Performance appraisal: Difference between revisions

{{A|hr|{{Image|360|png|}}}}{{quote|{{Deming on performance appraisal}}}}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.

Geometers will at once recognise that 360 degrees describes a complete revolution in a plane of ''two'', and not ''three'', dimensions. This got us wondering: if, as per modern dogma, employment really is a “two way conversation”, in which each side has obligations and rights; a symbiotic ecosystem where each party works for the enduring benefit of the other, then when do the workers get the chance to appraise the ''company’s'' performance? At what point do staff get to say to their corporate overlords and their earthly representatives, those gilded agents who occupy its executive suite that they have lacked focus, been ineffective, failed to deliver on key expectations?

“Ah, but that is the [[employee survey]]!” they will cry. But it isn’t, is it? This is the [[change paradox]]: management is, in this regard, like that [[This email is auto-generated. Please do not reply to it.|pestering email sent from an unmonitored account]]: good for communication in ''one'' way only. Talking, not listening. A skilfully contrived [[questionnaire]], begging questions already answered in management’s own meta-theory, cannot critically assess management’s performance. All answers it yields, 1 through 5, are of a piece with the existing theory of the game. The [[paradigm]] governs what count as good questions as well as what could as good answers. Thanks to the [[agency problem]], we feel this to be necessarily so: no agent designs a survey designed to prove her own [[redundancy]]. The [[employee survey]] is prisoner of the [[paradigm]] from which it emanates.