Accenture To Nix Performance Reviews And
Rankings For All 330,000 Employees
Company joins the ranks of
several other big-name firms that have similarly overhauled employee review
systems in recent years.
Is the era of employee
performance reviews and rankings coming to an end?
That’s
the question buzzing in the air this week after Accenture, one of the world’s
largest companies, announced its decision to toss these nail-biting measures of
employee success out the window.
Accenture
CEO Pierre Nanterme told The Washington Post that starting in September, the
performance of the company’s 330,000 staffers will no longer be judged based on company rankings and annual
evaluations.
Instead, the professional services firm will implement “a more fluid system, in
which employees receive timely feedback from their managers on an ongoing basis
following assignments.”
“All
this terminology of rankings -- forcing rankings along some distribution curve
or whatever -- we’re done with that,” Nanterme said. “We’re going to evaluate
you in your role, not vis à vis someone else who might work in Washington, who
might work in Bangalore. It’s irrelevant. It should be about you.”
Nanterme added
that this change will fundamentally, and dramatically, alter the company’s
performance management process.
“It’s
huge,” Nanterme said. “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of
what we did in the past.”
Accenture
joins the ranks of several big-name companies that have, in recent years,
done away with this source of employee stress.
The
Post, citing data from management research firm CEB, reports that six percent
of Fortune 500 companies have stopped using annual performance reviews and
forced rankings.
Microsoft, Adobe, Expedia and Motorola are some of the companies that have
recently overhauled their employee review system.
Some
studies have shown that performance reviews and rankings don’t improve, and may actually hurt, performance.
“The
reality is that the traditional performance appraisal as practiced in the
majority of organizations today is fundamentally flawed and incongruent with
our values-based, vision-driven and collaborative work environments,” Ray Williams,
author of "The Leadership Edge," wrote for Psychology
Today last year.
Reviews
and rankings have also been described as being too time-consuming, expensive and generally ineffective.
However,
some companies and business consultants have defended the system. Victor
Lipman, a retired Fortune 500 CEO, wrote in a Forbes.com post that reviews and
rankings can bring a sort of “disciplined rigor” to the management process.
Dominique
Mosbergen News Editor, The Huffington Post
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