Year after year, employees perform with the hope that the organisations will recognise their performance. On the other hand, organisations are constrained by the budget for salary increments that are allocated by management each year. The Human Resources (HR) in most organisations, often finds itself caught between the expectations of employees and the demands of management. Interestingly, the concept of the normal distribution curve is sometimes applied inappropriately or forcefully. Management may use a forced rating system to adjust employees’ performance ratings, often overlooking individual contributions. In the worst cases, when forced ranking fails to yield the desired results, organisations may implement cost-cutting measures under the pretext of Normalisation.
Who suffers more: employees or organisations?
While it may seem that employees bear the brunt, it is ultimately the organisations that suffer the most.
The million-dollar question is: if both employees and organisations experience negative consequences from the inappropriate use of this concept, why do organisations continue to apply this scientific tool in such an unscientific manner?
The reason lies in the fact that organisations often lack the proper HR tools to prevent what can be termed “normalisation.” There are two main reasons for this:
1. Organisations do struggle to set right KRAs despite having popular concepts of SMART, SIMple, BHAG etc, leading to employees not setting right KRAs and consequently, every employee overachieving on their performance. The main reason is not having the right Performance Management Framework, again despite having concepts like MBO, BSC etc.
2. Another and perhaps the most critical reason is organisations not having a tool which empowers managers to the level that they can make appropriate decisions while granting ratings to their employees.
Prajjo on its platform has solved both the challenges with its two of the most accoladed Software. These are:
1. SGR: The Performance management System
SGR that is Strategy, Goals and Review has removed two of the oldest obstacles in making PMS effective.
The first is conducting Goal Cascading. With SGR, now organisations can achieve more than 95% Goal Alignment from the top to the bottom management.
The second is involving every function where each employee equally contributes to the success of the organisation. Organisations can even calculate the value of functions which were marginalised due to not having any practical tool and methodology.
SGR is a copyrighted product.
2. IMS: Increment Management System
Theoretically, it is the immediate managers who should know the actual performance of individual employees and not the other senior managers in the hierarchy. In practice, the immediate managers receive the least weightage while finally deciding the performance ratings of employees. This happens because immediate managers are not empowered with an appropriate tool, and they end up granting biased ratings; if accepted at face value, will lead to higher wage bills for organisations that may be untenable.
Prajjo has conceived and developed a comprehensive Increment Management System by which organisations on one hand can empower their managers and on the other improve the quality of recommendations.
Organisations using these two tools from Prajjo can avoid relying on the flawed concept of Normalisation, which can lead to undesirable results: Unhappy people – Unhappy Organisations.
