Performance appraisal

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You could call it many things: a orchestrated scheme for institutionalised nepotism; a sanctioned suburbia of rotten boroughs; management-sponsored low-level cronyism; a massive multi-player online role-playing game or, most emphatically, a colossal, unflinchingly tedious waste of an institution’s collected time and resources.

One thing you may be sure it is not is a meaningful way of evaluating staff.

The “360” is administered, as one might administer cod liver oil to an unwilling child, by the good people of human resources. They alone hold any affection for it — why wouldn’t they? It keeps them gainfully occupied for seven months of the year — and theirs are the ultimata and naked threats that accompany its launch each year.

Inevitably it is decreed: this year there will be no deadline extensions; this year it will be simple; this year the system will not freeze or fail to save your work when it unexpectedly crashes at fifteen minutes to midnight on the deadline for submission — a deadline which contracts with every year that passes.

Each year, defiant non-compliance and massive IT malfunction ensure it will be otherwise. The scope of the 360 - how extensive; how frequent; how in-depth - is a good measure of how captive a firm is to its HR department. It might be fun to chart aggregate time invested in the 360 process against share price.

No-one doubts the 360 is well intended. So was Neville Chamberlain in Munich. By polling those with whom an employee has most closely worked regardless of rank, department or disposition, it is meant to provide a comprehensive and unbiased analysis of each employee’s contribution to the firm’s performance.

Scoring is numeric against standardised criteria: i.e., multi-choice. Since marks out of five fail to provide a script for the awkward half hour “performance conversation” one is obliged to conduct months after the process completes, appraisers are required to compose prose evaluations as well. Even the most public-spirited employee will find this trying.

Reducing matters to statistical analysis which can be fitted to a normal distribution is, of course, the sort of thing that aspiring management consultants adore, dispensing as it does with any need to understand the fundamentals of the business. It is considered lunacy by everyone else. If an employee’s contribution really can be reduced to a set of percentages, the open question is why have the employee at all.

And that, a management consultant might say, is exactly the point.

Nonetheless, the 360 is wide open to abuse. Unless he is uncommonly stupid in no circumstances will any employee nominate anyone with whom he hasn’t already entered a mutual admiration pact.

To correct this bias, some systems allow “unsolicited anonymous feedback”. But bitter indeed is she who goes out of her way to torpedo a colleague who has at least done her the favour of not requesting an appraisal. Bitter, and short of better things to do. Most appraisers have trouble summoning the will to appraise those whom they do have to evaluate without volunteering to character assassinate those they don’t.

Some institutions will even appraise the appraisers on the largesse of their appraisals, sanctioning those who are wantonly positive and rebasing their grades. But this is to concede the system is irreconcilably broken and really only assesses an individual’s acumen at knowing who will put in a good word.

It is also to forget the all conquering power of one’s direct line manager (and, for that matter, hers). No manager in her right mind will allow the statistical output of an obviously crooked system override innate prejudice. Simply put, if your boss thinks you’re a moron, no amount of “consistently exceeds expectations” scores from your buddies in operations will make a rat’s arse of difference to your hopes of promotion. And nor should they.

The implied, and wholly false, presumption of a 360 performance appraisal system is that performance management can somehow be crowd-sourced. If that were true, there would be little need for middle management or human resources — now there’s a thought — as the firm would operate like the free market it is meant to be, and not the dictatorship it in fact is.

Fat chance of that, though.