How to build the Work Culture of the Future: Chapter 4 — Meritocracy
Does the word “meritocracy” conjure up an image of stuffy academics making pronouncements from on high to determine how the “little people” should behave? Maybe it meant something like that once, but nowadays, that image couldn’t be more off the mark.
Table of Content
- What is Meritocracy?
- The Paradox of Meritocracy
- Factors ensuring Meritocracy in Workplace
3.1 Fostering Passion across the Organization
3.2 Encouraging a Culture of Listening
3.3 Transparency and Accountability
3.4 Organizational Accountability
3.5 Organizational Transparency - Outcomes of Meritocracy
4.1 Better Reward Mechanism
4.2 Effective workforce - Case Study: Insigniam- Creating a culture of Meritocracy
5.1 About Insigniam
5.2 Achievements of Insigniam based on the culture of Meritocracy
5.3 How is Meritocracy practiced at Insigniam?
1. What is Meritocracy?
Meritocracy is a practice in an organization where the best people and ideas win. In a meritocracy, everyone has the right to express their opinions and are encouraged to share them.
In a meritocracy, decisions are made by choosing the best ideas, regardless of who came up with them. Think of meritocracies as an extension of the old-school office suggestion box — but one that actually works.
Within a meritocracy, the owners or managers of the company still make the final decisions, but they must choose the best ideas after hearing what everyone has to say.
A meritocracy is an organization in which everyone can express an opinion openly without fear of negative consequences. In a meritocracy, decisions are made by choosing the best ideas, regardless of who came up with them.
A meritocracy also provides a clear path to the top for those who consistently propose good ideas that are adopted and prove profitable. Based on the merit of their ideas, those people earn respect and are promoted into positions of greater responsibility and decision-making power.
— Seema Natarajan, HR Manager, Heptagon Technologies Pvt Ltd
2. The Paradox of Meritocracy
When managers believe their company is a meritocracy because of its formal evaluation and reward systems, chances are that it isn’t. I call this organizational phenomenon “the paradox of meritocracy.” — Emilio J. Castilla, MIT Sloan
To assess the above statement, an experiment was carried out by Emilio and Stephen Benard. The experiment involved more than 400 individuals with managerial experience who were asked to make bonus, promotion and termination recommendations for several hypothetical employee profiles based on their annual performance.
The results of the experiment suggested that a company that was explicitly presented as meritocratic to a randomly assigned group of managers, tended to favor a male employee over an equally qualified female individual in the same job, with the same supervisor and the same performance evaluation scores. This bias resulted in larger monetary rewards for men.
When a company was not explicitly presented as meritocratic, the managers awarded the female employees with higher bonuses than they gave to male employees.
The paradox of meritocracy may help explain the persistence of gender- and race-associated wage disparities at many organizations today. But what accounts for this paradox?
One plausible explanation is that when managers believe their company as a whole is meritocratic, they may become less vigilant about their individual actions, leading them to unintentionally make biased decisions. It might be that, because managers think it unlikely that their actions will be interpreted as prejudiced, they are less prone to guard against being influenced by stereotypes.
Moreover, they may have a false sense of confidence that their decisions in such an environment will be fair, objective, and impartial, leading to little self-examination to uncover any hidden demographic biases.
3. Factors ensuring Meritocracy in Workplace
How, then, can companies practice a culture of Meritocracy and avoid the paradox of meritocracy in people-related decisions? Following factors can result in a Meritocracy in an Organization:
- Fostering passion across the organization
- Encourage a culture of listening
To deal with the Paradox of meritocracy, one needs to incorporate two key factors:
- Transparency
- Accountability
Now, let’s see in detail how each of these factors contribute to making an effective Meritocracy.
3.1 Fostering Passion across the Organization
Placing the employees in positions that speak of what they are truly excited about will result in better and creative ideas for implementation. Which in turn will provide your company with quality options to select from.
Thus, keeping the employees passionate about their work is necessary for continual progress.
Here are some key takeaways from the Passion for Work in the Middle East and North Africa poll, February 2016 to keep the employees passionate about their work.
- Get to know your employees better. Employees are keen to work harder for a manager who takes a personal interest in them and engages with them on a personal level.
- Provide opportunities for innovation and reward for participation. The leading barrier to employee engagement is often a lack of strategy and competing priorities. You can circumvent this when you present the challenge with a structure for participation and a system for rewards and recognition.
- Celebrate together. Whether it’s a company lunch or a commitment to celebrating employee birthdays or engagements, these events provide employees with the opportunity to interact on a personal level with each other. They also serve as a great opportunity for boosting engagement levels in your workplace.
As we follow one of our core value “ Openness”, which helps us to believe that everyone in our workplace is worth listening to and we encourage all our employees to share their opinions, and that is the major concept of Meritocracy. This newly revived outlook on management is a valuable one for many fast growing businesses and companies like ours especially if we are in the beginning stages of building our company’s culture.
— Seema Natarajan, HR Manager, Heptagon Technologies Pvt Ltd
3.2 Encouraging a Culture of Listening
As discussed before, a meritocratic organization is one where everyone can express an opinion openly without fear of negative consequences. To make the open expression of ideas possible, it is essential for leaders/employers to practice listening to their employees and encourage them to listen to each other as well. Here are a few ways to develop this culture.
- Create trust. Trust is the key to a successful feedback exchange. People will immediately disregard feedback from people they don’t believe have their best interests in mind.
