Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

On By M. WalgenbachIn Affirmative Action

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Performance Evaluations.  Who is doing the evaluation?  And what’s the purpose?  The purpose is to defend the company against lawsuits primarily.  Because of that external legal environment with labor laws and so forth, if a company fires someone there are any number of characteristics about that person that [the employee] can claim that they’re being discriminated against, that their firing was immoral or incorrect, then they could file a lawsuit for hundreds of thousands of dollars against the company.  And so performance evaluations are partly an effort by the company to determine who deserves to be promoted and who should go up by looking at everyone else’s evaluation of them but is mostly about establishing a record so that you can eliminate people that you think are the worst performers without running into a lawsuit issue.  So after several negative evaluations which are done by this long and complicated process, you have a record showing, “Oh, well, we’ve decided that this is not a good employee, so we fired them because of that, not because of their skin color, age, or whatever.”  The objection primarily is that it takes so much time.  You’re taking the decisions out of the hands of the managers who understand what their team members have done and can easily figure out how to reward them properly without the help of Performance Evaluations.  But because of the legal environment, all of the employees, the managers, and everyone else spend a great deal of time going through the motions of evaluating each individual employee. Then they get down to the meeting where they’re deciding what to do about them, the manager games the system essentially to get what they wanted in the first place.  So the entire exercise is a waste of everyone’s time.  No one enjoys it.  And just like deciding on salaries every year, or budgets every year, it’s a huge part of a manager’s job performing Performance Evaluations.  Companies that experimented with eliminating them entirely and just letting the manager do what they think is right for the employees and for the company discover that the result is just as good and no one has to spend the time on it.  And so the problem is the lawsuits.

Right, so in fact, the real problem behind all this is the government.  If these HR Departments are doing such a terrible job, there’s got to be a way to do an end-run around them.

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