INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT- RESEARCH PROPOSAL

DELOITTE- IMPROVING PERFORMANCE

MANAGEMENT

By
Kadireen K Sharaf
(2027748)

SECTION: J

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY CIA- 1

SUBMITTED TO:
PROF. HEMALATHA R

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT

CHRIST (DEEMED TO BE UNIVERSITY), Bengaluru

November 2020
 INTRODUCTION

In organizations, a huge variety of performance appraisal methods are being used, starting off
with the conventional annual performance tests. These were used to perform improvement
systems based on informal, real-time assessments, and these systems nearly all fail. In order to
monitor, compensate, access and formulate the job performance of workers. They also take the
form of structured performance assessment programs, and these involve timely employee
performance evaluations, assessment interviews or feedback sessions, assessments. The
performance management systems are ot completely optimized to perform better, a number of
analysts and experts share the conclusion that performance management is broken. Research
studies of both performance evaluation and performance improvement have found that there is
no, if any, evidence that these systems have any significant effect on employee performance or
quality.

A hallmark of the corporate press has long been the coming death of performance assessment in
companies. A number of major companies (e.g., Accenture, Deloitte, Microsoft, Distance, and
Medtronic) have discontinued or greatly decreased their use of structured performance
evaluation processes.

BACKGROUND OF THE PROBLEM

Deloitte, a major global consultancy, auditing, and financial advisory services firm, dedicated a
great deal of time and resources to performance management; Deloitte's study revealed that they
invested two million hours per year completing forms, attending workshops, and performance
assessments (Buckingham & Goodall, 2015). We found that many of them were eaten up by the
conversations of leaders behind closed doors about the effects of the process as we observed how
those hours were expended. The vast time and energy commitments needed by these programs
are not exclusive to Deloitte; numerous companies dedicate considerable resources to systems of
performance evaluation and performance management. Practical issues also overshadow
criticisms of performance evaluation and performance management systems.

This may not come as a surprise as several other firms, the company understands that their
present method of measuring their people's work and then educating them and rewarding them
accordingly is rapidly out of line with our priorities. In a very recent public survey conducted by
Deloitte, almost half of the executives who were surveyed (58 per cent) did accept that the
current performance enhancement plan that is in place generates neither workforce satisfaction
nor high performance. The need for something more agile, real-time, and individualised,
something that is squarely focused on fueling potential progress for evaluating employees more
efficiently is required.
 PROBLEM STATEMENT

Deloitte realised quickly that their changes in the performance management systems were not
yielding the required results and in return was increasing the cost and time of evaluation. Also
these evaluation techniques were not aligned with the organization objectives. The methods
adopted did prove good for raising the performance outcomes of the organization but at the same
time keeping a record of performance, goal setting and proper talent management was lacking in
the new system put in place by the company. The performance management model for the more
nonexecutive roles seemed to be outdated for the recent real-time world. The principal partners
and the managing directors were an exception for this model.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

1) To study the different performance rating techniques and propose a suitable method for
all employees and the organization (Deloitte) to agree upon.
2) Comparing relative costs, time and effort needed to evaluate employee performance o a
regular basis, and ways to optimize the same.
3) Effective redesign of the performance appraisal system in order to avoid the trigger of the
wave of employees quitting the organization.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1) Are traditional methods of performance appraisal more preferred by employees over the
performance management systems that are involved in the evaluating employees more
often?
2) What are the various reasons enumerated by the employees in regard with the
dissatisfaction with the performance management system?
3) How to make the system of rating and providing appraisals more cost effective?
(Comparison of old versus new systems)
4) What do the top performing teams in the organization do and what differentiates their
performance and experience from the rest of the employees?

EVIDENCES SHOWING THE REAL EXISTENCE OF THE PROBLEM

At the beginning of the year, there are targets set for each of the 65,000-plus employees working
with Deloitte; once a project is done, the manager of each employee gets to assess how well
those goals have been accomplished. The director also reports on whether the employee did or
didn't succeed. These judgments are then looked into during the single year-end ranking, arrived
at in long "consensus sessions" at which "counsellor" groups address hundreds of individuals in
the light of their peers. There is some proof to support the fact that employees like the
predictability of this method and the fact that they have a delegate at the consensus sessions
when each person is appointed a counsellor. The overwhelming majority of our population think
that the procedure is fair.

We acknowledge, though, that it is no longer the right design for the changing needs of Deloitte:
once-a-year targets for a real-time environment are too "batched" and conversations about
year-end scores are usually less important than conversations about actual success at the
moment. But it didn't crystallise the need for improvement until we started to count things.
Specifically, they counted the amount of hours expended by the company on performance
management, and noticed that it takes nearly 2 million hours a year to complete the forms, attend
the sessions, and generate the scores. They also researched how those hours were expended,
noticing that many of them were eaten up by the conversations behind closed doors between
leaders about the effects of the process.