- Reward ideas that challenge the status quo. Encourage your employees to speak up by listening, recognizing and maybe even trying out new ways of doing things. If others see someone being rewarded for this type of behavior they’ll be more likely to follow.
- More brainstorming sessions. The more interaction your employees have with each other the more chances they’ll get to practice their listening skills. Brainstorming sessions are a great way to encourage knowledge-sharing as well.
3.3 Transparency and Accountability
As mentioned before, the Paradox of meritocracy happens due to biases that managers don’t even realize.
Thus the first step is to collect data, perform analysis on previous performance appraisals and identify the areas where biases lie in an organization.
Once identified, one needs to take correction measures by increasing the accountability and transparency of the reward system in an organization.
How do we do that?
3.4 Organizational Accountability
We define organizational accountability as a set of procedures that make certain individuals responsible for ensuring the fair distribution of rewards among employees. Organizational accountability at different levels of the organization can be accomplished in two complementary ways.
- Process accountability: Certain individuals can be made responsible for the design and implementation of organizational procedures that managers will use when they make pay decisions.
- Outcome accountability: Certain individuals can be put in charge of monitoring and identifying situations in which managers are not making fair pay decisions.
3.5 Organizational Transparency
It is defined as a set of procedures that make relevant pay data available to certain individuals. Like organizational accountability, transparency can be accomplished in two complementary ways.
- Process transparency: Steps can be instituted to ensure that pay distribution processes and criteria are known to certain individuals.
- Outcome transparency: Specific measures can be implemented to make certain pay comparisons possible among individuals inside the company.
Summary of Accountability and Meritocracy
Incorporating the above-mentioned requires a lot of effort. Here are the reasons, why putting all those efforts is worth it.
4. Outcomes of Meritocracy
4.1 Better Reward Mechanism
Meritocracy develops transparency in performance appraisal, appreciates and rewards ideas of employees that are useful for the corporation. This makes the employees believe that they can prove themselves and be rewarded their productivity. In a nutshell, it prioritizes performance and uses it as a scale for promotions, bonuses, and other rewards.
4.2 Effective Workforce
Meritocracy results in the placement of employees at positions they deserve and are good at. The entire company will produce higher-quality work, and the skills of the employees will improve rapidly.
Other than these, certain other benefits of meritocracy are:
- It tends to make employees learn from more skilled co-workers, thereby leading to self-development.
- It tends to make the most capable individuals happier and thus keep them around.
- It promotes equal grounds for people from different races, classes, and socio-economic backgrounds.
According to me, the steps to ideally implement Meritocracy in an organization are:
* The best should come from anywhere — Good ideas, no matter where they originate, should always find generous and interested ears.
* The best idea should always win — Debate over potential solutions, paths, or decisions should always be about ideas.
* Contribution matters more than title — What people actually do (what they contribute, what they bring to the table) matters more than what they say they can (or should) do, and it matters far more than whatever title they hold.
— Seema Natarajan, HR Manager, Heptagon Technologies Pvt Ltd
5. Case Study: Insigniam- Creating a culture of Meritocracy
5.1 About Insigniam
Insigniam has over 30 years of experience working with large, complex organizations in generating breakthroughs in their management results — whether that be in topline growth, strategy implementation, improving profitability, or culture change.
Insigniam pioneered the field of organization transformation by marrying breakthrough performance and innovation, thus creating services and solutions that are unparalleled in their potency to quickly create dramatic growth.
Insigniam solutions include Enterprise Transformation, Breakthrough Projects, Transformational Leadership, and Managing Change. Offices are located in Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Philadelphia.
5.2 Achievements of Insigniam based on the culture of Meritocracy
In the fall of 2018, Insigniam was honored to be recognized by the Healthcare Business Women’s Association (HBA) as one of three recipients of the HBA ACE Award. As mentioned before, the HBA noted: “Based on a culture of meritocracy, Insigniam has achieved gender parity in leadership.”
5.3 How is Meritocracy practiced at Insigniam?
At Insigniam, a culture of meritocracy is the context in which they operate, as they work to serve their clients and fulfill the concerns of their clients, employees, and shareholders. Not for a set of “chosen few”, but as a commitment to recognize and reward performance and development of each and every employee; a commitment that lives through a set of principles and practices.
Insigniam dashboards and key metrics are shared openly to everyone in the firm, regardless of role or position and are accessible at all times on our enterprise-management system. There is never any mischief or uncertainty about the performance of the firm overall and of individuals within, cutting out a source of gossip or disempowering coffee machine conversations.
The scoreboard of client satisfaction, client delivery or business development with individual results is permanently updated. Coaching is available when you are not on track to meet your commitments.
We have grown so accustomed to this environment that we sometimes forget that some organizations are still reticent to be this transparent. Is it always comfortable to see your results shared openly and visible for everyone? No.
Is the human mind tempted to hide when results are not what one is committed to? Yes. Does this environment provide the conditions in which you can grow and develop? Yes. — Marie-Caroline Chauvet, Partner, Insigniam
That concludes this chapter on “Meritocracy”. The next chapter will be on “Collaboration”.
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References:
https://minutehack.com/guides/how-to-build-a-meritocracy
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/achieving-meritocracy-in-the-workplace/
https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/10/meritocracy/
https://quickbooks.intuit.com/ca/resources/managing-people/build-workplace-culture-meritocracy/
https://insigniam.com/blog/creating-a-culture-of-meritocracy/
https://insigniam.com/news/insigniam-wins-healthcare-businesswomen-association-ace-award/
