Perceptive HR Technology

I have spent my career building tools to help HR folks do their best work.  Over the years, I’ve been quick to point out the fact that ‘I live in a vacuum, and I love it!’  With that said, I also consider myself to be a bit more evolved than the average guy as it relates to the practice of HR as a leader.  In other words, I’d like to think that sometimes instead of just telling others what they should be doing, I can occasionally ‘preach what I practice.’

Today I had just such an opportunity.  I was meeting with another manager at Lawson (I suppose you could call it mentorship) and the subject of our annual merit increase allocation process came up.  And this individual manages a fairly large team, so I started asking all kinds of questions — how did performance ratings distribute across the group?  what was the range of increases that you had awarded to people?  and most importantly, when you’re done, how will a person know whether good vs. great performance has any real impact on their salary increase?

To make a long story short, I challenged this individual to get serious about using the process to show people, with crystal clarity, that really great performance results in a really great increase, and good performance results in just an ok one.  It looked like this manager was going to take the easy road — give increases in a very narrow range so that no one got really upset.  The tragedy of that was that it also meant that the few people that exhibited great performance (this manager did a good job doling out high overall ratings to only a select few people) were not going to really feel special (since of course the merit budget is fixed across the whole workgroup).

What was the individual’s greatest obstacle to taking a different approach?  Fear.   Not HR policies, not budgets or bureacuracy, not hard work.  It was, very simply, the fear of how to explain to the people with good performance that they would only get a good increase.  Fear of how to tell someone that the difference between good and great was several percentage points in your raise, not a half-point.  Fear that people would walk away from the experience demoralized rather than energized.

I put it this way — for the people that are good, the message is that if you strive for greatness, the rewards are disproportionately better — by a margin worth striving for!  And for the person that’s great, it’s the kind of reward that will pay dividends in motivation for months, not days (which is how long it lasts for the great employee who only gets a good raise).

So where did the preaching come in?  We’re sitting at Starbucks, and I realize that I am TOTALLY preaching to this person, to the point where I even thought I was laying it on a bit thick.  And now, as I write this post, I’m as convinced as ever that if it’s harder, it’s often worth the effort.  In the case of doling out merit increases, I’m certain that’s the case.

We’ll see what happens — I hope I inspired this person to re-evaluate the approach.  But as a mentor, I can only influence (hey, that was another recent post!).