Are We using the right Appraisal Systems??

 

Appraisal season is just around the corner. All job holders, especially the ones in IT industry, wait with bated breath for their ratings to be announced, depending on which presumably their salary revisions, bonuses and promotions will be decided, well, at least that is the established norm. What I believe to be the real causal effect of the ratings though, is a few bitching sessions with peers, a few short lived revolts and at the max the invention of a few new technical matrices for the next year’s modified appraisal system.

With so much competition and clients turning highly demanding, the only profit making avenue that seem to be working for the big IT giants is the ‘Over Commitment’ i.e. sell beyond your producing capacity. What it often results in is the over burdening and setting exceedingly high expectations for their employees. This huge pressure of delivery and the myriad of trackers and matrices to be maintained throughout the year, leaves employees with virtually no (or reduced) personal time and space.

What makes things worse is the fact that instead of simplifying things, the planners and innovators keep coming up with more complex formula and calculation matrices each year. All this is done in guise of technological simplification of course, but it eventually turns out to be a nightmarish feat for the poor, innocent employees who just look forward to their efforts getting deserved recognition. With the appraisal systems having number of input parameters possibly greater than Large Hadron Collider, it becomes impossible to keep track of one’s own performance highlights. There is an individual scale based score for everything ranging from number of billable hours to number of hours spent on bench, number of white papers published to number of patents filed, number of successful deliveries managed to number of dollars earned for the company. Then there is weighted score for all such individual components. There is cross functional and cross technological score and then there is career enhancement and learning score. And as if all of this wasn’t enough, there happens to be factors such as behavioural skills, personal skills, soft skills and N number of other less relevant (or irrelevant) skills too. The capturing of these parameters itself is a tiring and time consuming task, but the real nightmare is experienced when you are expected to score big on all these factors and are supposed to keep doing so throughout the elapsed year and justify that at the end.

It takes some refresher courses and trainings to understand these complex systems first. Then it takes an enormous effort to effectively comply with the requirements. Quite often this becomes an additional burden for employees to cope up with these systems given the amount of load they already deal with in their day to day lives.

What it results in is the unfair distribution of perks based on the skills that might not be relevant at all in the first place, yes, a person skilled enough to portray his/her image positively through these complex appraisal systems eventually turns out to be the winner, irrespective of the quality of work he/she had done, whereas a person prioritising his/her day to day work over these futile, non-productive exercises loses.

What comes as an outcome is a deep sense of remorse, lack of motivation and feeling of detachment. When the appraisal systems are supposed to be working in favour of the hard working and committed employees, it often turns out to be just the opposite. The question that the big IT giants need to ask themselves is that ‘Is it really worth it?’