Your performance management is an equity issue - here’s how to do it right
Performance management, assessments and/or appraisals are an area of work and HR that most organizations despise, aren’t doing well, or all of the above.
For a long time, this has been considered a mild failure at best and an irritant at worst. What few of us tend to consider is the ways bad, non-existent or ambiguous performance assessments support or fully cause inequity in the workplace.
Historically, the transactional nature of the employer-employee contract made it so that performance management was synonymous with performance appraisals. Primarily, they were used as a basis for making pay decisions. Today, it is common for companies to use performance management as a mechanism or tool to support their employees' growth and development.
Employees need (and want) to know where they stand and how to improve. Employees shouldn’t have to read between the lines to understand their performance, how they are being evaluated, and what they need to do to grow within the organization. This also allows team members and their managers to agree on what’s working and what isn’t working on projects, as well as align on the best way forward.
When you don’t have really clear ways to evaluate employees, they are left to advocate for themselves without guidelines. This leaves a lot of room for unconscious bias to creep into the performance appraisal and review process. Without clear structures around mobility (upward or lateral), you are leaving attrition to incidences of inequity. This unintentionally drives out talent who may have had the desire to stay, but don’t have access to the proper support.
Ambiguity also leaves room for "unofficial rules" to become accepted truth eg. you must be in a role for two years before you can be promoted or you must be part of a certain kind of project to be considered for a leadership position.
Even more concerning, ambiguity means new immigrants, women, and other marginalized people who haven’t been part of in-groups or the old-boys club have to guess and ignorantly navigate the cultural rules. This is where we see confusion and uncertainty about what a leader acts/looks like, how to show authenticity and so much more.
And to top that off, we cannot forget the link between performance assessments, upward mobility and the lack of diversity in leadership in almost every industry that exists. Now, before we go any further, let’s be clear here: diversity is not a silver bullet for equity. The mere presence of marginalized people alone does not increase or decrease equity and diversification alone is not sufficient to address systemic inequity. With that in mind, we know there are marked business and equity benefits to more diverse workplaces and products and services created by marginalized people that fully represent the communities an organization serves.
Ok, so we’ve just given you at least two-hundred more reasons to hate performance management more than you already did.
We’re not monsters though, so here’s how we recommend building stronger performance management systems for equity and inclusion:
Track your data. Has your organization historically been providing opportunities for mobility to the most privileged despite having competent and capable marginalized staff who are well positioned for promotions and leadership?
Ensure there is clarity about what each person’s role is and how they will be assessed. Clarity is your strongest ally in ensuring folks opt into their jobs with autonomy and understand why they have or haven’t been successful.
Create strong systems of assessment. Use the clear role breakdowns to assess staff and maintain accountability for those doing the assessment. This means leaving absolutely no room for statements like “they just weren’t a good fit” or “she doesn’t have leadership qualities”. Systems of assessments based on pre-determined and agreed upon roles and success means those doing the assessments must be clear and targeted.
Provide 360 degree feedback. Provide opportunities for leadership team members to be assessed as rigorously as all other members of the team.
Incorporate justice into your performance management. Equity and justice means envisioning a world that feels bizarre and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. For this reason, incorporating justice into these processes may look strange to those committed to maintaining the status quo. What this may look like is understanding the ways marginalized people have had professionalism, productivity and civility weaponized against them at work. This has included criticism of Black women’s hair, perceptions of Black people as lazy, child bearing people considered as temporary and unfocused, women considered unfit to lead and so much more. Understanding should then make way for corrective action, which might include scrutinizing performance assessments that lean on these stereotypes and providing space for marginalized people to succeed in spite of the barriers created in traditional work and in larger society.
In case it hasn’t been clear up until this point: performance management is most certainly an equity issue. Left ignored, you are creating unnecessary barriers to the most marginalized members of your organization.