John Linton
...........is written and spoken so often it has de-generated from being a 'truism' (a self evident fact) to some sort of HR mantra that is meaningless.
Annette completed the semi annual personnel review for our Australian personnel using the processes we have used within Exetel almost from our first year. She had previously completed the Sri Lankan personnel reviews in late November. Exetel remains a small company with around 80 people but, even so, it takes a significant amount of time to meet with each person and discuss their various views on their current and future working satisfaction and their preferred directions. I was first introduced to these processes when I worked for IBM in the Old Stone Age when IBM still appeared to take this process at least semi-seriously (which, at least according to my daughter, is no longer the case) and have adhered to them ever since that time as I actually do believe, and always have, that they are beneficial for both the employee and the employer.
Annette, being a far gentler 'soul' (and an infinitely nicer person) than I have ever been is a sensible person to conduct these reviews and has a lot of experience carrying out these processes and she always takes whatever time each individual wants to take rather than trying to complete the process against some sort of rigid schedule. Apart from discussing and recording each individual's views on a fixed set of topics she also allows any person who wishes to speak about anything they believe is important either to themselves or to other people within the company. So, generally speaking, it remains a sensible and useful part of addressing issues and making sure that each person's future career direction is known and, wherever possible, accounted for in the company's business planning. We have been doing this, as I said, Since early in 2005 and it has, generally, produced quite positive results for the overwhelming majority of our personnel and has certainly significantly benefited the company.
The 'outputs' of this process is an individual review for each person, a list of individual employee 'wants' and another list of general points that need addressing in terms of the company generally. The individual employee's review is sent to them with a copy maintained on their personnel file and the two lists are sent to the (other) directors for consideration and then sent to the managers concerned with the various issues to address the points raised. It's a "neat" and "complete" look at the company's operations as seen through the eyes of each individual who works within the companies and (like the review of customer suggestions by a director) it helps complete the process of reviewing every aspect of the company's operations. Of course the 'downside' is that personnel, especially those very new to the company, may well not say anything negative that is affecting them and you get an incorrect 'skew' on how well things are going with some individuals and how happy (or not) some people, whole 'departments' are in extreme cases.
So in reviewing the summaries and often referring back to the individual reviews it takes a somewhat 'practised eye' to determine whether the words recorded are telling you the truth or are something else entirely. Like any 'survey' the answers to the 'questions' need some 'interpretation'. Annette will distribute the results of the reviews later today but we informally discussed them last night and then discussed what changes she had seen between this and the previous reviews. The results this time showed an overall increase in current job satisfaction with a similar increase in likely satisfaction with future positions and the time of 'promotion'. Similarly the level of current remuneration was, with two notable exceptions ("Exetel pays everyone badly"), also an increase. The one significant decrease was in the satisfaction with "management" - including from the managers themselves who almost 100% stated that they needed "more management training"....with one employee (not manager) stating the difficult to comprehend "Exetel has no idea of how to manage technical personnel" (this about a company that until 9 months ago ONLY had technical personnel with the exception of one sales person). That was very difficult to understand taken at face value.
Whatever small levels of success Exetel has achieved over the past six years has only been through our ability to first select exceptional people (more often people capable of becoming excellent) and then retaining them (eight of the first ten people we hired are still working at Exetel - two of those as our CFO and CIO eventually promoted to those positons from very junior positions at their time of joining). As I went through the individual reviews I was, again struck, by how lucky that Exetel was to have so many truly excellent people and how that 'simple' fact determines how well any company will actually perform over time.
Perhaps the truism with which I commenced this meandering should be changed to:
The ability to select people who are going to be excellent is a company's most valuable asset.