績效考覈如何跟上時代 Management makeovers bring in peer reviews for pay

Dana Minbaeva does not know how her career appraisal will turn out this year — or whether it will even take place. Her organisation has freed team leaders to experiment before deciding whether to change its performance management.

達納•明巴耶娃(Dana Minbaeva)不知道今年她的職業評估將會是什麼樣子——甚至不知道是否會進行評估。她所在的組織讓團隊負責人自由試驗，然後決定是否改變其績效考覈方式。

Appropriately enough, Prof Minbaeva studies appraisals and staff feedback for Copenhagen Business School.

這再合適不過了，因爲明巴耶娃教授正在爲哥本哈根商學院(Copenhagen Business School)研究績效評估和員工反饋問題。

Hers is not the only employer tinkering with staff ratings and reviews. In the past three years, General Electric, Microsoft, Deloitte, Accenture and Cisco Systems are among many that have announced reform of, or actually reformed, their performance systems.

她的僱主並非唯一對員工評級和評估體系修修改改的僱主。過去3年裏，許多企業宣佈改革（或者已經改革了）它們的績效考覈系統，其中包括通用電氣(General Electric)、微軟(Microsoft)、德勤(Deloitte)、埃森哲(Accenture)和思科系統(Cisco Systems)。

Ratings are in the line of fire. Staff have long complained that they lead to a “rank and yank” process, where people rated lowest on a bell curve get forced out. In turn, that can drive team members into vicious competition with their colleagues. “People responsible for [software] features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts,” one Microsoft engineer told Vanity Fair in 2012. Microsoft ditched forced ranking a year later.

評級制度首當其衝。員工早就抱怨稱，它們導致了“評級然後解僱”過程——在鐘形曲線上評分最低的人將被迫走人。它們進而還會使得團隊成員與同事陷入惡性競爭。微軟的一位工程師在2012年告訴《名利場》(Vanity Fair)：“負責（軟件）功能的人將會公開破壞其他人的努力。”微軟在一年後放棄了強制評級制度。

When not toxic, ranking systems can be baffling. One team leader at a UK consultancy says he is asked to rate staff on three dimensions, “two of which I’ve frankly never understood, however many times I’ve discussed it with human resources”.

即便沒有“毒性”，評級體系也可能令人困惑。英國一家諮詢公司的一位團隊負責人表示，他被要求從3個方面給員工評級。“坦率說，其中兩個方面我從未弄明白，無論我與人力資源部門討論過多少次”。

If such crude rankings are dying, though, employers are still unclear what will replace them. They fret about how to gather enough information to decide on pay and promotion.

然而，即便此類粗糙的評級制度行將消亡，但僱主仍不清楚哪種制度能取代它們。他們發愁的是，如何收集足夠信息來決定薪酬和擢升事宜？

The future of performance management as a whole is only slightly easier to predict, but the annual career appraisal is fast disappearing. Where it survives, it is transforming into a process of constant feedback. The inspiration, in many cases, is bottom-up “Agile” product development, in which progress towards goals is regularly reassessed.

績效管理的整體未來還略微容易預測一些，但年度職業評估正在快速消失。即便它存活下來，也在轉變爲一套持續反饋的流程。在許多情況下，這其中的靈感來自自下而上的“敏捷”產品開發，其間定期評估朝着目標的進展情況。

Ashley Goodall, who started to introduce a new system at Deloitte before moving to Cisco to lead a similar project, says companies are no longer asking: “Do you have five ratings or seven ratings on a scale, or annual reviews? They’re looking at the whole edifice.” For a while Cisco ran with no traditional process: “You can just stop doing it and it turns out that the sky doesn’t fall.”

阿什利•古多爾(Ashley Goodall)最初在德勤推出一項新制度，後來去了思科牽頭實施類似項目。他表示，公司不再質問：“你們有5檔評級還是7檔評級，或者是年度評估？他們看的是整個體系。”思科一度沒有任何傳統流程：“你可以乾脆不這麼做，結果天沒有塌下來。”

One reason for change is that form-filling and bell-curve analysing are hugely inefficient. Mike Preston, Deloitte’s chief talent officer, says: “We were spending so many hours proposing a rating, debating a rating, communicating a rating, that we really didn’t spend time developing people.”

