Group performance reviews, bonuses and rewards in agile teams are new options of performance appraisals to promote teamwork. Individual performance reviews, recognition, and bonuses destroy teamwork, more so in agile work environment mentioned by Phalguna Ramaraju, agile coach and trainer, in his recent blog on performance reviews.
Senior management and HR leaders must be aware about the behavioral traits of agile team. HR policies should support self-organization and team work. Individual performance measures are not in favor of team culture of agile teams, mentioned by Phalguna.
When individual incentives and rewards are in place, team members tend to work like “horses with blinders” racing to reach their individual targets! So, when we are separating them through Individual rewards, what motivates them to collaborate and care for shared goals?
Flavius Stef, agile coach and trainer at Mozaic Works, shared his thoughts on HR department and performance reviews in his recent blog. He says primary focus in agile teams should be to increase team performance.
To increase performance, managers should work as closely as possible with their teams, provide constant feedback and collaboratively define and review performance. Their main focus should still be to increase the team’s performance as a whole, rather than that of its individuals.
Flavius says the rewards and appraisals should be decided on team basis. He mentioned to allocate bonuses to the team, let them decide the shares.
Cristina Stensvaag, product director at Capterra, mentioned in her blog on Capterra’s new experiment that brings together a group of employees from different departments, with different talents, experiences and backgrounds, to work together toward common goals. A group of employees define the terms of their own success. She also mentioned about cascading goal tracking through HR tools.
In addition to setting and tracking goals on an individual basis, many performance review software solutions also allow you to set and track cascading goals. "Cascading,” means how an individual’s goals match up to the bigger group’s goals, and even how that group’s contribution helps to accomplish the company’s top-level goals.
Claudio Pires, director executive at Fonte Medicina Diagnostica Brazil, changed the bonus system in his company. As mentioned in Happy Melly’s blog on merit money, Caudio described merit money system as:
We had a bonus system based on 360 degrees evaluation, but that took way too long. We then decided to make use of the Merit Money System.” It works very simple, every month everyone at the company receives the same bonus, Claudio even came up with a fictive currency for that. There’s just one rule, you have to give it away, you can’t keep the money for yourself. Is there someone you think did well for the company? Reward it.
