Performance anxiety: 4 ways to make appraisals more useful
When you’re a child, receiving clear, transparent judgment is a daily experience. School reports, test scores, sporting results — your performance, in absolute terms and relative to your peers, is set out for all to see in red pen, gold stars and player of the match trophies.
One of the under-appreciated privileges of adulthood is that people don’t often tell you that you’re rubbish at stuff. The annual appraisal ritual interrupts this blissful ignorance of our failings. Perhaps childhood trauma is why some people hate them so much.
Performance management is unpopular these days. Some management consultancies — the characters who sold the wheeze in the first place — have abandoned it. The Civil Service blog’s comment board is repeatedly sprayed with complaints about the current system. Unions express their concerns. Whitehall is now taking a look at how it can make better tools to accompany the process.
I sat on both sides of the table in Civil Service appraisal meetings. It can be a frustrating experience for all. The point of performance management is to motivate people to be more successful in their jobs. I can’t think of a single time where I didn’t leave feeling enervated, and I doubt I succeeded in avoiding that sensation for any of the people who reported to me.
What’s to be done? Here are four ideas.
- Find meaningful carrots and sticks.
Civil Service performance management is toothless, an All-Bran equivalent to the private sector Coco Pops it tries to emulate.
For better or worse, the incentives of the appraisal game in business management are clear. Do well enough, and you’ll get a substantial financial reward. Do poorly enough, and you’ll get a box and a P45.
In the public sector, both ends of this doubled-edged sword are blunted. Civil servants do not get fired for poor performance unless the circumstances are truly exceptional. While top performers get bonuses, they are generally equivalent to about 5% of salary. In finance, the average is more like 25%. (I don’t dispute there are individuals who have been awarded much more than these figures. But that’s a different problem.)
I’m not saying that it should be easier to fire civil servants and that we should pay good ones bigger bonuses. The public sector is not like banking, and thank goodness for that. What I am saying is that applying the financial logic of private sector performance management systems to government doesn’t work, because the spectrum of incentives is much narrower. The public sector needs levers that are meaningful and differentiate between levels of performance.
2. Support specialists and matrix managers.
The Civil Service competency framework sets out what good civil servants do and don’t do. More than any other document, it underpins the primacy of generalism in government. It’s a quiet menace.
If you’re, say, a front-end developer or data scientist, being set against such a yardstick is a bit perplexing. You have a choice; conform to the framework (which rather negates the point of being a talented specialist), fudge the process, or get a poor mark.
Your manager is in a quandary too, especially if they’re a sharing management responsibilities with someone else. They might be a generalist, in which case they have no idea whether you’re actually doing anything useful. Or they might be a specialist, in which case they’ll be as thrown by the framework as you are.
This isn’t just a problem for shiny new digital people either. One of the most brilliant analysts I ever worked with in government could never be legitimately recognised by the appraisal system because he couldn’t find anything to write in the appropriate boxes.
3. Bin the paper.
When I was a senior civil servant, I had to read and countersign 19 performance reports — maybe 15,000 words — every six months. I was lucky. Some have scores, even hundreds to deal with. When you add up the time to think about, write and review these things across all the central departments, it will add up to tens of thousands of hours, and millions of pounds in staff time.
There are only two reasons to have an appraisal paper trail. One is to protect people if poor performance becomes an issue. The other is to provide material for internal job applications.
Neither of those has anything to do with helping people do their jobs more effectively. Appraisal conversations, I grant you, will sometimes do that. The bits of paper never do.
4. Kill off box markings
Other than possibly pay, nothing has irked more civil servants in recent years than box markings. The idea is simple — every member of staff must be placed somewhere in a matrix indicating their relative performance. The kicker is ‘forced distribution’; every box must have a certain percentage of staff in it, including the bottom one.
During my 6 years in Whitehall, I was assessed using a 4-box system, a 9-box system, a 3-box system (that had a ‘secret’ fourth box) and a 9-box system again.
Even if it were stable and consistent across government, this system is maddening for managers and employees alike. It is arbitrary. It is open to gaming and horse-trading between managers. It distracts from the nuances of an appraisal conversation. It demotivates everyone outside the top box at a stroke. Again, it fundamentally fails to support people to do a better job.
So what — shall we just stop performance management in the Civil Service then? Well, maybe. But I’m a believer in tying performance to incentives. So before jumping to that conclusion, much better to reflect on whether there is a system that puts in a place the right incentives and processes to help people improve.
Better tools would be great. But let’s not put any lipstick on pigs.
