All about the approach, not the tools, ETHRWorld

By Supriya Sharma, Bhakti Dhanak

‘tis winter – climatic and funding. And then, it is the end of the year – ‘that’ time of the year when founders and team leaders in startups will sit across the table and ‘evaluate’ employees’ performance. ‘Ratings’, hikes, promotions and, often, resignations follow. Every year we hear from anxious founders who need to do performance assessment around this time of the year.

Closer to the end of the year, business periodicals also write about employee expectations or the flaws in the idea or process of performance assessment for startups. This year, a ‘leading’ business publication came out with a near-scathing critique of OKRs as a performance management ‘system’. Not the critique but the massive leaps in the article made us shudder! But we digress.

As a founder, you’ve your eyes set on a goal. You’ve broken down the goal into tasks. You’ve invested considerable time in identifying and bringing in people to take these tasks up. And you check progress made on goal. This is performance management. Despite its intuitive nature, performance management and assessment tend to give heartburn to managers and more so to founders. As you go into your performance assessment discussions, we wanted to leave you with some to-dos mainly with two objectives – peel off all the dressing around…