Cutting Off the Fish's Head and Employee Performance Reviews
A woman visited a friend of hers who was a great cook, hoping to learn how she fried fish. While they were preparing, she noticed her friend cutting off the fish's head and tail before putting it in the pan. She asked why, and her friend said she didn't know, she had learned it from her mother. So she asked her to call her mother and find out. The mother didn't know either. She had learned it from her own mother, the grandmother. When they finally asked the grandmother, her answer was simple: my pan was too small for a whole fish, so I'd cut off the head and tail to make it fit!
The yearly tradition in most organizations and workplaces is the annual employee performance review. All kinds of evaluation methods get used, usually the most widespread ones, along with the latest methods being applied in companies.
And somewhere along the way, the manager, the business owner, the finance director, and HR all forget why the review system was put in place to begin with.
So they apply systems and methods that were built and tested in different environments, on different teams and organizations, by people who ran their own experiments and picked what worked for them.
Choosing a system and applying it without knowing why it was built in the first place looks a lot like cutting off the fish's head.
Why do we evaluate employees at all?
Answer that question and you'll be able to build an evaluation method that fits what you actually want out of the process.
Let me share my own personal goal for having an annual review system: motivating employees to deliver the best performance they can.
And it's very hard to treat every employee with the same evaluation system. Each one has their own traits and strengths: the fast one, the finisher, the precise one, the analytical one, and all the other personalities that, together, build a team with varied skills for developing creative, high-quality solutions to different challenges.
As someone looking to get the best performance out of your team, it's essential to build an evaluation method that maximizes the employee's interest.
To make that idea clearer, let's take an example of a system that doesn't do it: a system that rates employees on three levels, a small group of top performers, a majority of average performers, and a small group of low performers (known as the bell curve).
Here it's the company's interest that gets maximized, making sure only a minority of employees receive bonuses and perks so the company doesn't lose out from the process.
That's just one example among several systems built on a similar principle of protecting the company's interest, where the system loses its focus on the employee's interest, and might discourage the employee or lose them altogether.
For example, if we apply a bell curve, the evaluator is forced to measure all employees against the same standard, forced to grade people with completely different responsibilities on the same items, forced to invent reasons to justify rating someone as average or a poor performer, and plenty of other things they'll have to do just to get through the review. And through all of that, they might lose the employee using the very tool that was meant to motivate them in the first place.
So evaluation systems are like cutting off the fish's head: experiments with hits and misses. As a team leader, what matters to you is bringing the employee's interest and the work's interest together. So think of an approach where you don't have to shortchange one employee for another's sake, or hand someone a high rating they don't deserve just so you can draw a nice curve in the annual report. Aim to end every year with real results and employees who have grown, and let your own annual review be how well you brought out the best in your team.