Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

After going through the seed stage and the valley of death, startups finally come to the stage of growth. For the founding team, the successive challenges in the technology business are easy to deal with, but the headache is that with the development of the company and the continuous arrival of new terms and concepts, it takes time to digest and determine. One of the most troublesome nouns is performance appraisal.

The business has been verified by the market, which examines the company's ability to solve user problems and create products and solutions, while the scale of the business challenges the company's ability to organize and use resources. The most important thing in the growth period is from the "chaos" of the early use of resources to the "order" of the ability of the organization to use resources. Therefore, performance appraisal-- how the team does well, how to motivate employees who make contributions, and how to restrain the behavior that affects output. At this time, we have to mention the founder's desk.

Among them, R & D performance management has always been a difficult problem, many R & D personnel left because they did not get reasonable assessment results, and their morale is low, which brings higher labor costs and even negative impact on enterprises. In the process of market verification of X-Developer products, we have the opportunity to come into contact with such growing enterprises to help these founders build R & D performance systems. Now these cases are summarized for reference by similar enterprises.

Common misunderstandings

There are several misunderstandings about R & D performance management itself, which make it difficult for enterprise managers to make a decision on "whether to do it or not".

Some people think that there is no performance management in R & D. Because R & D is mental work, performance appraisal is not applicable to R & D. The first error in this understanding is that there is no recognition that all work requires mental effort, and the difference is that the degree of physical effort (strength, speed) is different. The second error is that there is no recognition that the performance appraisal is the result, as long as the results of labor are different and reflect more stable differences, it can be applied to the performance appraisal. After all, no one wants to see their work results treated regardless of the pros and cons.

Others believe that R & D cannot be quantified and performance management cannot be done. Because of the difficulty of software measurement, no matter how "good-looking" the indicators are, they can't explain the problem. The oldest way, for example, is to evaluate developers by lines of code, and you end up with a group of "productive" developers plus a "bloated" spaghetti ramen system.

Some people think that performance appraisal is only for large companies, while small companies rely on human management and system, which binds the flexibility of small companies to death, and the hearts of employees are also cold. Of course, more people think that performance management is a tool of exploitation, that is, to make employees do more work in disguise.

In the end, these views talk about the real conflict, that is, what a company depends on for management. Talk about human relations or system, game or cooperation, win-lose or win-win. These conflicts have exposed the problem in the development of start-ups: the lack of coordination.

Coordination: in an organization, it is not only the team's ability to make the right decisions, but also the ability of the team to make consistent decisions.

Performance appraisal not only assesses the performance of employees, but also assesses the coordination ability of a company. Why on earth is it so difficult to implement performance appraisal?

What stops performance management?

A startup company that has grown to the size of 100 people is also struggling to decide whether and how to do R & D performance management. we help founders analyze and understand the real difficulties of performance management from the following aspects.

Extensive management: early Chinese enterprises attached importance to interpersonal relations, and harmony was the most precious in everything, not to mention management, let alone effective management. Over the past decade, fully enjoy the labor dividend, capital dividend, has been accustomed to extensive management, but also did not realize that the inflection point has arrived. So when it comes to performance management, in terms of goals, methods and means, I still don't know how to deal with it.

Lack of employee maturity: China has been carrying out urbanization in recent decades, and many employees are actually the "new entrant" generation. The previous generation of these employees had no enterprise work experience, they seldom got the knowledge of how to work in the enterprise, and the school did not have the corresponding pre-employment training. When it comes to the assessment means of the enterprise and the requirements of teamwork, many employees do not adapt very well. Because in their past life experience, they rarely encounter situations in which they communicate with others, share the results, and take responsibility for the results. This leads to an aversion to performance appraisal.

Lack of professionalism: many new technologies and methods in the software industry come from abroad. When the efficiency of the industry is pulled up, there are actually many factors. Enterprises can not improve efficiency in an all-round way, but can only allow employees to extend their working hours and use overtime to make up for the lack of efficiency. This will not be carried out in detail, you can write a book. It is already inefficient, do not optimize the method, no matter how to wave the radish stick, are of no use to the performance results.

Lack of result-oriented: employees will think that their own skills have improved, the process has paid on behalf of "good", and will not think about effective output and value contribution, nor can they accept evaluation criteria that are inconsistent with existing concepts. The performance appraisal usually implements the company's goal, examines the employee output, and the employee is in a local link, which belongs to passive acceptance, so it is difficult to really recognize it psychologically.

It is because of the existence of these objective factors that it is difficult for the company to implement performance appraisal. Since it is objective and unchangeable, should we still do the performance appraisal? The founder is getting headaches again.

This is why the company should have a "system", without a system, there will be no unified decision-making standards, everyone is reasonable, the company will not find the direction. Whether to do performance appraisal, we must first determine the basic principles of the performance management system, as well as the analysis of poorly done cases.

