Performance Management at Telco - Interview with Former Human Resource Manager
I joined Telco in 1986 and worked in personnel/HR, leaving in 2010 by which time I had become a middle manager. Although an HRM generalist, I had taken a lead role in Performance Management. It was because I totally disagreed with the way that Performance Management was being implemented that I decided to leave.
What lies behind Performance Management is a serious drive to reduce costs. For example, in Telco schemes were historically constructed in such a way that if employees are made compulsorily redundant it’s like winning the pools, the terms are generous. So to avoid this cost, Performance Management was adopted as the strategy to get rid of people, a way of moving people out of the organisation. It started about three years ago (2007). The five Performance Management bands are: ‘development needed’, ‘needs improvement’, ‘meets expectations’, ‘above expectations’ and ‘excellent’.
First, in early 2008, the company started producing Performance Management league tables of different groups of employees. For example, there would be league tables for the 3,000 field engineers, which would include data on the numbers of sickness absence cases and Performance Management cases. We were able to see how well they were performing against other groups. We were at the bottom of the league table, a position that was exposed by this strategy.
Second, later in 2008, a new Director was appointed with responsibility for field engineers. We were told we were not moving people out as quickly as the organisation had hoped. This manager would speak to other managers, basically a fortnightly inquisition on how effectively managers were dealing with sickness absence and Performance Management, and managers would be given targets on how many people they should take out, how many employees should have managed exit. These fortnightly meetings were about levelling the scores, so senior managers had to identify the lowest performers. The message was clear, ''IF YOU DON'T MANAGE PEOPLE OUT OF THE ORGANISATION, THEN YOU WILL GET MANAGED OUT YOURSELF''. Last year, we had two managers leave because they couldn’t take the strain, they couldn’t face putting the Performance Management pressure on other workers.
Field engineers would get low Performance Management scores if they did not keep their van tidy, did not complete computer-based training on time, did not contribute enough to Performance Management discussions or team meetings. Sickness absence figures were used in the calculations. Sickness absence figures did rise and we had a very high percentage. The Bradford Factor was introduced two and a half years ago. More than 10 days or 4 separate absences would trigger a sickness absence discussion.
We were being asked to find grounds to get rid of people without having to pay for it. If we could not find them, we would have to make up the grounds for managed exits. In my section of 80, 9 people were managed out of the organisation on performance grounds. The senior manager wore this as a badge of honour. There was a woman manager who went off sick in a really bad way, crying all the time. There were two cases, one of a person who was diagnosed with psychological depression, the other who had a brain tumour, who were put back on performance improvement when they returned from illness. One good thing was that this senior manager was moved. He had used intemperate language. He had threatened that if a particular manager did not sack another manager, then he would. A grievance was taken out against him and he was moved, but his behaviour would
never have tolerated at all in the past. They always said that there was no forced distribution of employees under Performance Management. Unions were beginning to get so many cases of employees with grievances arising out of Performance Management, that they raised the issue formally with the company. Following union complaints, Telco promised that there would be a culture change within the organisation. However, managers in Telco tell me that the culture is still one where the company is intent on saving money by hoping people will accept a small payment and go, rather than
wait and get a pension. There’s a lot of people, including senior managers who do not believe that the company has changed its practices even though the supposed new approach to Performance Management came in after 1st April 2010.
Increasing numbers of people are going off sick. Many are working harder and harder because they are worried at ending up at the bottom of the performance management heap. And this makes them sick. Last year when I was a Prospect rep I had a member who hanged himself in a telephone exchange, because the pressures of work had become so intense. The pressure of avoiding becoming a poor performer drives people to work harder and is causing mental health problems, some of them serious. There was a great deal of publicity about the 27 suicides at France Telecom that were caused by work pressure. Do we want to be in the paper for the same thing? Apart from that tragic suicide case, I have had female colleagues breaking down and weeping, I have a man go to pieces in front of me. I did not want to be part of this any more especially after the man committing suicide.
On the company website it describes Performance Management as about coaching, developing people and improving their performance. Yet, in practice, my ex-colleagues are spending about 80% of their time on action of one sort or another against underperformers. What matters is only the last quarter’s Performance Management. You can go from being an ‘Excellent’ performer to ‘Development Needed’ within a quarter. The organisation’s motive is clear, they are out to get you out. It is a horrible and inhuman way for people to be treated.
They introduced surveillance for field engineers under the duty of care. The GSM calculates the quickest way between two jobs. It tracks the movement of the van; for example, when it stops for more than two minutes alerts will be triggered in the manager’s office. Under the older system it was a matter of ‘management by consent’, in that the engineers would always respond to a request to do a job. The new system when jobs are tightly timed and monitored is supposed to save time and money, but the saving is a fallacy. Jobs differ in complexity and the length of time they take to complete. They can’t be standardised. I have never met a manager who was supportive of these measures. When employees have commitments - family and a mortgage - it is difficult for them to put themselves on the line and stand up to unfair demands. They have to perform well at work and make sure that they can keep their job. The organisation always seems to know who are the most fragile people who can be picked on. ‘We can give so and so a generally unsatisfactory as they will not fight back’ seems to be the mentality.
In Telco the target and, in fact, the ideal was to get underperformers out within 12 weeks. Individuals are given a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) which lasts for four weeks, then if there is no or insufficient improvement, a formal warning is issued, then a disciplinary interview, then if no improvement, the final formal warning and then if no improvement they are dismissed.
There was quite a sinister practice that we were to use – ‘the car-park conversation’. A manager would be expected to take an employee, who had received poor performance score, outside for an informal discussion. The manager would then start a conversation along the lines of, ‘You know your last review. It’s only going one way, isn’t it? You should perhaps think about coming to an arrangement’. It was important that the manager would never make any explicit suggestion that the worker should leave. We were given training in how to conduct these kind of conversations; a one-day course on employee relations for HR managers, where we would go through the best mechanisms for ensuring that an employee would voluntarily suggest a compromise agreement. As an aside, the HRM trainer who delivered the course resigned as he hated having to do it.