Job evaluations and pay-for-performance – more perversions in the workplace
Here's a good example of what happens when people who don't really know what goes on in the workplace try to give advice (or make laws) about workplace issues: they think job evaluations are fair.
Job evaluations, when administered appropriately, are conducted frequently enough to help employees perform their jobs well. The intent is to develop employees so they will have successfully accomplished their tasks and advanced the organization's goals by the end of the year. But most managers in hierarchies don't like managing people—they find it boring and unrewarding. So they don't do it. And they get away with not doing it because their managers hate it, too, so they don't manage the managers.
At the very last minute, managers sequester themselves in their offices for the dreaded annual exercise of writing job evaluations. Because they haven't managed their employees all year long, they have no information to summarize about each employee's achievements—so they make it up. When evaluations are used to determine bonuses, bad bosses give good evaluations to their buddies and bad evaluations to the people they don't like—regardless of actual performance.
Base-salary structures have minimized the effect of this favoritism because annual adjustments have been associated with the position—to keep it competitive with similar positions at other employing organizations. Base salaries enable organizations to compete in hiring the best talent by offering comparable salaries to new hires. But now, bad bosses may be getting more power to abuse government employees—a way to discourage good employees who do not collude with their boss's dysfunction by not just withholding raises, but by lowering the base-salary for comparable positions to force compliance with a bad boss's personal agenda.
It's easy to think that it makes sense to pay people less if they are not performing well in their jobs; it even sounds logical. And in a system of integrity, it might work. But in a system with no checks and balances—in which no one is minding the store, in which managers aren't managing managers to make sure they're doing the job of developing employees—in a hierarchical system in the United States, this is just one more nail in the coffin of workplace justice.
Job evaluations, when administered appropriately, are conducted frequently enough to help employees perform their jobs well. The intent is to develop employees so they will have successfully accomplished their tasks and advanced the organization's goals by the end of the year. But most managers in hierarchies don't like managing people—they find it boring and unrewarding. So they don't do it. And they get away with not doing it because their managers hate it, too, so they don't manage the managers.
At the very last minute, managers sequester themselves in their offices for the dreaded annual exercise of writing job evaluations. Because they haven't managed their employees all year long, they have no information to summarize about each employee's achievements—so they make it up. When evaluations are used to determine bonuses, bad bosses give good evaluations to their buddies and bad evaluations to the people they don't like—regardless of actual performance.
Base-salary structures have minimized the effect of this favoritism because annual adjustments have been associated with the position—to keep it competitive with similar positions at other employing organizations. Base salaries enable organizations to compete in hiring the best talent by offering comparable salaries to new hires. But now, bad bosses may be getting more power to abuse government employees—a way to discourage good employees who do not collude with their boss's dysfunction by not just withholding raises, but by lowering the base-salary for comparable positions to force compliance with a bad boss's personal agenda.
It's easy to think that it makes sense to pay people less if they are not performing well in their jobs; it even sounds logical. And in a system of integrity, it might work. But in a system with no checks and balances—in which no one is minding the store, in which managers aren't managing managers to make sure they're doing the job of developing employees—in a hierarchical system in the United States, this is just one more nail in the coffin of workplace justice.
