Incentive plans always go awry Wise Bread Part of my "how to build a better team" series of posts. I like this article because it emphasizes not pitting your team against a "prize" (ie making them work AGAINST eachother, but instead help then work together). I'll have to add the original article that got me thinking about teamwork (and Peer evals) here (maybe I blogged this one already?):
I've been trying to "Crack the code" of peer ratings since I came to Novell (even though they don't seem to do them anymore), one of the biggest flaws in the old peer rating system is that you could rate everyone on your team as a 5 (on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being best), and if most people rate everyone else on the team as a 7, then your average points go up quite a bit. I noticed this because my first peer review that I did I rated everyone as a 9 or 10, and I had the lowest peer rating on the team (because on average, other team members averaged others at a 5--some 6's, some 7's and 4's, but mostly 5's) Thus, I got penalized for feeling like I worked on the best team at Novell.Anyway, I've done many spreadsheets to try to find a solution to this problem, and the best solution that I could ever come up with was a "ranking" system, you rank everyone on the team except for yourself from 1 to x, it will be plainly obvious to a manager who the "top" performer is, because a lot of people will rate that person with a 1 (1 being good). Anyway, this article is a fresher approach to team evaluations, one method for allowing an individual to "Self-Evaluate" and then comparing that evaluation to the team (and rewarding that individual the closer he rates himself to the team), or the other method, which uses a "Mean" rating, which means if you are rating 10 people from 1 to 10 then your scores must add up to be 50.... Anyway, here's a quote from the article, and a link, in case anyone is interested. I haven't seen any peer reviews at Novell for the last few years, but if they want to bring them back, hopefully someone will take a look at this article,"One of the most difficult problems managers face is how to allocate bonuses to members of a team when there is scant information on the contribution of each member to the team's success. We'll look at a procedure whereby the members of a team assess the contributions of everybody, including themselves. It rewards honest self-assessments by motivating members to say what other members think they deserve. Members receive more or less what they request, avoiding disappointment and obviating recriminations."
http://plus.maths.org/issue46/features/brams/index.html
http://dskye.blogspot.com/2008/04/incentive-plans-always-go-awry-wise.html
