This is the question most of you come across at least once a year. Some of you might have faced it twice a year as well. I am not sure about all the work environment, but this is surely true in private job sector. The private sector became attractive as the career path was projected as performance driven and not experience driven. This was a major attraction for all the energy filled young force, ready to go to all extremes to move ahead quickly. This concept of performance driven career path has definitely evolved over time. Nowadays, it seems to be getting generalized. There may be multiple reasons behind the same. Some of those could be.
- The implicit complexity of measuring the performance of humans.
- The increase in employee strength of organization. Definitely the “size does matter”
- Mixture of politics with the pure performance.
- The huge gap between the best and worst in one group.
- and there may be some others as well, which my simple mind is not even able to dream of.
What seems to be happening today is that most of the companies are adopting similar kind of performance evaluation model. How is to possible to have standard measure to judge different individuals? I do not know. This is something I have wrote about earlier as well. I won’t go through the same again. While this basic question is always, still some more thoughts popped up in my tiny brain assuming that these methods are right. Let me try to list some of those, but probably not as direct questions though.
- Most of the companies claim themselves to be perfomance driven and highlight there is no scope for non-performing people. Really?
- The evaluation criteria is already set. How does that apply to all the people? Isn’t it used to be that pick the best quality of person and train him to reap the benefits based on that excellence. Well, atleast the old Hindu mythology, Mahabharta, says so. How different is modern man that evaluation is different?
- The best performer is generally who performs 125 -150%. How do we measure this? I mean really.
- There are some criteria generally chosen e.g. number of trainings delivered, number of proposal’s submitted, number of hours committed. Are these really the criteria of performance?
- There are multiple criteria and everybody is assumed to perform in a similar way in all dimensions. Be real.
- Assume if the above and similar really are the performance criteria, what is 100% on a timescale. e.g. 1st year, you had a target to submit 2 proposals. You being enthusiastic submitted 3. 150% performance, great!!!! What will be your 100% next year then? 2 or 3 or even 4? When will you stop?
Above are very simple thoughts arose for this “performance”. Add in the complexity of politics, preferences, bribing, organization alignment, team and culture differences, the equation becomes really complex. What is the result. Most of the people end up working like crazies to acheive that “high performer” tag that may lead them to next level. Side effect; health issues, family issues, complaints, mental and body stress.
Sure, working is important. Doing work is also a kind of meal for mind and body. But, one needs to remember that work is not all.
So, how much did you perform?
Whatever level you perform either pratcillay or politically, you can always to choose to smile and laugh.
Love,
Arundeep
