Ep. 817 Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations https://t.co/9dnCn83Vyv
— St. Michael, the Archangel (@aveng_angel) March 29, 2024
Performance Evaluations.
Who is doing the evaluation? And what’s the purpose? The purpose is to defend the company against lawsuits primarily. Because of that external legal environment with labor laws and so forth, if a company fires someone there are any number of characteristics about that person that [the employee] can claim that they’re being discriminated against, that their firing was immoral or incorrect; then they could file a lawsuit for hundreds of thousands of dollars against the company. And so performance evaluations are partly an effort by the company to determine who deserves to be promoted and who should go up by looking at everyone else’s evaluation of them but is mostly about establishing a record so that you can eliminate people that you think are the worst performers without running into a lawsuit issue. So after several negative evaluations which are done by this long and complicated process, you have a record showing, “Oh, well, we’ve decided that this is not a good employee, so we fired them because of that, not because of their skin color, age, or whatever.” The objection primarily is that it takes so much time. You’re taking the decisions out of the hands of the managers who understand what their team members have done and can easily figure out how to reward them properly without the help of Performance Evaluations. But because of the legal environment, all of the employees, the managers, and everyone else spend a great deal of time going through the motions of evaluating each individual employee. Then they get down to the meeting where they’re deciding what to do about them, the manager games the system essentially to get what they wanted in the first place. So the entire exercise is a waste of everyone’s time. No one enjoys it. And just like deciding on salaries or budgets every year, it’s a huge part of a manager’s job performing Performance Evaluations. Companies that experimented with eliminating them entirely and just letting the manager do what they think is right for the employees and for the company discover that the result is just as good, and no one has to spend the time on it. And so the problem is the lawsuits.
WOODS: Well, now look, there's got to be a way, if these HR departments are doing such a terrible job, there's got to be a way to do an end-run around them. I mean, it's your own company. If I'm running a company and I've got some department that keeps bringing me terrible candidates, isn't there some way I can disrupt this or intervene?
KINNISON: Exactly, of course, there is. And the reason why it doesn't happen very often is that it's a long-term thing. The HR department is there; it exists; it does what it's doing. If you want to change it, it's going to be a lot of work. It's going to be a lot of political trouble with people within the company. And why would you do that when everything seems to be working and it's fine? Well, the answer is if you don't do it, in the long run, your company will be hobbled. It's best if you start out with an HR head when you're growing as a company who has the attitude of getting the business going and reflects that in all of the people that he hires, so your HR department is not your internal enemy. That's the best thing. But if you're coming in to a large organization and you discover that HR is about socialjustice-warrior happy talk, and they're trying to make a social culture camp out of it, you need to do something, and you do that by changing your head of HR, giving that person the mission of setting a new culture for your HR, and working hard to keep people who've been programmed by labor activists and diversity activists from being important. That of course is difficult. You'll get a bad reputation. What was his name? T.J. Rodgers at Cypress Semiconductor is a fine example of someone in the '80s and '90s who resisted these efforts to make social justice the thing. And, of course, he got a reputation for it. He went really public with it. And it's one of the things you can do is to be a hard-nosed hard ass about certain things and just stick your ground and don't try to deflect and don't try to defend yourself from these accusations. Just say, 'This is what it is. We're a company that's trying to make money doing great products for people. We do more good in the world by doing that than by grooming our employees and making it a great place to work that people are happy with but they don't actually work very hard." If you get that kind of reputation, you will be attracting the kind of employees that you want.
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations https://t.co/9okJSJzUws via @amazon
— St. Michael, the Archangel (@aveng_angel) March 29, 2024
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