Meritocracy matters. A company that rewards talent, effort, and achievement can be expected to outperform those where nepotism, systemic biases, toxic politics, and sheer incompetence are prevalent; it’s just a matter of time. The rise of people analytics, innovations in the field of HR technologies, as well as the inevitable integration of AI and machine learning algorithms into talent management practices, are all signals of the same underlying phenomenon: a relentless quest for a more rational, fair, and evidence-based approach to managing workers, and unlocking human potential at work.
Toward Fairer Data-Driven Performance Management
Companies are awash in people analytics — but that data rarely translates into trustworthy markers of performance.
December 14, 2022
Anthony Gerace
Summary.
Reliable, accurate, and bias-free measures of employees’ job performance are notoriously elusive. And while companies are awash with data about their employees, their ability to translate them into trustworthy markers of performance is at best a work in progress. Research shows that self-ratings and supervisory ratings of job performance overlap by merely 4%. While true meritocracy in organizations is impossible and performance won’t ever be entirely measurable, organizations can become more merit-based, fairer, and overall more successful if they identify KPIs about performance within their organizations and use the right data to measure it.