The core of performance management is feedback.

Return to the purpose of performance appraisal: in order to achieve the strategic goals of the organization, use scientific and reasonable methods to evaluate the employees, and feedback the results to the employees.

The core of this is feedback: performance management is a process of continuous communication, continuous communication, continuous adjustment and re-communication.

The purpose of communication is to make employees' goals agree with the goals of the enterprise. "those who share the same desire win". Only when the goals are the same, can employees really have the will and motivation to achieve them.

The main reasons for the failure of performance appraisal

As for the reasons why performance management falls short of expectations, we have collected some major cases and summarized them from the following aspects.

Lack of communication: as mentioned above, the core of performance management is communication, rather than making a few forms, issuing a few indicators and waiting for the results to wield a big stick. Before and after the development of the performance management system, there is no full communication with key staff, the blunt approach will cause employees do not understand, disobedience and other conflicting psychology.

Case study: Luo Ji thought that "issuing the year-end bonus is lazy politics"

At the end of 2018, an article entitled "giving employees a year-end bonus is lazy politics" caused an uproar. On Zhihu, "how to think of Luo Ji and saying that giving employees year-end bonuses is lazy politics", a total of 525 responses, almost all negative comments, a total of more than 1 million views.

The fundamental reason is that Luoji hopes to begin to implement performance management, professionals to do professional things, so that the organization can operate more efficiently, due to the choice of the wrong time and the wrong key term "year-end bonus", resulting in internal and external misunderstandings.

Lack of motivation: too many times of assessment, each incentive is small, can not have an impact on employees, but also lost the effect. The goals and results of the assessment must be equal in the psychological evaluation of the employees. if the employees think that the pay is greater than the return, it will not only affect the normal work enthusiasm, but also dampen the confidence in the company.

Case study: quarterly assessment and bonus

At the beginning, a start-up company implemented a quarterly bonus system, which paid 20% and 50% bonuses to employees who performed well and excellently. But the employees are not active, and after the monthly performance feedback, the originally high morale is getting lower and lower. Afterwards communication found that the primary goal of employees to join our company is not money, but an environment that wants to get a rapid promotion. The most effective incentive is promotion, even if you wait for a year or two instead of getting a bonus every quarter.

The standard is not clear: the two sides of the assessment have different understanding of the criteria of the evaluation of the results, or can not quantify their performance, or are not linked to the real performance, or contain human factors, resulting in the evaluation results are not accepted by employees.

Case: assessment of indicators that cannot be assessed or changed

The performance appraisal set by a company for grass-roots managers includes: values, key task promotion, etc.; the assessment method is employee self-evaluation and direct superior evaluation. As a result, employees and superiors differ greatly from each other in scoring the same index, and they are not satisfied with each other. The reason for the analysis is that the two sides have different understandings, such as when the task is very complex and the span is long, how to evaluate the degree of completion? Values are the basic characteristics of people and are difficult to change, and they are the result of performance, so they should be regarded as the key factors in the appointment of employees.

Inadequate supervision: lack of process supervision, or difficulties in process supervision, resulting in substandard performance only afterwards or for a long time.

Case: code quality issues

Many large systems have the sad situation of "changing a bugs and causing more bugs", especially copying and pasting a lot of code and copying a lot of bugs to all parts of the system. Every day, there is a backlog of requirements, code is growing, and everyone knows that quality is important. but everyone doesn't have time to monitor quality-especially in large teams where design and implementation responsibilities are separated, "backpot" architects put out fires everywhere, and even though "working" programmers keep setting fires, the number of events can never come down.

Design performance management system

To sum up, in order to make the implementation of performance management really effective, we need to avoid the problems that may arise in communication, motivation, standards and supervision, and constantly feedback to employees to continuously adjust their ways to achieve their goals. However, this is really an ideal state, so companies should constantly improve their overall performance through feedback and communication, which is a very important factor: whether employees are willing to accept this kind of feedback and communication. whether you can constantly adjust your methods to narrow the gap in achieving your goals.

The first step in the correct implementation of performance management is to choose the right person. After all, the company is a commercial organization, the purpose of its existence is to competitively supply goods that meet the needs of the market, in order to obtain returns and distribute returns. In a sense, the employee position of the company is not a kind of social fair welfare, it is for those who are competitive and suitable to participate in business activities, and hope to gain recognition, reward and status through their own competitive advantage. This involves the diversity of social organizations, so there is not much to be done.

The process of implementing performance management is the process of developing the whole organization. How to assess the position is not linked to the rank, the results of the assessment are not linked to the promotion mechanism, there is no long-term appreciation, this kind of performance appraisal is undoubtedly a transaction, undoubtedly playing a bargaining game, turning the long-term relationship between the company and employees into a limited interaction in game theory.

Limited interaction: both sides do not consider the future appreciation, only to maximize their own interests in this transaction, there is no incentive for cooperation under the limited interaction, it is impossible for both sides to win-win cooperation.

