Still, Schwall thought his team could achieve more. How tools are changing the way we manage, learn, and get things done. People were rewarded for sustained performance and paid an additional bonus for each of their leads who visited a retail store. The operation was the epitome of transparency - via Salesforce CRM integration, leaderboards displayed the top reps’ progress. Schwall was looking for a way to improve his unit’s performance. He implemented it last year with an interesting twist. Though each rating system has its limits, the idea is to prevent recruiters and managers from assigning too much significance to some factors and not enough to others.īut does creating one synthetic score to manage performance make sense in non-sports organizations, as well? David Schwall, a director who heads up inside sales at Clayton Homes (a Berkshire Hathaway company that builds homes in the United States), says it’s working there. In baseball, we have Sabermetrics, a set of stats that measure in-game activity in football, the Total QBR, which captures the quarterback’s various contributions and in basketball, the PER (player efficiency rating), an all-in-one measure of individual productivity. How do we fix that? Sports organizations have taken some of the apparent bias out of talent analytics by incorporating several factors into performance assessment, synthesizing numerous observable metrics into one “uber” number. So then we explain the metrics away rather than using them to learn what’s working and improve the things that aren’t. When we feel it doesn’t sufficiently account for our contributions, we lose confidence in it, feeling trapped by its failure to “understand” us. Analytics can help correct that problem, but sometimes even the data doesn’t seem fair.

They’re striving to assess people strictly on merit: how productive they are, how well they collaborate, how much value they create.Īs human beings, we’re naturally biased in how we perceive others’ competence and worth. Now that everything we do at work can be observed, measured, tracked, and reported - thanks to sensing technologies and cheap processing power - more organizations are relying heavily on “the data” to manage employees’ performance.

Transparency by Ethan Stone