Commonly, evaluation is understood as the "assessment of knowledge, skills, abilities and performance", understanding by "assessment" the appreciation or calculation of one or more things.
Therefore, when evaluating, a numerical value is being assigned, whether calculated or appreciated, to what is examined and that value will depend on the pre-established or imposed rules associated with a particular scale.
When it is valued it is compared.
For example, a kilogram of pure gold does not have the same value as a kilogram of cotton, it is obvious, but what makes them different is the meaning and price that each one of them has, because in the end they weigh exactly the same.
Therefore, the valuation does not depend on the valued item but on the vision or expectations of it, which immediately translates into a significantly subjective fact.
But valuing objects is much easier than valuing people. If you are lost somewhere in the world, a cell phone with a global positioning system, without games and with a monochrome screen, is many times more valuable than the same phone with polyphonic sounds, various games, a color screen but without GPS.
It's easy to value that way. But a person's performance, quality, and even utility cannot be governed by such obvious and linear patterns as in the previous example.
Giving value to things is something intuitive and if you want genetic of the human being. There are fossil records of things that were valuable to man in the earliest age of their appearance and, with the passage of time, his interest in classifying has become increasingly evident.
But who said you can evaluate performance? Who gives a person or group of them the authority to say that something is right or wrong? Why do administrators consider evaluation necessary? Can you be objective when evaluating?
Perhaps, the idea of evaluating the actions of people, their behavior, successes and failures in the work environment is more linked to an ancestral religious thought than to a truly administrative process.
An example of this statement is vividly represented in the Book of the Dead of the ancient Egyptian civilization who represented how the soul of people was subjected to an evaluation before establishing whether or not it was worthy to enter the other world.
The actions of the recently deceased were weighed by Anubis and if his benevolent and successful behavior weighed more than his shortcomings and mistakes, he counted on happiness and glory in the afterlife.
This line of thought was very similar to that of the Sumerians, the first civilization to develop important advances in religious, social and administrative concepts and whose culture was diffused in much of the ancestors of the Egyptian people.
Apparently this conception of being evaluated for their actions after death is assimilated by the Hebrew people, who served as slaves of the Egyptians, and was later coined in the religious thought of Christian doctrine who promotes the final judgment where they will be exalted the offenders together and convicted.
As the incredible influence that religion exerted on society cannot be ignored, the linear and flat idea that imagines a superior being evaluating another of a lower level was welcomed and practically inserted in the global consciousness transmitted from generation to generation, so it is particularly logical at all stages of human development, from academic to work.
This gives the evaluator greater preponderance.
You cannot evaluate something or someone if you are not above it, or at least that is what the line indicates. That is why it is the teacher who evaluates the student and not the other way around.
But when evaluating, it seems that the ancestral principle of the idea that originated the process is obviated, since both the Sumerians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Christians and other religions influenced by the same paradigm based their activity on following the steps that the leader or the leaders had pointed out, resulting in one of the patterns that today still governs the evaluation methodology:
The reward and the punishment.
What is it evaluated for in the labor field? It is easy to imagine hundreds of answers, but the closest to the truth is the one that explains the need to know whether or not the work is being done along the line that has been clearly established.
Those who have done it and done it well are publicly recognized, receive the highest percentage of increase and are unequivocal candidates for promotions or promotions. Here is the prize.
Those who have not done their best are reprimanded either subtly or harshly, undergo training to "see if they improve," are denied or given the smallest percentage of salary increase or, at worst, cases, they are fired based on the results of the evaluation. Here is the punishment.
It is simple and at the same time terribly disappointing, the performance evaluation, based on the ancestral paradigm, aims to reward or punish who better or worse has done it according to the case and that gives a flat and elemental condition to such an important tool managerial.
Ahora bien, recientemente se ha pasado de evaluaciones de 0º a las de 180º e incluso existen empresas que se jactan de evaluar a su personal en 360º, procesos en donde hasta el más elemental de los cargos puede ofrecer su percepción de la más influyente posición y se cree que con ello definitivamente se le está dando una visión completa y compleja a la evaluación evitando en un porcentaje aceptable la subjetividad característica de la misma, cuando en realidad se está reafirmando esta condición.
Perception-based evaluations, whatever their degree of circumference, do not offer a vision of reality but rather an illusion of it, because as in most cases it is difficult for anyone who evaluates not to feel affected by the absence of details, since the mind is not always immediate and in assessment processes it usually happens that the most recent events are imposed on those that occurred significantly earlier.