Performance Evaluation in the stage of Rapid Development

In the past, when helping them optimize organizational effectiveness in many 100-person organizations, many R & D Leader lamented that it was because the business was growing so fast that the R & D organization expanded so rapidly that it was too late to carry out any team-building.

In large R & D organizations, we usually find that the most critical factor affecting organizational efficiency is that the most basic team rules fail after personnel expansion. For example, with regard to the basic norms of code quality, front-line managers say that a large number of new recruits write substandard code and are under pressure to release every week, which is out of control; for example, in the basic norms of branch management, front-line managers say that there are too many people. too many conflicts affect daily progress, so first develop separately, first implement the functions, and then concentrate on merging before testing. Then the test will also think, first test this function, find the problem early and correct it as soon as possible, and then uniformly return before going online, and finally just change a few environment configurations.

But in essence, many problems are not problems in static time and early stage, but early deficiencies are exposed in dynamic time and later stage. For example, if you don't play on the field, you don't know the gap between you and others in speed and endurance, which is not caused by playing on the field, but because of the long-term accumulated gap between you and others in habits, choices, and training preferences. For example, some cardiovascular diseases occur in adolescence, but the results do not show their impact until old age. The same is true in the rapid expansion of the organization, if at the beginning, there is a strict performance management system, the organization can also develop in an orderly manner, rather than putting chaos together, and ultimately affect the efficiency of the organization.

The post-90s and even post-00s generation are different from previous generations. they pay more attention to whether their values and choices match the company, whether their abilities can be brought into full play in the company platform, and whether the company can provide enough stage and promotion space. Our summary is as follows:

The new generation of employees have higher requirements for the improvement of social status and ability than those in the past.

This does not mean that they have no material requirements, but that their current family and material conditions have met the basic requirements of current life, and expect companies to provide social conditions that families cannot provide. continue to improve their own ability to obtain higher material conditions in the future. In this case, the company's choice should not be satisfied with the present, but to find future employees.

Management performance behavior

As we mentioned earlier, employees' ideas and values are extremely difficult to change, and it is not suitable for performance appraisal.

In the process of performance management, the most important thing is to clearly lead employees to change their work style and improve their work skills through performance goals. These include:

Clear positioning: clear responsibilities. For employees of different positions, there are differences in positioning, and they are strictly required to meet the current assessment goals.

Specific requirements: the goal is clear. There is a specific definition of the objectives of performance appraisal in each stage, and the evaluation criteria are specified.

Referenced process: the path is clear. How to achieve the assessment goals, including various work norms and requirements, must be written and implemented into actionable behavior in order to give adequate guidance to employees.

Accurate result feedback: rewards and penalties are clear. Do it or not, give accurate feedback and be linked to an open and transparent reward and punishment mechanism.

Our reference assessment criteria include the formulation of different assessment priorities and index weight decomposition for employees of different ranks.

Cycle of performance feedback

The key evaluation is to make evaluation and feedback according to the performance behavior of employees. According to different effects, the feedback schemes that can be referenced include: timely feedback, monthly evaluation and quarterly disclosure.

Timely feedback is verbal, on-the-spot evaluation, and mainly incentive. The main application scenarios for employees have made improvements, made new progress, and overcome certain difficulties, focusing on behavior.

Monthly evaluation is a written record, according to the performance of the month, various indicators are rated, and the results can be made public or not, and monthly written or face-to-face performance feedback is not recommended, because employees also have self-psychological evaluation, which can be given a certain period of reflection so that they can adjust themselves.

Quarterly feedback is mainly written and publishes the average value of performance appraisal. Quarterly performance can usually assess employees' characteristics and gaps in skills and work style, point out good performance, items and suggestions for improvement, and publish evaluation results, including salary increases and promotion opportunities.

Performance management application

Finally, the application of X-Developer R & D effectiveness platform in performance analysis is briefly mentioned. X-Developer models and analyzes the effective relationship between R & D output and behavior, so as to help managers find performance problems and trace them back at any time. At the same time, employees can also compare the gap between the team and the team according to real-time updated reports, including norm submission, rationality of task planning, task completion cycle and quality performance, which can greatly improve the timeliness of performance feedback. it also reduces the time cost of managers, open calculation standards and graphical feedback models, and resolves unnecessary communication misunderstandings.

The free community version of X-Developer can help the R & D team build a consistent code management specification and form an efficient rhythm of code output. Since its launch, users have now covered finance, real estate, energy, logistics and manufacturing. We will further interact with users to help users improve their R & D performance.

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Https://x-developer.cn

Market volume technology is a platform service provider focusing on product innovation and efficiency optimization. based on more than ten years of consulting experience in well-known enterprises, we provide tools and data analysis platforms around product innovation, and help enterprises optimize product R & D performance.

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