Dana Minbaeva does not know how her career appraisal will turn out this year — or whether it will even take place. Her organisation has freed team leaders to experiment before deciding whether to change its performance management.

达纳•明巴耶娃(Dana Minbaeva)不知道今年她的职业评估将会是什么样子——甚至不知道是否会进行评估。她所在的组织让团队负责人自由试验，然后决定是否改变其绩效考核方式。

Appropriately enough, Prof Minbaeva studies appraisals and staff feedback for Copenhagen Business School.

这再合适不过了，因为明巴耶娃教授正在为哥本哈根商学院(Copenhagen Business School)研究绩效评估和员工反馈问题。

Hers is not the only employer tinkering with staff ratings and reviews. In the past three years, General Electric, Microsoft, Deloitte, Accenture and Cisco Systems are among many that have announced reform of, or actually reformed, their performance systems.

她的雇主并非唯一对员工评级和评估体系修修改改的雇主。过去3年里，许多企业宣布改革（或者已经改革了）它们的绩效考核系统，其中包括通用电气(General Electric)、微软(Microsoft)、德勤(Deloitte)、埃森哲(Accenture)和思科系统(Cisco Systems)。

Ratings are in the line of fire. Staff have long complained that they lead to a “rank and yank” process, where people rated lowest on a bell curve get forced out. In turn, that can drive team members into vicious competition with their colleagues. “People responsible for [software] features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts,” one Microsoft engineer told Vanity Fair in 2012. Microsoft ditched forced ranking a year later.

评级制度首当其冲。员工早就抱怨称，它们导致了“评级然后解雇”过程——在钟形曲线上评分最低的人将被迫走人。它们进而还会使得团队成员与同事陷入恶性竞争。微软的一位工程师在2012年告诉《名利场》(Vanity Fair)：“负责（软件）功能的人将会公开破坏其他人的努力。”微软在一年后放弃了强制评级制度。

When not toxic, ranking systems can be baffling. One team leader at a UK consultancy says he is asked to rate staff on three dimensions, “two of which I’ve frankly never understood, however many times I’ve discussed it with human resources”.

即便没有“毒性”，评级体系也可能令人困惑。英国一家咨询公司的一位团队负责人表示，他被要求从3个方面给员工评级。“坦率说，其中两个方面我从未弄明白，无论我与人力资源部门讨论过多少次”。

If such crude rankings are dying, though, employers are still unclear what will replace them. They fret about how to gather enough information to decide on pay and promotion.

然而，即便此类粗糙的评级制度行将消亡，但雇主仍不清楚哪种制度能取代它们。他们发愁的是，如何收集足够信息来决定薪酬和擢升事宜？

The future of performance management as a whole is only slightly easier to predict, but the annual career appraisal is fast disappearing. Where it survives, it is transforming into a process of constant feedback. The inspiration, in many cases, is bottom-up “Agile” product development, in which progress towards goals is regularly reassessed.

绩效管理的整体未来还略微容易预测一些，但年度职业评估正在快速消失。即便它存活下来，也在转变为一套持续反馈的流程。在许多情况下，这其中的灵感来自自下而上的“敏捷”产品开发，其间定期评估朝着目标的进展情况。

Ashley Goodall, who started to introduce a new system at Deloitte before moving to Cisco to lead a similar project, says companies are no longer asking: “Do you have five ratings or seven ratings on a scale, or annual reviews? They’re looking at the whole edifice.” For a while Cisco ran with no traditional process: “You can just stop doing it and it turns out that the sky doesn’t fall.”

阿什利•古多尔(Ashley Goodall)最初在德勤推出一项新制度，后来去了思科牵头实施类似项目。他表示，公司不再质问：“你们有5档评级还是7档评级，或者是年度评估？他们看的是整个体系。”思科一度没有任何传统流程：“你可以干脆不这么做，结果天没有塌下来。”

One reason for change is that form-filling and bell-curve analysing are hugely inefficient. Mike Preston, Deloitte’s chief talent officer, says: “We were spending so many hours proposing a rating, debating a rating, communicating a rating, that we really didn’t spend time developing people.”

