Reinventing the wheel

Sometimes big corporations are reinventing the wheel every now and then especially when there are changes in the top management. For instance, if a new boss is coming in, surely he or she will have his or her management styles and thus requires management team to make some adjustments to suit the new boss’ management requirement. But that probably would not affect the whole work force. Prior to the merger, the company I’m currently working with spent millions of dollar to development a new appraisal system. Each of the executive was given ample trainings and thick dictionary which contains detailed definitions of all those confusing HR terms and phrases. They called it PMD a.k.a Performance Management Development.

Well, that only lasted for two years than the merger came in. Naturally we have to abandon the old system and to adopt the new one. Again, a lot of training conducted for everybody to be able to do the appraisal. This time it is an on-line system. Within a time frame, the on-line system is opened for the employees to key in their KPIs and Leadership qualities and so on. Then the KPIs will be moderated by the immediate superior on-line. Six months later, you have to do mid-year review and a year later final appraisal. It seems very complicated isn’t it? Again, a lot of money was spent to develop the system, to train the people and also installation of the hardware and software. At the end of the year, the company will tell you that the performance of the company is not so good and thus it is not paying good bonus and increment. There you are, people get fed up, for all the nonsense that they have to go through, they get peanut at the end of the day.

When a new boss comes, the system will be changed. The government has recently appointed Idris Jala of MAS to be a minister in-charge of monitoring ministerial KPIs. Basing on the inconsistency of the government in monitoring the performances of its minister and also the civil servants, I do hope that Idris is capable to instill some positive changes and coming out with something effective and most importantly can last long enough to see positive results. Otherwise, we are just reinventing the wheels again and again, going nowhere all this while.