As we near the time where we spend literally several hours on the process of filing Evaluation Forms and reviews and goal setting for each employee, I just have to say: What a waste of time!
I strongly believe in providing feedback and setting goals and targets, etc. I strongly believe that only good people should be rewarded. What I also strongly believe is that the processes we now endure are not achieving the goal it was supposed to. In the end, it comes own to a very simple question: Did you do your job? The larger the organization it seems, the more ludicrous the forms and convoluted the process. To paraphrase, the system is a mere shadow of what it was intended to represent, sometimes distorted beyond recognition.
Instead of hours of paperwork, how about a face-to-face with supervisors, underlings, internal and external customers/vendors and peers? A 360degree summary would surely tell us more than the stack of literally worthless paper we are generating wouldn't it? And for those that foolishly rely on numbers (such as revenue targets, etc), numbers can tell you anything you want, including and excluding the truth.
We, in the trustee industry, are in the business of providing a service (which may come to a surprise to our banker friends that far-too-often consider trusts to be a product). Sales figures do not reflect whether it was good service. Consider the scenario of a young OL going into Louis Vuitton. She will walk out with a handbag. Was it because of the brand? Was it the design of the bag? Was it the sales staff? Was it the price? Numbers don't tell you what you need to know in staff evaluations because whether the customer was happy with the staff (regardless of whether a sale was made) should have been the paramount evaluation criterion. If someone choses Chanel or Ferragamo instead, was it your sales staff at fault or your product people? Was it your marketing people?
An interview with interested parties would get you closer to the truth and how to manage your organization and people better. You may have the best trust team and not know it because other factors drove customers away. You may have the worst trust team but get away with it because you have the strongest brand or cheapest pricing. For those who do have the organization's long term interests at heart, knowing why you are successful and knowing why you have failed is just as important as the result. Are you in the trust business or dumb luck business?
Alas, we tend to give out promotions and bonuses based on good numbers and not good service. We tend to chastise and punish for bad numbers. I had a team once that went overboard on hours spent and were red flagged to my attention. A cursory view was they were simply inefficient and mismanaging resources, in other words: doing a bad job. A deeper investigation turned out that the problem was much worse in that they were understating time costs in order to look better. Where was the time going? It was picking up the slack for a loss of a senior team member, spent training up a junior replacement and getting the run around from another user who had made a rather ridiculous demand for data which require manual adjustments to the standard computer generated reports. So whose to blame? The supervisor who let the senior staff go? The same supervisor who hired an inadequate replacement? The supervisor that allowed inter-department intrusions? The other department head? The team itself? With facts and details, you can decide. With a simple bad number, you have no idea.
Oh well....back to the forms.
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