At the end of every appraisal cycle, one thing which haunts the employee is not the discussion with his manager, it's a curve called as "Bell Curve" Refer wikipedia, on the origins of "Dead Bell", it says the use of dead bell was with a belief that it was rung to keep evil spirits away. Mohit (fictional name) was one of average performer in his organization and he was well aware of the fact. He remained average performer, till the time the bell which was supposed to keep evil spirits brought ill-luck to him. He was rated as poor performer, courtesy, Bell Curve.
The Bell curve which is nothing but the graphical representation of normal distribution. A bell curve is a graph which depicts a normal distribution of variables, in which most values cluster around a mean, while outliers can be found above and below the mean. The tool have been intensely used by organization for annual appraisals of employees. In laymen terms from HR perspective, you will have few outliers whether positive or negative in equal value. So your overachievers will be more or less equal to non-performers while the rest herd will follow the middle path. The blind folded HR Heads never debated on its relevance. It’s not their fault as it falls under a management practice called Best Practices. As GE, one of the most admired company did it, the other followed it religiously. An Harvard Business Review article in 2012 attributed Microsoft's “lost decade“ to the rigid implementation of the bell curve that incentivized engineers and developers to compete with each other than to collaborate, and to curry favour with managers. Leading consulting firm KPMG on a pilot basis shifted from this approach from April 1, 2015. As per Shalini Pillay, head of people, performance and culture at KPMG in India, it will help dismantle the artificial barriers imposed by the bell curve and take away the internal competition between employees, thus encouraging qualitative discussions on performance. Other organization like Cisco, Adobe, Infosys have also moved out of the practice. If the logic says that 2% of your employees are poor, then the big question to debate is why they were hired?, Who was responsible for their growth and skill gap or performance gaps? An individual joins an organization to make a career and to grow. His skill gap need should be addressed with regular consultive session with regular feedback and on-the-job training rather than waiting for the annual appraisal cycle to push and make him or her realize where they stand among their peers. It may not be true that an employee sitting on the one end of the curve with non-performers can’t be productive in any organization provided we force to brand them. With more and more organisations dumping it, we sure will see the death of "Bell Curve" which has haunted many. (c) Sunil Singh Rana
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A working professional with 19+ years of experience in Sales, Marketing, Strategy and Operations, I am an avid reader and quizzer.
My areas of interest are Business Strategy, Marketing, Customer Management and Digital Media. With my blogger mission as "Learn, Think and Share", I would love to share my thoughts on business strategy, leadership, management, marketing and business quizzing. If my blogs help you out in your professional growth or my quizzes provides a perfect match of infotainment, then I will consider my little attempt as rewarding. - Sunil Singh Rana ABOUT AUTHORArchives
December 2018
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