Discussion Between The Manager And The Employee example essay topic

Executive Summary For this report, I had chosen Agilent Technologies Sales (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd as my research topic. It is one of the branches in the world that delivers innovative technologies, solutions and services to a wide range of customers in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis. One of Agilent's goals is to maintain a good-quality relationship between employees and management regardless of the economic conditions in which the business is operating. Introduction This report focuses on the Performance Appraisal of Agilent Technologies.

Performance appraisal is one of the factors related to an organization's long-term success. It has the ability to measure how well employees perform and then use the information to ensure that performance meets present standards and improves over time. To help us have a view in the performance appraisal system of Agilent Technologies, an interview was conducted with two members of the company, Ms. Lim and Ms. Tracy Leong. Ms. Lim is the Assistant Manager in Customer Service, whereas Ms. Leong has been working in the Customer Service department for more 2 years. She is responsible for ensuring that their company's customers receive an adequate level of service or help with their questions and concerns. Also, she interacts with customers to provide information in response to inquiries about products or services and to handle and resolve complaints, through a variety of means, either in person, by telephone, e-mail or regular mail correspondence, or fax, or even over the Internet.

In Agilent, the Human Resources (HR) department has focused on improving responsiveness, clarifying the scope of its services and continuing to build its expertise. Despite difficult economic conditions in recent years, they have continued working toward making Agilent an employer of choice across the globe. The aim is to provide employees with a working environment they find challenging and enjoyable by hiring some of the best people and encouraging open communication and feedback with management. In Agilent, it is the responsibility of the managers to maintain a work environment where employees can openly discuss their performance, progress and development. This requires open and frequent communication on an informal basis between managers and employees. These information exchanges should include expectations for results, actions desired to maintain or increase effectiveness, and an assessment of the ranking criteria.

At a minimum, managers should meet quarterly with their employees to provide performance feedback, with special attention given to the written feedback provided after the annual ranking process is completed. Managers are expected to complete a RFF (Rank Feedback Form) annually at the completion of the ranking process. From the interview with Ms. Lim, the managerial will rank their employees according to their relative level of performance. The employees will be call upon into the office by their own manager or even supervisor, and will be interviewed accordingly. Ranking is done on an annual basis during the annual planning cycle, which takes place worldwide during Quarter 1. There are three rank categories and a performance category for employees who are not ranked because they are not consistently demonstrating the performance expected of those in similar positions.

The rank categories are: Rank One - This is the group of employees that have consistently far outperformed their peers in all four rank criteria. They are the top performers, role models, and perceived leaders. Rank Two - These employees consistently exceed expectations. This group of employees occasionally performs at a Rank One level and sometimes at a Rank Three level. Rank Three - Employees ranked in this category are the employees who are making a solid contribution to the company. They are valuable members of the company's team, on-target and meeting expectations for performance.

This ranking method then enables the management to provide the employees with increment. However, if the result on an employee is found to be in the same level as previous year, his or her increment will remain the same, or even lesser. Worst still, whoever is being tagged as in the level of "bad performance", that particular employee will be ranked as PIR (Performance Improvement Required). From here, one will be terminated from job if there is not sign of improvement within half year. The next stage is the feedback system. The essential part of the performance feedback process is the discussion between the manager and the employee.

Prior to completing the RFF (Rank Preparation Form) and inputting the employee's rank in the system, the manager will gather performance feedback on the employee from a variety of sources. The manager will choose to share this form with the employee in order to gather his / her input prior to completing the RFF. After the RFF has been completed and the rank approved by all levels of the management team, the manager will then discuss the RFF with the employee. During the discussion, the manager and employee will both discuss the employee's responsibilities, goals and objectives, results, strengths and areas for development.

The manager will then sets performance objectives and measures that tie to business objectives for the coming year. The manager and employee will also discuss ways to address the employee's knowledge and skill gaps relative to the next year's performance objectives, as well as the skills that will be required to meet business objectives in the next two years. Asked about the respond on the appraisal system, Ms. Lim mentioned that a survey in year 2001 indicated that 80% of the employees feel a sense of accomplishment, believe their work is worthwhile, and believe their co-workers do excellent work, perceive they have opportunities for development and believe that their supervisor develops their abilities. She stated that their management recognizes that this culture cannot be taken for granted and found out that communication is key. As a result, the management took focused actions to improve communication in specific groups whose communication scores were below the company average. Performance appraisal is a key part of an organization's performance management system.

Performance appraisal typically involves measuring how well an individual employee is doing their job against a set of criteria (for example, personal competencies, behavioral characteristics or achievements), providing feedback and creating a development plan (Stone 2002: 266). Based on the interviews with both the employees of Agilent Technologies, this system basically seems to be successful enough. However, detailed literature showed that there are still lack of some important points and yet, these need to be improved. According to Fisher (1993), he described that there are four types of uses of performance appraisal, which are between person, within person, systems maintenance and documentation. Between person uses are what have been referred to as administrative purposes, consisting of recognition of individual's performance to make decisions regarding salary administration, promotions, retention, termination, layoffs, etc. Within person uses are those identified in MBO, such as feedback on performance strengths and weaknesses to identify training needs and determine assignments and transfers.