改變的一個理由是，填表和鍾型曲線分析的效率極低。德勤的首席人才官邁克•普雷斯頓(Mike Preston)表示：“我們花這麼多時間提議、辯論和溝通一個評級，以至於我們真的沒有時間開發人才。”

Accenture’s chief executive set off a wave of approval last year when he said the consultancy would “get rid of 90 per cent of what we did in the past”. Its staff were spending 21 hours each, 8m hours in total every year, on performance management. Sixteen of those hours were devoted just to process.

埃森哲首席執行官去年引發一波讚賞，當時他表示，這家諮詢公司“將取消90%過去所做的事情”。每年其員工每人有21個小時、公司總計有800萬個小時投入績效管理。其中有16個小時只是在履行流程。

Companies are not, however, trying to recover all the wasted hours. They want to redeploy them. Janice Semper, a performance management expert at GE, says the industrial group’s managers now devote more time to “coaching and pushing decision-making down in the organisation” — a big change from Jack Welch, then chief executive, urging them to draw a “vitality curve” and force out the worst-performing 10 per cent in any team.

然而，企業並沒有試圖收回全部浪費的時間。他們希望重新配置這些時間。通用電氣(GE)的績效管理專家賈尼絲•森佩爾(Janice Semper)表示，這家工業集團的管理人員現在花更多時間“指導並推動組織內部的決策下行”——這與前首席執行官傑克•韋爾奇(Jack Welch)相比有很大的變化，後者曾敦促管理人員繪製“活力曲線”，並迫使任何團隊中表現最差的10%員工走人。

Reformers believe younger workers are happier measuring and updating performance and targets regularly using mobile apps than they are waiting 12 months. “Imagine if Fitbit [the wearable fitness tracker] only sent you an email at the end of the year,” argues Kris Duggan, founder of BetterWorks, which sells goal-setting software.

改革者相信，較爲年輕的員工更樂意定期使用移動APP來衡量和更新績效和目標，而不是等上12個月。銷售目標設定軟件的BetterWorks的創始人克里斯•達根(Kris Duggan)辯稱：“想象一下，如果Fitbit（可穿戴健身追蹤器）只是在年末給你發郵件的話。”

In the programmes being rolled out at Deloitte and Cisco, based on an ap-proach developed by consultancy Marcus Buckingham, managers use a combination of regular “check-ins”, backed up by instant staff engagement surveys and quarterly performance snapshots. GE calls its regular discussions “touchpoints”; its informal feedback sessions are known as “insights”.

德勤和思科基於諮詢公司馬庫斯·白金漢(Marcus Buckingham)開發的方法出臺了績效考覈項目，在這些項目中，經理們採用一套組合方式，包括定期“登記”，快速員工參與度調查，以及季度績效“快照”。通用電氣將定期討論稱爲“觸點”；非正式反饋會議稱爲“洞察力”。

Transparency is another element common to the latest appraisal methods. Accenture, which hopes to have implemented a change for all 373,000 employees by midyear, asks teams to share strengths, agree priorities and adjust them based on open assessments of how the work is going.

透明度是最新評估方法常見的另一個元素。埃森哲希望到今年年中對其37.3萬名員工作出一次全面調整，要求各團隊分享優勢、商定工作重點，並根據對工作進展情況的公開評估進行調整。

Companies are also trying to devolve responsibility for feedback and performance reviews to smaller units, in the belief peers are better at identifying laggards quickly and dealing with them.

公司也在試圖將反饋和績效評估責任下放到較小單位，相信同僚更善於迅速發現後進者，並做出應對。

Accenture has a pilot scheme to delegate pay decisions to individual teams, some with as few as 30 members. “This was the area I was a little nervous about, because we don’t want rewards to bec-ome a free-for-all,” admits Ellyn Shook, the group’s chief leadership and human resources officer.

埃森哲推出一項試點項目，把薪資決定權交給各個團隊，其中一些團隊只有30人。該集團首席領導力和人力資源官埃琳•舒克(Ellyn Shook)承認：“這是我以前感到有些緊張的地方，因爲我們不想讓獎酬變得毫無規則可循。”

Critics question whether the reforms are even focusing on the right problem, since the fact that humans love feedback and hate ratings is not exactly new. W Edwards Deming, the US management expert who revolutionised Japan-ese manufacturing quality, wrote in the 1980s that rating “nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics”.