改变的一个理由是，填表和钟型曲线分析的效率极低。德勤的首席人才官迈克•普雷斯顿(Mike Preston)表示：“我们花这么多时间提议、辩论和沟通一个评级，以至于我们真的没有时间开发人才。”

Accenture’s chief executive set off a wave of approval last year when he said the consultancy would “get rid of 90 per cent of what we did in the past”. Its staff were spending 21 hours each, 8m hours in total every year, on performance management. Sixteen of those hours were devoted just to process.

埃森哲首席执行官去年引发一波赞赏，当时他表示，这家咨询公司“将取消90%过去所做的事情”。每年其员工每人有21个小时、公司总计有800万个小时投入绩效管理。其中有16个小时只是在履行流程。

Companies are not, however, trying to recover all the wasted hours. They want to redeploy them. Janice Semper, a performance management expert at GE, says the industrial group’s managers now devote more time to “coaching and pushing decision-making down in the organisation” — a big change from Jack Welch, then chief executive, urging them to draw a “vitality curve” and force out the worst-performing 10 per cent in any team.

然而，企业并没有试图收回全部浪费的时间。他们希望重新配置这些时间。通用电气(GE)的绩效管理专家贾尼丝•森佩尔(Janice Semper)表示，这家工业集团的管理人员现在花更多时间“指导并推动组织内部的决策下行”——这与前首席执行官杰克•韦尔奇(Jack Welch)相比有很大的变化，后者曾敦促管理人员绘制“活力曲线”，并迫使任何团队中表现最差的10%员工走人。

Reformers believe younger workers are happier measuring and updating performance and targets regularly using mobile apps than they are waiting 12 months. “Imagine if Fitbit [the wearable fitness tracker] only sent you an email at the end of the year,” argues Kris Duggan, founder of BetterWorks, which sells goal-setting software.

改革者相信，较为年轻的员工更乐意定期使用移动APP来衡量和更新绩效和目标，而不是等上12个月。销售目标设定软件的BetterWorks的创始人克里斯•达根(Kris Duggan)辩称：“想象一下，如果Fitbit（可穿戴健身追踪器）只是在年末给你发邮件的话。”

In the programmes being rolled out at Deloitte and Cisco, based on an ap-proach developed by consultancy Marcus Buckingham, managers use a combination of regular “check-ins”, backed up by instant staff engagement surveys and quarterly performance snapshots. GE calls its regular discussions “touchpoints”; its informal feedback sessions are known as “insights”.

德勤和思科基于咨询公司马库斯·白金汉(Marcus Buckingham)开发的方法出台了绩效考核项目，在这些项目中，经理们采用一套组合方式，包括定期“登记”，快速员工参与度调查，以及季度绩效“快照”。通用电气将定期讨论称为“触点”；非正式反馈会议称为“洞察力”。

Transparency is another element common to the latest appraisal methods. Accenture, which hopes to have implemented a change for all 373,000 employees by midyear, asks teams to share strengths, agree priorities and adjust them based on open assessments of how the work is going.

透明度是最新评估方法常见的另一个元素。埃森哲希望到今年年中对其37.3万名员工作出一次全面调整，要求各团队分享优势、商定工作重点，并根据对工作进展情况的公开评估进行调整。

Companies are also trying to devolve responsibility for feedback and performance reviews to smaller units, in the belief peers are better at identifying laggards quickly and dealing with them.

公司也在试图将反馈和绩效评估责任下放到较小单位，相信同僚更善于迅速发现后进者，并做出应对。

Accenture has a pilot scheme to delegate pay decisions to individual teams, some with as few as 30 members. “This was the area I was a little nervous about, because we don’t want rewards to bec-ome a free-for-all,” admits Ellyn Shook, the group’s chief leadership and human resources officer.

埃森哲推出一项试点项目，把薪资决定权交给各个团队，其中一些团队只有30人。该集团首席领导力和人力资源官埃琳•舒克(Ellyn Shook)承认：“这是我以前感到有些紧张的地方，因为我们不想让奖酬变得毫无规则可循。”

Critics question whether the reforms are even focusing on the right problem, since the fact that humans love feedback and hate ratings is not exactly new. W Edwards Deming, the US management expert who revolutionised Japan-ese manufacturing quality, wrote in the 1980s that rating “nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics”.

