Making the right choice with HR policies

Q. Organizations today use a bell-curve for performance evaluation process. Does this system work in favor of the organization or against when the high performers begin to compete against each other rather than collaborate? Will this ultimately work against the organization? If so, is there any alternative to it?

A. I don't think bell-curve impacts team work or acts against organizations's interest. One of the most important facts about business organizations is that they are doing business first. Customer's value what you give in return for what they are paying. There are many in the market you would compete with and only the best will survive. Bell-curve helps in objectively recognizing what is performance and what is not acceptable performance. It sets in transparency as managers are challenged to categorize people in different performance brackets thereby leading to differentiation.

I have seen that as the manager is responsible to differentiate, a more objective evaluation happens as no manager would like to be seen as somebody who is unfair to his or her people. Contrary to this, in case of absence of bell-curve there would be no ‘accountability' for the manager to drive a meritocratic culture in the organization and would be lenient. So, bell-curve criteria prevent the leniency syndrome to creep in.

Therefore any system which helps in bringing facts to the forefront and helps organizations to appreciate good performance would necessarily reinforce team work. Needless to mention but the assumption is that the team is aligned towards the overall purpose of the business organization to win in the marketplace.

So competing within to compete in the marketplace may bring in the best and foster team work. Since team work is about working together for a common purpose and not just being together. Therefore, bell-curve or normal distribution does not create a hyper competitive peer-to-peer culture, instead it creates a binding force aligned for the purpose of the organization.

We must endeavour to find out an alternative to this and I am sure as the current context of business changes we can look at other methods of evaluation like summative evaluation some day.

A lot of HR processes (particularly for internal movements, growth opportunities, promotion policies, terminations, etc) are in place to ensure fairness and transparency, and to ensure that employees are not promoted or terminated as a result of a unilateral decision taken by a manager. However this becomes a hindrance for organizations in rapid ramp up mode when they need the flexibility of taking quick decisions to meet the business need of the hour, resulting in conflict between line managers and HR. Is there any ideal solution?

HR processes like business process are actually put in place to ensure business success. In a situation where a business moves from a slow growth to high growth phase, the systems and processes should be adapted accordingly.

Processes are laid out to deliver certain kind of business outcomes, so output per se does not change only the context changes. The changes are about how these processes have to be executed with changed circumstances. In many cases, not once, I have seen that if the fundamentals of process managed are not adhered to, it will impact the quality of output.

For example, if an organization is trying to recruit one person or 1,000 people, it would have a bearing on the output if the steps for reaching the outcome are not adhered to. However having said that, output quality and quantity would be compromised if the process bottlenecks and effort quotient are not appropriately adjusted to the context and size of outcome expected.

If the effort to recruit 10 people in a month is one man month then what is the effort required to recruit 1,000 a month, after factoring efficiencies of scale, etc.

Agility to my mind is more cultural and not a work way issue. Agility is compromised in the name of ‘Process Adherence', then my suggestion is to focus on understanding cycle time and bottlenecks and take steps to reduce these bottlenecks for predictable results.