Performance appraisals also help in organizational goals, which are referred to as systems maintenance uses. Examples of this type of purpose are workforce planning, determining organizational training needs, evaluating goal achievement, identifying organizational developmental needs, assisting in goal identification, evaluating the personnel system and reinforcing the authority structure. Finally, documentation purposes are to meet the legal requirements by documenting personnel decisions and conducting validation research on the performance appraisal tools. Agilent Technologies does include the first three types of appraisal. It uses appraisal as an employee development tool that can place the supervisor in a supportive, reinforcing role. Since the management does provide feedback on the past performance, the supervisor or manager can encourage employees to sustain good behaviour and performance.

However, it does not include documentation, in which this is also one of the important types in the system, because documentation may, for example, assist the company in providing criteria for validation research. Prior to that, Agilent uses the Supervisor Evaluation for the appraisal system. According to Stone (2002), this is one of the multiple sources to generate performance evaluation data. It is assumed that the supervisor knows the job well, as well as the performance standards to be met and the actual performance of the individual employee. Unfortunately, supervisory ratings often provide an incomplete evaluation.

According to Ms. Leong, due to the bias effect, where sometimes the supervisor or manager might be rating their employees either consistently low or high because of personal preference on certain employee. Therefore, this shows that there is still certain limitation to the system, which should be taken into consideration. From the research, Agilent is using the MBO technique. According to Stone (2002), MBO is a technique whereby the manager and the subordinate mutually identify common goals, define the subordinate's major areas of responsibility in terms of expected results, and use these as measures in assessing the subordinate's performance. The employees of Agilent does show a good respond on this technique, due to the survey indicated in year 2001 from Ms. Lim. The supervisor or manager of every department manage to meets his or her superior and agrees on a set of goals to be achieved during the specified period of time.

Throughout the period, progress towards the goals is monitored, though the employee is left generally free to determine how to go about the meeting of those goals. Following that, at the end of the year, the employee and supervisor or manager again meet to evaluate whether the goals are achieved and again set a new one for the next year. According to Fisher (1993) as well, MBO encourages innovation and creativity, since employees are free to determine how they will meet their goals. However, in certain cases, sometimes the management faced problem such as feedback on those goal-directed performance motivates higher performance only when it leads to the setting of higher goals. Those of lower goals do not necessarily gain the same results.

Besides, with the system, some managers in the company do not like to deliver negative messages to their employees with whom they are working with, and whom they often like on a personal basis, and in contrast, employees do not like to receive them. Also, it is clear that managers hesitate to give unfavorable appraisals for fear that the appearance of unsatisfactory work by subordinates reflects badly on the manager's ability to select and develop employees. Conclusion Basically, Agilent Technologies conducts one fine performance appraisal system. Though there are limitations to it, yet the respond of employees tend to show a healthy sign. This indicates that the system is effective enough to be continued. The employee that gets a good performance appraisal thinks that the system is wonderful, whereas the employee that gets a bad one thinks that the system is unfair.

Recommendations Performance appraisal is a system where not every employee in the company may like. Such as in Agilent, although survey shows that most of them are satisfied with it, yet the minority part shouldn't be ignore. Every employee should be treated as the same because they are a huge part of a company in order for the company to become successful. Thus, a few suggestions are recommended for the appraisal system in Agilent Technologies, to be better serving as an effective efficient system. One of the things on is to offer proper training to supervisors. Through training, supervisors may then rank the employees with correct judgment.

This will mean that there is no sign of them using progressive discipline. In simpler term, no bias error will occur. Secondly, positive feedback on performance related to goals shall be conducted, as this will gives the worker a sense of achievement, recognition and accomplishment, in which the company might miss it. Thirdly, Agilent needs to incorporate multiple sources of information from peers, subordinates, customers, and employee self-evaluations.

The company will want to conduct additional research on how these types of measures can be reliably and validly developed and integrated into the appraisal process. This helps reducing sampling error by increasing the number of observations and reduces the effect of possible biases. This way, the supervisors and managers will feel more comfortable, since they are no longer solely responsible for what happens to the person as a result of the rating. Probably there are still many ways to be researched and then be conducted. However, I do think these three ways are as important as they will lead the performance appraisal to a better system in Agilent Technologies.

Bibliography

1. Stone, R.J. 2002, 4th en, Human Resource Management, John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.
Australia. 2. Fisher, C.D., Schoenfeld t, L.F. and Shaw, J.B. 1993, 2nd en, Human Resource Management, Houghton Mifflin Company, London.
3. Paterson, T.T. 1972, 2nd en, Job Evaluation: A New Method.