Lets face it, no matter how great a policy, or logical, their will be an employee or two who think it’s the worst thing since Jersey Shore (yes, that’s a link to the wikipedia entry for those of you who really want to know). However, there are some policies both HR and employees hate. I’ve also provided a couple ways to either replace or fix these terrible policies:
- Forced Performance Rankings
- Mandatory Timesheet Hours
- Proof for Compassionate leave
- No-beard policy
Forced Performance Rankings. These are an old system, and often referred to because they were used at General Electric a perennial success story (and not just because they never pay taxes). GE would rank all employees and fire the lowest performing 10%. However, most people don’t realize that General Electric moved away from this system fairly quickly because it didn’t necessarily work. Less recognized is that this was the exact same system used at Enron (not quite a success story these days). However, I believe that GE’s new process, merged with a nice visual grid can really help an organization. It provides great tool for HR in improving organizational performance, and individuals.
- Individuals: GE ranks all employees relative to their peers still. However rather than terminating the bottom 10%, they engage coaching to help improve their performance. This helps with continual development over time, if an employee is excellent one year, but their peers catch up and surpass them they get the coaching required to return to success rather than being removed.
- Organization: Performance matrix to diagnose organizational wide areas that require improvement (based off of 360* feedback, and rankings by group) . This can be used for the development of organizational wide development initiatives that compliment individual development areas. This chart shows the entire organization could use work on technical skills, as well as highlights gaps within the organization such as Management Skills within Information Technology.
Mandatory Timesheets and hours. Yes,
people need to come into work and get it done. They also need to
be shouldering their fair share of the work, and that is pretty
unlikely if they are working 10 hours a week and their cube-neighbour
doing the same job is pulling 50. But in a changing job
market where where over half of employees feel compelled to reply to a
manager’s e-mails on the weekend this policy is
outdated. Focusing on results instead is a far
better plan, but it takes a lot of work. Managers need to be
more involved in setting goals, expectations, and deliverables.
Certainly a more hands on approach, although as a Project Manager friend
once told me, if he isn’t spending at least 80% of his time
actively managing the people and the project then it won’t be delivered
well. It takes a lot of effort to keep everything coordinated –
but that’s his job.
Proof for Compassionate leave. It’s a jerk move to as
someone to bring back a note to prove the legitimacy of their in-laws
illness (or worse), not to mention the hassle of deciding who counts in a
policy like this “employee parents, but not in-laws). While
you’re at it, you might as well ditch sick leave and other random
allotments of time and just replace them with one pool. Dump this
administrivia, and just provide X number of personal days. I know
Accenture has taken this one further and combined all their days into
one. New management consultants are provided 25 days a year paid
leave. This means employees have a lot of leeway with how to use
these to balance their lives.
No-beard policy. Yes, it exists…and unless it’s an OH&S issue (like a beard interfering with an air mask for a firefighter) you can probably lump facial hair under another policy as “employee maintains a professional appearance.”
Did I miss anything? Then let me know what terrible HR policies you have seen (or worse – been told to write!).
“The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent PwC’s positions, strategies or opinions.”