批评者质疑这些改革是否聚焦于正确的问题，因为人类喜欢反馈而憎恶评级的事实并不新鲜。当年推动日本制造业质量发生革命性转变的美国管理专家威廉•爱德华兹•德明(W. Edwards Deming)在上世纪80年代就写道，评级“培育了短期业绩，搞砸了长期规划，滋生了不安、摧毁了团队合作，助长了对立和政治”。

His followers believe companies should fix faulty ways of working, not obsess about individual performance, which is bound to vary. Formal ratings should be dropped, Kelly Allan, a consultant and adviser to The Deming Institute, says: “Once you hear you’re a three out of five you can’t hear anything else.”

德明的追随者相信，公司应该纠正有问题的工作方式，而不是纠结于注定各有不同的个人表现。咨询师、The Deming Institute顾问凯利•艾伦(Kelly Allan)表示，应该取消正式的评级制度，他说：“一旦你听到自己在总分五分的尺度上得到三分，你就听不到其他东西了。”

GE is collecting views from 30,000 staff who have been trying out a world without ratings. Ms Semper says there is “a lot of momentum” behind its new performance “conversations” and an understanding that ratings may detract from that process. Under GE’s approach, she believes team leaders will have more data with which to reward people appropriately. The same philosophy informs the Cisco and Deloitte programmes, which generate a scatter chart of team performance, rather than a single number, allowing managers to spot outliers and assess how individuals are doing more fairly and accurately.

通用电气正在收集3万名员工的看法，这些员工近期尝试了一个没有评级的世界。森佩尔表示，其新的绩效谈话“动量巨大”，大家认为评级可能损害这一过程。按照通用的做法，她相信团队负责人将有更多恰当奖励员工所需的数据。同样的理念启迪着思科和德勤的项目，这些项目产生有关团队业绩的散点图表，而非单个数字，让经理们发现异常值，并且更为公平、准确地评估个人表现。

Old habits may be hard to kick, though. Accenture’s feedback shows team leaders still want a framework, which Ms Shook calls “guardrails”, to help them assign pay.

然而，人们可能很难改变旧日的习惯。埃森哲的反馈表明，团队负责人仍想要一个框架帮助他们分配薪酬，舒克将这种框架称为“围栏”。

Some team leaders, brought up on the old system, may resist the change. An HR executive at one big European company says managers set in the old ways simply use new continuous-feedback tools to record the traditional annual appraisal. Steve Hunt of SAP SuccessFactors, which supplies such tools, says one company had trouble restructuring staff after it ditched its rating system. “They ended up asking ‘Can we use compensation increases as a proxy [for individual performance]?’” he says. “That’s crazy.”

一些团队负责人在旧制度下长大，他们可能抵制这种变化。欧洲某家大型公司的一位人事高管表示，习惯于旧制度的经理们只是使用新的持续反馈工具来记录传统的年度评估。供应此类工具的SAP SuccessFactors的史蒂夫•亨特(Steve Hunt)表示，有一家公司在废除评级体系后在重组员工方面陷入了困境。他说：“他们最终问道‘我们可以用薪酬增加作为（个人业绩的）代表吗？’这简直是疯了。”

Prof Minbaeva says that as long as performance management schemes fit corporate strategy and everyone agrees with them, their precise structure may not matter. She points out that Danish managers already use MUS, an acronym for the Danish term meaning “employee development conversation”. When they saw the multinationals’ reform plans, “they shrugged their shoulders and said: what’s new?”. As for her business school’s experiments with performance management, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they come back with a system that’s only slightly different”.

明巴耶娃教授表示，只要绩效管理机制符合企业战略，而且每个人都认可，那么它们的具体结构并不重要。她指出，丹麦经理已经使用MUS——丹麦语“员工发展谈话”的缩写——这种结构。当他们看到跨国公司的改革计划时，“他们耸耸肩说道：有什么新东西吗？”。对于她在商学院进行的绩效管理实验，“如果他们最终确定采用一套只是略有不同的制度，我不会感到意外”。