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Grade-based performance Senior employees are outperformed by their subordinates all the time. Use metrics to reward the doers and identify the dead weight. O P I N I O N
T he subject of compensation is a challenging and emotionally-charged issue. It affects all of us: our staff, our families, and our organizations. During the process of annual performance reviews, we as supervisors know that subjectivity is our menace and we need to be uniform in our approach to the evaluation of staff. As leadership, we also recognize the need to provide young professionals with a defined pathway for salary advancement. And as shareholders, we want a mechanism for identifying the people in our firms who are not contributing at levels commensurate with their salaries. We all want a compensation program that is consistent in its application, equitable in its distribution, and transparent in its implementation – one that maximizes our individual and corporate potentials for growth.
Marc Florian
As supervisors and management, we’re all looking for quantitative systems that can quickly provide consistent, equitable, and measurable standards for: ❚ ❚ Benchmarking performance ❚ ❚ Encouraging effective performance ❚ ❚ Retaining talented employees We get together in conference calls and meetings to discuss: ❚ ❚ How general performance guidelines/expectations could be tied to individual job classifications? ❚ ❚ How could these tools be used to standardize a means of driving effective performance and identify unacceptable performance? We all seem to agree that every employee, young and old, should know exactly what is expected of them, and that those expectations should be embodied among the fundamental building blocks of our firms’ career frameworks. With this introduction, what follows is a discussion of how rolling financial metrics within any given job classification or labor category could be used to help drive individual and corporate performance, provide a pathway for salary growth and career advancement among our hard- working professional-technical staff, and serve as justification for corrective action among our under-performers. GRADE-BASED PERFORMANCE GOALS (PROFESSIONAL-TECHNICAL STAFF). In nearly every A/E firm I know, you’ll find supervisors, leadership, and shareholders express- ing concern that their review processes don’t nec- essarily provide consistent, equitable, or measur- able standards to benchmark performance. And,
nearly all of them say that their review practices generally fail to address concerns about long-term, underperforming staff, particularly those at more senior levels with higher compensation. In fact, I’ve heard many front-line managers say that some of their processes not only fail to recognize hard- working employees, but continue to reward less productive employees. “We all want a compensation program that is consistent in its application, equitable in its distribution, and transparent in its implementation.” That said, the following example demonstrates how using three-year rolling financial metrics, such as those associated with labor revenues stemming from an individual’s project management and/or marketing efforts (PM/ ME) could provide a quantifiable, equitable, and consistent basis for rating the performance of professional-technical staff, advancing careers, and driving shareholder value. ASSIMILATING AND ANALYZING THE DATA. Each year, as part of the budgeting process, many A/E firms will generate financial statistics associated with the PM/ME contributions of its professional-technical staff. These data serve two key purposes: First, it enables management to look back at what was, thereby helping them to forecast what can be, and second, it enables supervisors to compare and contrast the contributions of individual staff. However, many firms will take this process a step further and publish three years of these data
See MARC FLORIAN, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER August 14, 2017, ISSUE 1212
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