Standardising Employee Assessment
Creating skill maps creates a more transparent and fair progression system
TL;DR
Assessing, developing and promoting talent throughout their tenure at your company can be better achieved by mapping specific skill requirements for every role and level. This is not a panacea for a perfectly fair career progression system but it creates more transparency and objectivity.
Redesigning the Assessment Process
Building a successful company requires a lot and it isn’t always easy to balance the needs of the business with those of the team. In the long run, though, you are just as much in the business of developing people as you are in the business of building a company. Spending time thinking about your team’s potential, skill gaps, growth opportunities and assessing these on an ongoing basis, is key to your company’s success. If done right, it also helps motivating your employees and creating a strong employer brand.
The topic of managing talent is broad. In this post we’ll focus on how to design a progression system that attempts to be fair and transparent. Formal assessments of talent happen (at best) on a quarterly basis. Usually those assessments focus on performance against individual goals (trickled down from company level) for that period. This process is repeated until high performers get promoted to retain them.
What’s problematic with this way of assessing and promoting is that it’s inconsistent across the organisational functions. Some companies have calibration sessions to normalise the individual treatment of employees across teams. Even so, this approach doesn’t allow managers or employees to compare their performance/skills against a desired role they want to attain in the organisation.
If you’ve ever played a role-playing game (RPG) then you know that most job progression systems leave much to be desired. In an RPG you pick your starting class, say a mage. You know from the outset what specialisation you can reach along the progression path as a mage (sales), say you want to be a a fire mage aka pyromancer (Account Executive). The game tells you what exact skills you need to attain to achieve the goal on your desired path. To become a fire mage you need to level up your overall experience (i.e. spend a certain amount of time at the company) but specifically you need to increase your intelligence (e.g. work on account management skills) and use a lot of fire spells (e.g. successfully retain x% of your clients). I’ve overstretched the metaphor sufficiently but you see the appeal of the RPG progression: you know exactly what to do to become a fire mage (Account Executive).
Real life is not as straight forward as an engineered game world. There is a lot of randomness and many competing interests that make things more complicated. This shouldn’t stop us from designing a better system, even if it can’t be perfectly followed.
Skill Mapping RPG Style
Being assessed against quarterly objectives is pretty standard at most companies. Some organisations even do personal development plans (PFPs), which allow employees to express their learning and development goals. This allows their managers to hold the employee accountable for their own ambition. Usually, these plans are meant to incorporate the skills that could net the employee a promotion. However, often what skills/achievements are actually needed for the promotion are not explicitly expressed.
An alternative approach is to design jobs and levels like an RPG. Let’s imagine we have a sales role with the following progression (from junior to senior): Account Associate, Account Manager, Account Executive, Account Director. We’ll now create a skill map for this progression starting with the most senior role:
Account Director Skills - Account Management, Reporting, Communication, etc
The above is not comprehensive and as you can see it’s close to what you’d expect being in the responsibilities/requirements section of a job spec. Now we’ll pick one of those skills and specify different levels:
Account Management (1-5)
Account Management (5) - Managing C-level relationships S&P 500 with customer satisfaction >4; Identifies 6 figure growth opportunities within account portfolio; Customer retention rate of 90+%, etcAccount Management (4) - Managing clients with turnover above X million (not S&P 500) with customer satisfaction >4; Identifies 5 figure growth opportunities within account portfolio; Customer retention rate of 85+%, etc
…
Again the above is not comprehensive but you get the gist. Take a skill, define levels and then specify what is required at each level of that skill. Now if we look at the Account Director skill set above we require an Account Management (5) skill level for anyone who wants to take that role. While if you want to be an Account Executive, an Account Management (4) skill level is sufficient:
Account Director Skills - Account Management (5), Reporting (5), Communication (5), etc
Account Executive Skills - Account Management (4), Reporting (3), Communication (4), etc
…
When you do this exercise for all jobs and required skills in your organisation you realise that some of the skills apply across the company. Communication for instance is something you can then define in a consistent manner for everyone, irrespective of their specific team.
Once you have defined jobs, skills and levels you need to assess your team and determine their current levels. This part is always going to be subjective but to minimise arbitrariness and favouritism you want to make skill level definitions objectively measurable as much as possible (see customer retention above). As part of whatever assessment cycle you run, you can now see where your employees are on the skill level progression for their specific path and suggest development opportunities to get them to the next level.
Omid’s Assessment - Account Management (4), Reporting (4), Communication (5), etc = still needs to improve upon Account Management and Reporting to progress to Account Director
Of course, most well run companies have an assessment process that communicates how people can improve and get to the next level. However, from personal experience managers mostly apply individual frameworks to employees that are not normalised across jobs and levels. This in turn leads to a lack of feedback consistency and transparency across the organisation.
Life isn’t Fair
There is a lot of nuance and complexity that comes with slicing and dicing jobs, skills and levels like this. Definitions will not always be perfect. You may discover skill requirements for certain jobs are different than what was assumed initially. As the company evolves so will its skill needs. It’s worth acknowledging that no system is going to be perfect or 100% fair. It’s pretty obvious that the thought required to set a system like this up alone, is worth the effort. It will give the leadership and management team a much better understanding of what skills the company needs.
During the assignment of employees to a specific skill level, subjectivity will still be an issue (unless you quantify things well) but over-quantifying and specifying helps reduce the arbitrariness of assessments even if not being 100% fair.
Sometimes there is no business need for someone to be promoted despite them having reached the skill level that is required for the next step. The skill map makes these instances more obvious and this may lead to employee frustration. In general, this is less of an issue for individual contributor positions but more so for people on a people management path. In those situations, however, having an honest conversation about business need is always more fair and graceful than making up reasons for why a promotion is not happening.
A lot of work goes into running and maintaining a skill map. This is why going through this exercise is most useful for startups that have found product market fit and are starting to scale.
Conclusion
All performance assessment is unfair to an extent. By creating a skill map we enable managers to standardise their judgement based on pre-defined and thoughtful criteria. Employees will be able to assess themselves against clear requirements for progression. This transparency is both motivating and increases the fairness in the assessment process which ultimately leads to a much stronger employer brand.