Although it is true that there are companies that have multiplied the evaluation periods by up to four, it is no less true that such processes continue to maintain the stigma of subjectivity because they are aimed at establishing comparative patterns of what is perceived from the evaluated in areas such as: teamwork, communication, supervision, etc. Elements that should not be valued, under any circumstances, by schemes unrelated to the vision of competencies.
As is known, competencies are talents and skills that individuals possess, these vary from one person to another, although it is true that they all possess the same competencies, it is no less true that these are presented on a greater or lesser scale according to their developing.
But competencies cannot be developed unilaterally as is usually believed, not by training the employee through programs and courses will his talent be developed.
That is an illusion. And it is precisely for this reason that even today, with all the advanced management thinking about human resources, performance evaluation pursues more of a utopia than the true purpose for which it is proposed:
Not all people will develop all their skills. And they don't really need to.
For example, when evaluating whether or not a person is oriented to teamwork and it is detected, under traditional perception approaches (either at 180º or 360º) that they do not meet this requirement, then an attempt is made to integrate the person to this line of thought because such competence is considered vital for the development of the activities of the company, when in reality the very nature of the individual is being ignored and, to develop a competence, others are left aside that could be of many more utility. Why does this happen?
Because they are so committed to the paradigm of what is commonly called the “ought to be” that what “is” and the advantages that it can offer the company are put aside.
The opinion of the environment and one's own is not entirely rulable, it allows to know the self-image and how it is perceived by others and that has value, but such practice cannot be considered a performance evaluation since it does not measure what is really this must generate, which in a few words is nothing more than the "result" of its management.
If the idea of the evaluation is to know if the objectives have been achieved satisfactorily or not, the assessment should not focus on the person but on the fruit of their work, that allows us to return to what was commented at the beginning, evaluate a person is difficult, but assessing things (in this case the results) is much easier.
The important thing in any case is to understand that the interaction with the environment, punctuality, communication and other factors of a similar nature that agglutinate the extensive questions of the evaluation are elements that must be considered when selecting the personnel and not as an item post -contracting, because if the individual was correctly estimated, he will undoubtedly maintain the profile that the company expects in those areas, therefore the professional must be valued for the fruit of his management and what he adds to the organization.
Now, if it is observed from a skeptical perspective, it will be possible to notice that the person's assessment seems to have been reduced to a single factor and the others have been disregarded, so this way of observing the “Evaluation of the Performance". Well, no. Here's the change from flat view to multidimensional perspective:
People should be evaluated, preferably at 360º but not on the basis of what the environment believes it to be, but on the basis of what the individual really contributes, it is here where the formula proposed in 1995 and exposed in the article enters again "The new models and the Human Resource: When the angle changes the perspective" where it is stated that:
Under this conception, the evaluation will be given by the responses that the Human Resource offers when its role is as Provider and its assessment will be justified when its role is that of a Client.
How can this be done without falling into subjectivity? When the roles are properly defined in a company as well as the objectives that have been set for each level of knowledge or "position", what is expected is to obtain an efficient, efficient and effective response to a service or the optimal development of a product These are quantifiable, measurable and comparable facts that allow us to establish their quality. If the answer is correct, meets expectations and generates added value, is it necessary to delve into other factors?
Obviously, it is not a question of disregarding the elements associated with the strengthening of competences, these must be present in the individual's working life but not as a consequence of a performance evaluation but as an assessment of their potential and the initial map to be developed. at the time of hiring.
Training should not be tied to how accurate or erratic performance may be, because if this is the case, the inability of the organization to hire the appropriate profile for a position is being indirectly expressed, in cases where "performance" don't meet expectations.
Magic and human ingenuity cannot be subjected to evaluations where what is believed does not coincide with what one has, it would be absurd to continue maintaining that line of thoughts typical of a past attached to rigid and orthodox paradigms. If the concept of performance evaluation that prevails in this world of speed and urgency had been applied to Michelangelo, when he painted the Sistine Chapel, he would have been fired for non-compliance in response times, scarce or absolute absence of communication and little willingness to work in a team.
But his fame and artistic precision prevented him from being treated like anyone else, and history shows that his work, the result of his work, greatly exceeds the items previously exposed.
How many cases like Michelangelo's occur in organizations? In the hyperactive world that works today, everything has priority and the answers are required in seconds, well, if you want speed you have to hire speed, you cannot pretend to hire an individual with certain skills to demand others and, above all, evaluate him by which less has developed.
