presence of hygiene factors, takes people away from their work. It works as a road block in cultivating ownership amongst employees. Some of the key hygiene factors are
a. Money or Salary – The discontent in salary emanates from comparisons within and outside of the company. Most employees triangulate their salary based on their personal needs, salary levels in the industry and salary levels within the company especially within their own band. A mismatch in salary that the employee expects and the company provides becomes single most important reason for disgruntlement. A salary lower than what other colleagues are getting is seen as “I am being valued less”. This affects the esteem of the employee as well. We at Srijan followed Open Salaries to minimise this discord. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/open-salaries/)
b. Democracy – Excluding people from decision making process or not being heard or grievances not being addressed is another reason for employees to feel less valued. Create an organisation where people can speak up if they have a problem or if they want to contribute. This would address the issue of hygiene factors. Create an environment where people can speak up without fear of losing job for criticising. Let them share their disagreements be it with strategy, colour of wall paper or the quality of coffee.

2. Recruitment and induction –
a. Hire passionate people-Let people come and work in the company for free for a week. See if they enjoy the work. Let them make an informed choice. Get a feedback from the colleagues on them.
b. The behaviour of people reflects their passion, their needs, their beliefs and assumptions. Most people are looking for jobs and careers but they stick to work places/ companies where most of their needs are met with. People may blame their bosses, lengthy or excessive work hours or lack of growth opportunities but the underlying cause would be unfulfilled needs or unhappiness with something. So the one week spent in office would also help colleagues understand the candidate/person. A feedback would help from the colleagues would help in understanding if the candidate would fit into the organisational culture.

3. Staff Interactions – HR/ Founders can design company in a way that allows/ facilitates interactions between staff to fulfill their social needs e.g. seating the whole team together in open work spaces without cabins and cubicles fulfils social needs such as need for inclusion. This also facilitates communication and reduces information asymmetry between team members. Structuring organisation around team would also help. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/building-football-teams-at-work/ )

4. Allow people to experiment. Allow people to fail but do not tolerate mistakes – Most organizations are so focussed on success that they just build on their formula that made them successful. The managers and the company fail to experiment as they are afraid of failures. Let people experiment and learn. Takes failures in strides. The behavior in small and medium sized family owned companies is a good example. A father, who is grooming his child, is tolerant of Child’s failures. He would allow him to experiment and fail. But unfortunately he would not be as charitable with his employee. No wonder the son takes ownership, but the manager does not.

5. Devolve decision making to teams – One of the surest way of promoting ownership is devolve decision making. Responsibility without authority has no meaning. The senior management should devolve planning, implementation and control to lower rungs of management. This would give them autonomy and control over their operations. Teams develop their own sub-culture and help people bond, collaborate, cooperate and hence learn and grow. Essentially fulfill their social and self-actualization needs.

In a competitive world which is changing very fast, organizations need people who take pride in their work and own it. The traditional model of seeing employee costs as zero sum game is not going to be effective. HR departments will have to go beyond traditional roles and responsibilities and would have to add creating organizational culture to their job descriptions. Creating work spaces where people can achieve their full potential would be one of it.

Salaries and Performance Appraisal

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by Rajneesh Rastogi in Democratic Organizations, Development, Learning Organizations, Management, Teams

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Demotivator, HR, Hygiene, Motivator, Performance Appraisal, Salary

Talk to people in most companies and one common villain that most people have is HR. Probe deeper and the villain would turn out to be an unfair or unjust performance appraisal. If we go down another level, it would be unhappiness with history of increments.

The objective of performance appraisal system is to provide a feedback to an employee on his or her performance. The appraisal process is a feedback on factors affecting performance. The inputs from performance appraisal system along with guidance and mentoring are supposed to help a person shape his or her career.

Linking performance to appraisal leads to distortion of the process. The employees are keen to get a better rating, than hear the feedback. The discussion shifts from feedback to debate on rating between the employee and supervisor and what is written on the paper. The supervisor and supervisee in most cases are also not able to bring in instances, attitudes or behaviours that do not conform to format of appraisal but do affect the final rating. A poor rating is not seen as reflection of performance but an outcome of inter-personal relationship between supervisor and supervisee. The companies tried to address it by bringing in super boss into the equation but did not help anyone as the underlying assumption was not addressed.

Despite all the efforts of HR to make the system work and to make the process more fairer and agreeable to all, the supervisee who gets a bad rating mostly leaves the table with a feeling that I got a poor appraisal as my boss played favourites. Companies have tried experiments and methods like 360 feedback but they all backfire. This is because of lack of trust. A closed 360 degree means that people feel the feedback was taken from people who have connived with the supervisor.

Linking performance appraisal to increments may defeat exercises like bell curve as people may not like to take smart people in their team for that will squeeze them to centre of the bell curve. This affects competence of the team and would breed mediocrity.

The only way the damage can be undone is by delinking performance appraisal from salary. The performance appraisal is a continuous exercise and should be retained that way with both formal and informal components.