The next finding was that the assessment of someone's talents generates contradictory
information. Deloitte took four simple items to simplify their performance rating system,
narrowing down a complex performance appraisal form (e.g., I would always want him or her on
my team given what I know of the performance of this person).

HYPOTHESIS OF THE STUDY

1) H1A: Inefficient performance management is positively affecting the Company

2) H1B: Inefficient performance management is negatively affecting the Company
3) H2A: The rating system of performance is positively affecting the Company
4) H2B: The rating system of performance is negatively affecting the company

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Our research was based on prior analysis. Beginning in the late 1990s, Gallup had undertaken a
multi-year review to compare high-performing teams, ultimately this affected over 1.4 million
employees, about 50,000 teams, and over 192 organisations. He raised questions on different
topics starting from task and intent to salaries and job prospects, from both high- and
lower-performing teams, and isolated the issues on which the high-performing teams firmly
agreed and the others did not.

Data Collection:

Aguinis and his peers have firmly questioned the belief in a collection of articles that work
success is usually transmitted. They note that a power law distribution rather than a standard
distribution tends to obey certain measures of efficiency and contribution to the enterprise.
(Aguinis & Bradley, 2015; Aguinis, Ji, & Joo, 2018; Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014; Aguinis,
O'Boyle, Gonzalez‐Mulé, & Joo, 2016; Crawford, Aguinis, Lichtenstein, Davidsson, &
McKelvey, 2015). The Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of Deloitte 's companies are expected to
recognise 10 teams in their organisations that they deem the "best". They will obtain teams that
have been picked for several different purposes by using this "folk" concept of top teams. Some
were selected because they were extremely successful, some had expanded exponentially, some
had to remain powerful with their consumers, and some were regarded as imaginative.

The team can develop a random, stratified sample of the rest of the organization armed with this
list of teams and ensure that this sample represents the company's diversity in terms of gender,
geography, level, ethnicity, and the like. The "natural" team was represented by this random
sample. A proprietary, research-backed survey was subsequently administered to both of these
two groups. The goal is to identify variables that distinguish the highest performing Deloitte
groups from more normal teams.

Relying on an existing model which proves successful for the better performing teams can help
enumerate performance management norms for scratch by replicating it. Professionals working
on the best teams reported that they have more of the following things when comparing the best
teams to a representative sample of teams:
a. A chance to make daily use of their strengths
b. Knowledge of what is expected at work from them
c. Belief in the mission or intention of the job they are doing

Data Analysis:

It is helpful to think through the consequences of Aguinis and his colleagues' argument that there
are a handful of stars performing at a very high level in many environments and a very large
number of employees whose performance is significantly less stellar and relatively
homogeneous. There is hardly any need for complex methods of performance evaluation if this is
a good representation of the distribution of job performance.
After figuring out what makes the best teams, we can imply this to develop a model for
performance appraisal that revolve around them and implement them more. Professionals can be
asked to draft the appraisal methods in 2 categories, namely performance and development.

Leaders were then asked to annually review and approve employee objectives, referring back to
them at the end of the year. We moved to a dynamic, informal goal setting in the new RPM
model that happens in the context of everyday work. The three main reasons we made this shift
were the following:
1) Shelf life: Goals can change very rapidly , especially in a customer service organisation.
We discovered that most of the objectives of our employees were out of date just 2
months into the performance year.
2) Control: The capacity to choose and influence objectives is limited for most
non-executive roles. Asking professionals to articulate these objectives would therefore
sometimes lead to miscommunication and an inability to perform against them due to
factors outside the control of the professional.
3) Past their expiry date: Usually, targets at year-end have not been checked in depth.

REFERENCES

1) Pulakos, E. D., & Battista, M. (2020). Performance Management Transformation:

Lessons Learned and Next Steps (Society Industrial Organizational Psych). Oxford
University Press.
2) Murphy, K. R. (2019). Performance evaluation will not die, but it should. Human
Resource Management Journal, 30(1), 13–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12259
3) Reinventing Performance Management. (2015, November 16). Harvard Business Review.
https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management
4) Schweyer, A. (2020). Book Review: Nine Lies about Work, By Buckingham, M., &
Goodall, A. Compensation & Benefits Review, 52(4), 193–196.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0886368720910041
5) Aguinis, H., & Bradley, K. J. (2015). The secret sauce for organizational success.
Organizational Dynamics, 44(3), 161–168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2015.05.001