批評者質疑這些改革是否聚焦於正確的問題，因爲人類喜歡反饋而憎惡評級的事實並不新鮮。當年推動日本製造業質量發生革命性轉變的美國管理專家威廉•愛德華茲•德明(W. Edwards Deming)在上世紀80年代就寫道，評級“培育了短期業績，搞砸了長期規劃，滋生了不安、摧毀了團隊合作，助長了對立和政治”。

His followers believe companies should fix faulty ways of working, not obsess about individual performance, which is bound to vary. Formal ratings should be dropped, Kelly Allan, a consultant and adviser to The Deming Institute, says: “Once you hear you’re a three out of five you can’t hear anything else.”

德明的追隨者相信，公司應該糾正有問題的工作方式，而不是糾結於註定各有不同的個人表現。諮詢師、The Deming Institute顧問凱利•艾倫(Kelly Allan)表示，應該取消正式的評級制度，他說：“一旦你聽到自己在總分五分的尺度上得到三分，你就聽不到其他東西了。”

GE is collecting views from 30,000 staff who have been trying out a world without ratings. Ms Semper says there is “a lot of momentum” behind its new performance “conversations” and an understanding that ratings may detract from that process. Under GE’s approach, she believes team leaders will have more data with which to reward people appropriately. The same philosophy informs the Cisco and Deloitte programmes, which generate a scatter chart of team performance, rather than a single number, allowing managers to spot outliers and assess how individuals are doing more fairly and accurately.

通用電氣正在收集3萬名員工的看法，這些員工近期嘗試了一個沒有評級的世界。森佩爾表示，其新的績效談話“動量巨大”，大家認爲評級可能損害這一過程。按照通用的做法，她相信團隊負責人將有更多恰當獎勵員工所需的數據。同樣的理念啓迪着思科和德勤的項目，這些項目產生有關團隊業績的散點圖表，而非單個數字，讓經理們發現異常值，並且更爲公平、準確地評估個人表現。

Old habits may be hard to kick, though. Accenture’s feedback shows team leaders still want a framework, which Ms Shook calls “guardrails”, to help them assign pay.

然而，人們可能很難改變舊日的習慣。埃森哲的反饋表明，團隊負責人仍想要一個框架幫助他們分配薪酬，舒克將這種框架稱爲“圍欄”。

Some team leaders, brought up on the old system, may resist the change. An HR executive at one big European company says managers set in the old ways simply use new continuous-feedback tools to record the traditional annual appraisal. Steve Hunt of SAP SuccessFactors, which supplies such tools, says one company had trouble restructuring staff after it ditched its rating system. “They ended up asking ‘Can we use compensation increases as a proxy [for individual performance]?’” he says. “That’s crazy.”

一些團隊負責人在舊制度下長大，他們可能抵制這種變化。歐洲某家大型公司的一位人事高管表示，習慣於舊制度的經理們只是使用新的持續反饋工具來記錄傳統的年度評估。供應此類工具的SAP SuccessFactors的史蒂夫•亨特(Steve Hunt)表示，有一家公司在廢除評級體系後在重組員工方面陷入了困境。他說：“他們最終問道‘我們可以用薪酬增加作爲（個人業績的）代表嗎？’這簡直是瘋了。”

Prof Minbaeva says that as long as performance management schemes fit corporate strategy and everyone agrees with them, their precise structure may not matter. She points out that Danish managers already use MUS, an acronym for the Danish term meaning “employee development conversation”. When they saw the multinationals’ reform plans, “they shrugged their shoulders and said: what’s new?”. As for her business school’s experiments with performance management, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they come back with a system that’s only slightly different”.

明巴耶娃教授表示，只要績效管理機制符合企業戰略，而且每個人都認可，那麼它們的具體結構並不重要。她指出，丹麥經理已經使用MUS——丹麥語“員工發展談話”的縮寫——這種結構。當他們看到跨國公司的改革計劃時，“他們聳聳肩說道：有什麼新東西嗎？”。對於她在商學院進行的績效管理實驗，“如果他們最終確定採用一套只是略有不同的制度，我不會感到意外”。