How to Keep Politics Out of Office?

Its appraisal time! Probably the "most turbulent yet exciting time" of the year at any organisation.Everyone is expecting a windfall! And not all, and sometimes not even a few may get it, depending on the state of the economy, industry, and the organisation, multiplied by the "perception" about an individual's performance.

The word perception is important here. Because it is the driver of how an employee gets assessed. However, do not confuse it with "illusion", as illusion is purely imaginary while as perception is based on a lot of real data and behavioral observations.

Employees are typically ranked and then sorted in descending order based on some criteria. Then comes the much talked about yet openly unaccepted exercise of fitting in the bell curve!

All this is fine. However, politics gets in when the employees perceive lack of fair play in the exercise. So how to avoid politics in employee assessments?

There a couple of things that need to be ensured not just during the time of this monthly exercise but throughout the year.

While no one denies that there should be transparency and objectivity in doing this, there are gray areas.

Some of these are :

• Targets based on "historical performance" of micro markets. This is the crudest method without any insights into the current trends and future potential.
• Targets based on "company objectives" which are sometimes away from market reality. Imagine an auto major having a target of selling a million electric vehicles when the regulatory environment is not clear on issues which will enable this.
• Equal division within a team so as to ensure "equity" without taking into account tenures and capabilities of individual employees.The flip side here is some top performers can get a raw deal for performing at the top! So a balance has to be struck between individual potential and equitable distribution.
• Doing the entire exercise in hush hush manner to wrap up in time. This can derail a well intention-ed exercise too and make it appear kind of conspiracy hatch. The onus is equally on employees as much as on the organisation here.
• Once employees have been communicated about targets and tasks, it is important to give visibility to them about target setting methodology and also flash periodic performance rankings. Monthly performance rankings is the minimum, the higher the frequency the better.
• Have a structured dialogue on quarterly basis with laggards, and also with the top performers. Set up a mechanism to transfer learnings from top performers to all! Make the toppers write their own success stories and make those available to all so that the entire organisation learns from those!

So the best way to avoid politics is to avoid getting trapped in these grey areas. Additionally, workplace friendships/relationships are becoming more and more common and are creeping into the realm of assessments too. Both leaders as well as employees need to steer clear of such complicities and complexities. While this is a separate area which needs to be looked into in depths, suffice here to say that much of politics is also due to the unnecessary and avoidable complications arising out of friendships and relationships at office!

Here's wishing all organisations and employees an "apolitical and amiable" year with mutually beneficial outcomes!