Human resource is the vital element in any organization’s success and survival, and is the most complicated to manage. The complication arises due to human nature which is subjective and tends to be unpredictable.
However, in an organizational environment judging someone’s productive behavior and efficiency tends to be a difficult task to say the least. In the case of Morgan Stanley, the Human Resource or the Office of Development has set out to measure performance based on some basic indicators as judged by fellow colleagues, bosses and subordinates.
Though the new system marks an improvement over the previous one, there are some issues that still need to be resolved. First, the system requires people to judge other people whom they are working with and this requires judgment from many quarters and this can lead to discord between two people as it is easy to recognize who it was who made the remark. This can also lead to bias between two previously begrudged members and might not be fair.
Second due to evaluation bias, this might get carried into the work environment where two might not be able to gel in well as teammates.
Third, the system requires the director to make a summary which is not only time consuming but may miss out on some important details. Moreover people might use the evaluation form to air their complaints rather than evaluate the skills, capabilities and contributions of the evaluatee.
The main issues thus mentioned can be resolved in a number of pertinent ways, but the solution deemed most feasible has been provided here. Aforementioned is the issue of judging coworkers, which is hesitancy among employees to criticize their fellow workers for fear of inculcating ill-will among each other. This is a feeling that can be gotten rid of by promoting a culture of transparency and constant feedback so that the arrival of the data packet at the end of the year does not bring any shocks which are the main reason for conflicts in general.
More so is the problem where people might avenge themselves through evaluations that they have to do for other people, the director should make sure that it is clear that the form be used as a decision making tool and that employees are aware of its importance in compensation and progress in the company.
As stated in the study, the numerical information, rather than the qualitative comments were being used to gauge an employee’s effectiveness. And this was discounting the open-ended questions as they were more informative than numbers which could place two employees with different evaluations at one level.
This problem can be resolved by using content analysis on the qualitative information and by making the point scale wider allowing for more variations. Moreover some of the scales can be followed by a remark note where the evaluator can put in words what he or she implies when they give the final score to a person.
In addition to these issues, the firm was facing the problem of assigning weightage to each of the four criteria namely, market/professional skills, management and leadership skills, commercial orientation and teamwork.
The evaluation forms that were distributed to employees for evaluation of their fellows are in need of refinement, as their short length was a plus point wherein it didn’t take much time to fill out but terms such as creativity, professionalism and versatility that were placed under the head of professional skills are subject to each person’s background and are not measurable in categorical terms. Then again a criteria such as adhering to a firm’s policy’ might need explaining and would require complete knowledge on the evaluators part of the firms rules and would be considered to restrictive a criteria for productivity.
Under teamwork, the broad rating of teamwork skills is too general in that it needs to be broken down into components such as cooperation with fellow members, sharing of vital information, keeping team members in the loop etc.
Hence if I was the human resource manager in 1998 I would detail the broad categories more and make the evaluation system more comprehensive. Moreover I would make sure that the evaluation is quarterly rather than annual because the objective of the system is to improve results by way of recognizing good workers and improving on the workers that are lagging behind and are inefficient.
Hence the quarterly reviews would make sure that everyone was onboard with how the company viewed them as employees and how efficient it thought they were so that there would be no shocks to employees to deal with. However the compensation plans cannot be based in their entirety on these as results given by workers also need to be taken into account.
The system was a good basis as the company’s evaluation system and the current evaluation programs based on key performance indicators could have originated from there as the systems too uses categories to measure an employee’s performance.