The multidimensional orientation of the "performance evaluation" is found in the broad conception of its vision and in the breaking of the paradigm that until now has marked its execution, in the first place it is necessary to discard the idea that performance can be evaluated, since It is not true, a successful performance does not guarantee a successful result, no matter how logical this may seem.
How many times do you follow the expected steps and get a completely different answer than the one you want to have?
The example of Coca Cola is ideal in this case, in the eighties and due to pressure from its closest competitor Coca Cola decided to change the formula of its product, carried out studies, measurements, tests and all kinds of marketing gadgets to ensure that The new flavor would subtract customers from Pepsi, the result was surprising, everything necessary had been done to guarantee the success of the new presentation of the classic drink and the acceptance percentages were projected, but when it was released the rejection was total and the company was forced to return to its formula and withdraw the new product from the market. Can that be considered a performance error?
Of course, in the eyes of the old paradigm it may be like that, because in such a large country more than 200 thousand people should have been consulted (as apparently it was done) in addition to a thousand and one criticism that any analyst can make now that failure is known; But if you look carefully at all the information, you can see something interesting: the steps and strategies were studied and approved by the company before launching the new product on the market, which gives an important value to the data previously supplied, since those responsible After launching the product they believed in them and bet on achieving the objectives, which translates into a correct performance with a wrong result.
Obviously, if it had been a success, the story would be different. The above means that in the end what is expected to be evaluated is the successful result, since the failed one is already evaluated.
Secondly, if the evaluation is the prize or the punishment, then it is not an evaluation as such, it is an examination or a judgment, since a budget is not evaluated to stop the work but to correct deviations, a disease is not evaluates to evict the patient but to choose how to attack the problem and get out of it successfully.
The evaluation should not be seen as the assessment of knowledge, ability or performance, but rather as the progress of these over the previous survey carried out at the beginning of the hiring in order to improve the individual and the company, not as a scale to establish their permanence or retirement of the job.
Finally, as in accounting and finance, companies should forget about the term "performance evaluation" and give way to the term "results evaluation", since that is where all the elements of human ingenuity come together and where It is observed if in fact it is known and what is done with what is known adds value, which can be observed from a true objective perspective.
There is talk of "evaluating the result" in a multidimensional way when considering the influence of the environment, organizational culture, business policies, management tools provided and the clarity of the objectives set out in the results, without leaving aside the competencies individual talent presents, since each person has their own way of reacting to a challenge, stimulus or requirement and it does not necessarily have to be the one expected for the ideal response to be generated.
Another important point to highlight on this issue is that traditional evaluations are usually done from one to four times a year, as already mentioned, which places them even more in the academic and traditional concept than in the business vision and of company that is had in the present.
If in the past reviewing the accounting of a company annually led many investors to bankruptcy, what makes organizations think that the results of the management of their personnel can wait three months to know if they are deviating or not, when any deviation can induce loss of trust in the product or service.
At present and thanks to the advancement of technology, the financial capacity of a company can be evaluated day by day and even hour after hour; This computing phenomenon can be transferred to the labor field if each activity is assigned a code and if a certain number of these codes are associated with a level of knowledge or "position" and therefore with the person who occupies it, as stated. account the accounts in an accounting operation, this association of codes and activities would enjoy the electronic signature of the person in charge and the acceptance of the quality and satisfaction of those who require it, which could be valued daily and give a sense of continuity and ranking to the individual results offering a true objective view of the individual responses that have been required.
Obviously such exemplification of an objective valuation method cannot be applied in the same line in all labor segments, but it can be adjusted according to the activity.
Evaluate performance? In the classroom, in learning environments or in supervised competition formats… Yes, because in them the management of managerial coaching is observed where what is pursued is learning through mentoring and example. In work environments? Certainly not.
What companies must address in greater detail is the result, the people who are employed are already evaluated in the selection, their work and performance only show how right or wrong the recruitment and selection method can be.
Reward and punishment should not be associated with the evaluation of results as immediate experiences of success or failure, it is obvious that if an employee does not meet the goal and even offering opportunities, he continues with a discordant and distorted attitude of what is Waiting for him should be withdrawn, but the result of that decision should be based on the product or service he offers, not on the opinion of third parties about his ability or inability to relate, to cite an example.
Not all the people who have added value to the world have covered all the ideal conditions, on the contrary, they have been shy, absent or moody, which suggests that not all people can go through the same tapestry or be can measure with the same scale, as unfortunately do the performance evaluation processes that are currently applied, that is why abandoning this practice and focusing on what really matters, such as the result, offers people the same possibility If they are valued, then, as already pointed out, it is easier to value an object or a service than to quantify the importance of a person.
