> It seems to me the solution is to rate people against absolute standards, never against each other.
The problem is that some desirable activities and behaviours aren't objectively measurable, but proposing any given measurement and then tying it to reward and punishment will change activities and behaviours.
In fields where you can have "total supervision" of a task, it can be made to work. If your metric is "widgets screwed together that pass QC", that's easily measured and paid.
If your goals are stuff like "elegant, modifiable software" or "communicates well with colleagues" then these can't be measured objectively. You have to pick proxies (cyclomatic complexity, number of emails sent) as your measurement. But then all that happens is that the proxies are optimised for. People will write peculiar software and treat email like twitter.
The book to read is Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by Robert D. Austin. His 3-party model of performance tracking neatly demonstrates why, under most conditions, an "objective" system is impossible.
The problem is that some desirable activities and behaviours aren't objectively measurable, but proposing any given measurement and then tying it to reward and punishment will change activities and behaviours.
In fields where you can have "total supervision" of a task, it can be made to work. If your metric is "widgets screwed together that pass QC", that's easily measured and paid.
If your goals are stuff like "elegant, modifiable software" or "communicates well with colleagues" then these can't be measured objectively. You have to pick proxies (cyclomatic complexity, number of emails sent) as your measurement. But then all that happens is that the proxies are optimised for. People will write peculiar software and treat email like twitter.
The book to read is Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations by Robert D. Austin. His 3-party model of performance tracking neatly demonstrates why, under most conditions, an "objective" system is impossible.
Not hard. Impossible.