This would surely shock most of my colleagues from business school who believe good performances should be rewarded and bad performances should be punished. The underlying assumption still being that money or salary is a motivator or it can be both carrot and stick. This world view still comes from industrial revolution where the assumption was people are lazy or do not want to work unless they are provided incentives or penalised for not working.

Bell curve ensures that people just do not have to give their best but just be ahead of rest of the team mates. This breeds a feeling of competitiveness where colleagues do not like to pass on knowledge or play in team. This also leads to situations where people can only show a better performance by downplaying someone else’s performance leading to sub-groups and office politics. This does nothing to raise standards in office.

In this age of knowledge workers, organisations that do well are organisations that are able to tap intrinsic motivation in their employees. Companies need to figure out what kind of employees it wants. People who need money to excel or people who want to excel. The latter would pull up their peers and raise the standard of company and in the process make money. Money is an outcome and not an input resource.

This is why, we at Srijan delinked our salaries and performance appraisal.

Teams and Performance Appraisal Systems

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by Rajneesh Rastogi in Democratic Organizations, Learning Organizations, Management, Teams

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Performance Appraisal, Performance Incentive, Teams

Most organisations would like their employees to work in teams. Most organisations recognise that effective teams foster collaboration and bring diverse skill sets that are often necessary to deliver in complex situations. Hence each individual is appraised for working in teams and hence on soft skills necessary for it. The organisations also conduct expensive team building exercises where they fly people from across the globe to participate in them.

Yet, most organisations undo all the good work by building structures that undermine sharing, cooperation and more importantly, seamless interchange in roles.

To explain my point, I will take example of two games Cricket and Football. Cricket is a team game which is collection of individual performances. Each player has a specific role and his role and responsibilities.  For the team to win, each individual has to perform his role and deliver on it. And hence Cricket also has prizes for best batsman, best bowler etc. As against this, football is a totally team game. While players have clear roles and responsibilities, the game is very fluid and players keep on moving from one position to other and keep on interchanging roles. Depending on the need, a mid-fielder or person from defence would move ahead and even score goals. And there would be situations where a striker would be saving goals at the goal line. This happens in a very limited way in cricket where a fielder may don gloves or batsman may bowl in exceptional circumstances.

The incentives are also different in the two games. The teams play for trophies o championships and compete with each other. Either a team wins or loses. While in football, the players get their salaries from the clubs, they play to win trophies or prizes either for club or for country. An individual may win a golden boot or most valuable player trophy as against Cricket where prizes are accompanied with cash. The cash in cricket even for individual prizes such as man of the match or player of the tournament are shared between the team. The winner of the prize may get 25% of the total amount with rest shared equally between all team members.

If we compare corporate setup, the individuals are brought together as a team. Each member is appraised individually for his performance.  There are no rewards for the team.  But individuals get rewarded for their performance. Most of the time, teams have a team leader and sometimes hierarchy as well. Most companies have a 360 degree feedback from the colleagues or team members.  These add another dimension to performance of the team. The team may have no internal democracy and everyone may only be expected to perform his role.

So an individual who can demonstrate that he has performed well in his role and has all the qualities necessary to deliver in team will get his incentives ( based on his performance ) irrespective of performance of the team. The 360 degree feedback means that the team mates will get a chance to provide real feedback to a team mate which they would not have shared across the table or would have been couched in diplomatic words. All this leads to a situation where the recipient is often wondering which of the team member is his friend and who is his enemy.

All this leads to a situation where the team members work in sub-groups, play politics to demonstrate their individual performance and are resistant to stepping into a team member’s role if required. A working style or team dynamics that are hardly conducive to creating a winning football team.

I tried creating such teams in Srijan.  These teams were based on the following principles

  1. There is no hierarchy in the team. Everyone in the team was equal and could challenge others in the team. This meant that anyone could pitch in ideas or could participate in evaluating ideas. Over a period, would lead to better decision making and better team work.
  2. The 360 degree performance appraisal system was across the table where the whole team sat together and discussed each other’s strengths and weaknesses. The advantage was everything was in open. The disadvantage was hard feedback or not so positive feedback was generally not easy to come by. This despite the feedback workshop we had. But unfortunately it was no followed up with regular practice sessions. This was one area which needed lot of attention.

One thing we were trying before I moved out of Srijan was delinking salaries to performance. Everyone gets a salary that he decides based on his expectation, affordability of the company and market rate. The total employee costs were pegged to sales and a component of performance bonus was built in employee costs. This was function of company’s performance and was to be distributed to team instead of individual. The performance of the team was to be assessed based on completion of assignment in time, variance between budgeted and actual contribution and contributions to the community amongst some other parameters.

 

 

 

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • November 2022
  • August 2022
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • July 2018
  • May 2018
  • January 2018
  • June 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • March 2016
  • October 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • June 2014

Categories

  • Agile Technology
  • Business Process Engineering
  • Climate Change
  • Democratic Organizations
  • Development
  • Environment
  • Healthcare
  • Learning Organizations
  • Management
  • Relationships
  • Teams
  • Uncategorized
    • Culture

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Rajneesh Rastogi
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Rajneesh Rastogi
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...