To enhance/sustain your bottomline by changing your method of staff performance evaluation

(photo by Daphne)

... I'm proud, grateful, and happy to be a Canadian .. especially a Chinese Canadian ! :) .. I view this R&D proposal as a vehicle to allow me to pay back some of what I owe Canada ..

Summary:

• This is a research-&-development proposal to address a common major corporate issue - the inability to adequately unleash the creativity of their employees. The primary issue stems from the employees' fear of failure and the fear of being misjudged (see "How Failure Breeds Success", BusinessWeek July 10th, 2006).
  

Purpose:

• I'm seeking multiple business and academic groups probably working together in pairs to conduct this proposed research to assess the effectiveness of unleashing the creativity of their employees. If interested, please contact rochcheng@gmail.com.

Hypothesis:

• The root cause of the fear of failure stems from the fact that we (i.e., the employer or ourselves) judge our performance mainly by the result/outcome of what we do. The author hypothesizes that by focusing directly on one’s intent and effort, and using the result/outcome to analyze these two attributes, we would be able to significantly minimize individuals’ fear of failure and fear of being misjudged. As a result, the corporate atmosphere would be such that the creativity of employees would come forth naturally. The gateway to achieve this is through adopting a new way of doing performance measurement of the employees.
  

Implementation Strategy:

This is achieved via the formal performance appraisal process of an employee.

• An employee's performance is a function of his/her intent and effort.
• The achieved result/outcome of a previously set objective is used to assess the employee's intent and effort.
  
• Performance Measurement Formula (examples shown below):
• Performance Index = Intent x (W1) + (Quality of Effort) x (W2) + (Quantity of Effort) x (W3)

Where W_x is a weighting factor which is to be arbitrarily set by each organization.

How to enhance and integrate the existing Performance Appraisal process with this proposed approach:

Weighting Assignment for a functional group

Human Resource department, working in conjunction with senior management of a corporation, will set the weighting assignment range for each category for a particular group of the organization. In the following example, the manager of the group can arbitrarily set any weighting value from 0 to 5 for the “intent” category or a weighting value of 0 to 10 for the “outcome” category. However, the sum of the weighting values of the four categories must be equal to 10.

Example a): With primary emphasis on using “outcome” as the ultimate criterion.

Intent [0 – 5]	Effort (quality) [0-5]	Effort (quantity) [0-5]	Outcome [0-10]	Overall [must be 10]
0.5	1	0.5	8	10

Example b): With primary emphasis on using “outcome” to qualify one’s “intent” and “effort” as the ultimate criterion.

Intent [0 – 5]	Effort (quality) [0-5]	Effort (quantity) [0-5]	Outcome [0-10]	Overall [must be 10]
4	4	2	0	10

About assigning a performance value to a particular category for an employee

The actual value assigned to each evaluation category for an employee is always of the range from 0 to 10. Encourage each manager to trust that the intent of most employees is good when they are doing a particular task. So, assign a default value of 5 to the “intent” category – unless you’ve concrete evidence (say, based on the outcome), do not change it to a higher or lower value. Consider an assigned value of 5 is fully satisfactory.

Example:

	Intent [0 – 5]	Effort (quality) [0-5]	Effort (quantity) [0-5]	Outcome [0-10]	Total
Weighting [W]	0.5	1	0.5	8	10
Manager’s view* of John Smith’s performance of a particular task [P]	5	5	8	4
W x P	2.5	5	4	32	43.5

* For the purpose of simplifying the illustration, an employee’s self assessment of his/her own performance in each category is not shown here.

Comments:

• Try not to let your concern about the practicality of the implementation to deter you from focusing on what should be done. I'll address your concern separately :)
• The overriding purpose of this blog is to eventually actualize the ideas as described in the "What If" section (at the very end of this blog). This end section presents that, to significantly enhance the quality of living for this human race, we and our children should learn a way of thinking and values that complement/amplify their core cultural and religious values.
  
• The very first step in mapping a key component of the "What If" ideas in the field of psychology or philosophy to an implementable level is through this R&D proposal.

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