Interesting Links for 23-05-2014

[andrewducker]

• Is RIPA fit for purpose?
  (tags: crime police epicfail internet )
• George R. R. Martin’s 14 Greatest LiveJournal Entries
  (tags: livejournal GeorgeRRMartin )
• This is pretty-much how I feel about Facebook right now
  (tags: Facebook )
• The BBCs HR department are clearly trying to destroy it
  (tags: bbc HumanResources fail )
• This is now officially my

Comments

[steer]

Hah.... I actually feel some slight sympathy for the BBC HR dept there. If you're going to have a scale of 1-5 you do need to have some kind of guidelines as to what proportion of people belong in each box. Otherwise you risk one manager thinking that about one fifth of employees belong in each category and another manager thinking that only 1% of employees are extraordinary and 1% are in the very lowest. So, it completely makes sense to have some rule of thumb that you apply to work out approximately what frequency to rate people in the best and worst groups... except when you take in the human aspect and people worrying that they won't be granted the best grade because that would put them over the magic barrier.

[andrewducker]

Now you're assuming that all teams have equal percentages of people in the different boxes. The experience, from everywhere that's used a variant of stack ranking, is that it's horribly toxic

[steer]

Actually I'm assuming quite the opposite, that all teams have different percentages of people in different boxes and that managers have freedom to say that 100% of their staff are in the top 5% or bottom 5% if they believe that to be the case. I presumed that was the intent of the document (and that people discussing it later were misinterpreting

[andrewducker]

I presumed that was the intent of the document (and that people discussing it later were misinterpreting)I'm confused. On what basis did you assume that was the intent of the document? If the intent of the document was to say that all groups would have varying numbers of people in different buckets then surely it would say that, and not give numbers

[steer]

I think maybe we're at cross purposes here. We don't have the full document so we have to guess what they meant. So saying someone is a top 5% employee could mean:
1) They are the best 5% of people at that job out of all the people in the world.
2) They are the best 5% of people at that job out of all the people in the company
or
3) They are the best 5% of people at that job out of all the people that manager has graded.

1 is obviously daft. I mean you hire them because they have that skill. Almost everyone in your company will be in the top 5% of people in the world at that job. I'm in the top 5% of C coders because 95% of people can't code C. (Numbers approximate).
3 is obviously daft because managers will not typically have enough staff for the fine grained split down to that level (you need 20 reports to make the 5% level meaningful) and abilities will vary. 2 is the only interpretation that makes any kind of sense and is at all useful as an outcome.

If the intent of the document was to say that all groups would have

[andrewducker]

No.. you absolutely need the numbers. Otherwise how do you make the judgement?

Based on job criteria? Are people achieving their goals? What is the value they are bringing to the company?

That's certainly how the _good_ managers I've worked with have done it. Based on individual merit - against criteria which are clearly written - with calibration against other managers to make sure that the different ones aren't grading massively out of whack against each other.

I don't see how the achievements of anyone else in the company have anything to do with "Am I providing good value for my current pay?" and "Do they need to pay me more to stop me leaving?"

[steer]

Based on job criteria? Are people achieving their goals? What is the value they are bringing to the company?

That is how you would rate their performance -- how do you then map that on a scale 1-5?

[andrewducker]

1 - So bad at their job that they need to be on an improvement plan right now or we're going to have to get rid of them.
2 - not good at their job. Failing to achieve some of their criteria.
3 - Achieving all of their criteria.
4 - Achieving all of their criteria, overachieving at some of them.
5 - Overachieving all of their criteria.

(With bonus points for doing things that aren't anything to do with their criteria but make a positive difference to the company, and negative points for being a dick and making a negative difference to the company.)

(Except, y'know, in better English.)

[steer]

OK... so you've got that scale. Now what is "overachieving". If you mark on your scale maybe manager Bob is a bit Lake Wobegone and believes all children are above average and thinks everyone is over achieving. On the other hand maybe manager Alf has higher expectations and thinks nobody is over achieving. MAybe manager Bob sets really easy criteria... you need something under this saying approximately how hard it should be to get "5" or it's completely arbitrary. (I accept it will always slightly arbitrary but without some kind of guideline the poor managers actually have no chance of being fair even if they want to be fair.)

[andrewducker]

Well, you also need role profiles to go with it, defining what you're supposed to achieve. And then you _do_, I agree, need cross-calibration, which is where HR comes into, getting the managers to spend some time making sure that when Bob says "AMAZING" that he means something similar to Simone.

But in-team ranking bumps into massive problems in exactly that situation, where one team under one manager does have lots of good people working on the latest cool stuff, and another team under another manager has a bunch of less good people who are slowly working away at something less important.

I don't think there's a perfect way of doing this - but the grading-on-a-curve method is one that seems to upset the most people, the most often.

[steer]

And then you _do_, I agree, need cross-calibration, which is where HR comes into, getting the managers to spend some time making sure that when Bob says "AMAZING" that he means something similar to Simone.

Yes -- and the most straightforward way to calibrate this would be to say something like "5% of people in the company as a whole are AMAZING" or "20% are DAMN GOOD".

where one team under one manager does have lots of good people working on the latest cool stuff, and another team under another manager has a bunch of less good people who are slowly working away at something less important.

Yes... it's always going to be difficult. How do you compare slow and steady with fitfully brilliant.

I don't think there's a perfect way of doing this - but the grading-on-a-curve method is one that seems to upset the most people, the most often.That's what I was trying to get at right back at the start when I said ".. except when you take in the human aspect and people worrying that they won't be granted the best grade because that would put

[andrewducker]

Yes -- and the most straightforward way to calibrate this would be to say something like "5% of people in the company as a whole are AMAZING" or "20% are DAMN GOOD".

I'm going to need some justification for that. Because I can't see how you get to this conclusion.

What if 60% of the people in the company are amazing? What if it's only 1%?

[steer]

I am assuming the aim is to try to get an assessment that is fair between managers, so that Dave saying "amazing" is equal as near it can be to Amy saying it. The rating of "amazing" is without some calibration meaningless so the concept of 1% or 60% off employees being amazing not useful, and if ranked 60% off your employees as amazing then would not be amazed. (The current ofsted rankings are such that iirc "average" is bad and "satisfactory" is resigning bad... The point is that the word meanings are not attached the ranks.... average is way below average and satisfactory is not satisfactory

I need to know what you think of...something odd Julie just said

[andrewducker]

With large companies you have massively variant talent bases working in very different areas, with largely divergent skill-sets.

And none of this gets away from the moral-destroying effects of grading people on a curve, which causes in-fighting and kills productivity.

Personally, I don't think that grading people 1-5 in the first place is a good idea - that's the rot setting in because managers somewhere think that in order ot manage something you need to quantify it (preferably numerically), and it's all downhill from there.

Re: I need to know what you think of...something odd Julie just said

[steer]

That is all undeniably true. I think I said elsewhere it is probably actually better from a personnel point of view too have a less fair system that does a worse job at identifying talent as it will cause less resentment. So having a murky unclear system open to abuse and worse for employees (fairer and more accurate) is probably better for employees (less damage to morale). So given you are dealing with people then heading with woolly words and giving promotions and bonuses an opaque way well probably make them happier. People are a problem.

Re: I need to know what you think of...something odd Julie just said

[andrewducker]

They certainly are. If they would just fit into nice neat boxes life would be so much easier!