Designing a reward points based appraisal system for my subordinates [closed]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I am in a managerial position in an organization where the system of performance appraisal is an annual form submitted by the employees which are then reviewed by the superiors to award them grading as Good, Very Good, Excellent and Outstanding. This complete appraisal process lies at the hand of superiors without any involvement of HR until the last stage where appraisal report is submitted to them for record keeping and utilization for further promotions and increments.

I find this system faulty to a large extent. Consider these scenarios- (1) My subordinate works hard enough throughout the year but due to some unavoidable reasons, just a few days before his appraisal form reaches me, he goes for a verbal fight with me. Then there is a huge possibility that I will screw his appraisal. (2) My subordinate gives sub standard results throughout the year, but one month before the times of appraisal he starts giving extra ordinary results. Then I am susceptible to give him much better rating than what he actually deserves based on his annual performance.

Moreover, my organization is a labor intensive workplace. For example, I have to manage more than 500 people daily. Obviously, I achieve this only through my immediate subordinates who are 11 in number.

I want to create a system where each and every task I assign to each of my subordinates should give them a clear indication as of how it will affect their appraisal report. It should appear to them that each and every action they are committing is directly associated with their appraisal. Moreover, I want to make the system much more transparent, positive and trustworthy.

My Ultimate Goal- To create a system which motivates people to work.

For this purpose, I have come up with an idea of monthly points based reward system. Its salient features will be -

1. For each task that I will assign to each subordinate, I will get a target date from them in a fixed format.
2. If the task gets completed on the target date, +5 marks else -1 for each passing working day after that.
3. For genuine reasons, target dates will be shifted without any point loss. Excuses and that too just 1 or 2 days before target date will not be tolerated.
4. There will be some bonus points like +50 for innovating and successfully executing an idea. No negative points for this.
5. At the end of each month, I will send a report to all the subordinates containing total marks obtained by them out of maximum marks for that month along with their aggregate marks for all the months of the current financial year.
6. The final appraisal grading will depend on the final percentage received by him like Outstanding for >=95%, Excellent for >=85%, Very Good for >=70% and so on.

Now I want to ask two questions -

• In case I gave 3 tasks to one person and 15 tasks to the other, the chances of getting a good score or potentially bad score is more for the first one. How should I change my scoring system to neutralize it from the number of tasks that I assign to a person?
• Any loopholes or logical faults that I may be missing which will lead to the failure of this system? Can I remove those loopholes or further improvise this system to achieve my ultimate goal? I am looking for practical actionable advice rather than plain bookish ideas.

PS-

1. Most of the people with whom I am working are grossly demotivated. It's not that I have not tried public appreciation before resorting to this idea. I have a system of giving instant appreciation note to someone doing a great job. But here I am trying to find out the solution for giving results on time. The reason why I am going for such a system is to fight the huge inertia inside them without going for scolding or charge sheets or major punishments.
2. Apart from occasional prizes, I have no power to give any kind of monetary benefit to any employee.
3. The work is mostly managerial for my subordinates too. It's all about getting work done on time with quality.
4. The scoring system I have explained above is not exhaustive. In real time application, I will add some more levels as suitable for my organization.

manpreet 2 years ago

Please don't do this!

As JoeStrazzare points out in his comments this system (and pretty much everyone I've ever seen that was similar) can be gamed and that will allow bad workers to get really good appraisals while the geunine "good" employees will suffer, and ultimately they will be forced to pad their estimates as well just to avoid the negatives. So your productivity will actually drop from this alone and that's before you take into account the extra overhead from actually administering the system! Even worse your employees will probably feel that you are dehumanizing them - treating them and their work as just + and - numbers on a spreadsheet and not as colleagues.

There will be ambiguity in what constitutes a "genuine" reason for a deadline changing, which will cause arguments, resentments, accusations of bias and so on.

I could go on but (and I'm sorry) this really is just a terrible, terrible idea!

If you look at the scenarios you say lead you to this "solution"

(1) My subordinate works hard enough throughout the year but due to some unavoidable reasons, just a few days before his appraisal form reaches me, he goes for a verbal fight with me. Then there is a huge possibility that I will screw his appraisal. (2) My subordinate gives sub standard results throughout the year, but one month before the times of appraisal he starts giving extra ordinary results.

Both of these can be solved by having 1-1s or mini-appraisals more frequently than annually - quarterly or six-monthly depending on numbers of direct reports. This amortizes the "they pissed me off/impressed me just before the review" effect over the entire year which reduces any skewing of the results, and it also gives you the opportunity to work on any areas where they need to improve while there is still time in the year to make a difference... they can get a better review and you can "fix" problems months sooner. Yes there is extra time spent on the reviews but it's going to be much less time and effort than the system you propose and will give better results and happier employees (and remember a happy employee is generally much more motivated and productive than an unhappy one).