Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.
| Abba Eban
A quote often erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill in the form of ‘The Americans will always do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives’, or something similar.
I am quoting it here in hopes that it might inspire CHROs to change their approach to monitoring people’s performance so aggressively, as explored in the next section.
Performance Mismanagement
In a compelling article by Stacia Garr and Priyanka Mehrotra, Don’t Sacrifice Employee Upskilling for Productivity, the authors lay out the lede in the second paragraph:
Last year, businesses used more methods to track their employees’ productivity than in previous years. But businesses that stepped up their scrutiny of employee performance did not see bigger productivity gains. And in adopting all those new methods, they cut back on something even more important — growth and development — which will hurt them in the long run.
I’ll recouch that: the approach that businesses are taking to track productivity does not lead to increased productivity.
And later on, the authors share a link to a recent Gallup study that reveals what should be withering criticism of people management practices: Only two percent of CHROs from Fortune 500 companies Gallup recently surveyed strongly agree that their performance management system works.
Perhaps the visceral shock of hybrid work and the quiet revolution have combined to push the world of HR off the rails.
If the goal of HR processes is to track productivity — and to increase it — but they fall short, you could make the most generous assumption: those putting those techniques in place are well-motivated, but other activities need to be undertaken to actually achieve higher productivity. That’s what Garr and Mehrotra do, writing about what needs to be added to the mix:
Workers are broadly frustrated with the steps their companies are taking to track their output. Only 39% feel that their companies conduct a fair and consistent evaluation, a big drop from 48% in 2021.
Less than half (46%) of employees said their organizations encouraged them to learn new skills, a 7-point drop from 2021. Skill development is essential for long-term productivity gains.[…]
Organizations also cut back on something else: ensuring that managers had conversations with employees about their growth. That figure dropped from 60% in 2019 to 50% last year. Our research found that when companies encourage these types of conversations on a regular basis, employees are three times more likely to give their business a positive net promoter score (NPS) and almost two and a half times more likely to rate their managers as effective.
At the very least, it looks like short-termism has come to dominate organizational focus on performance, and instead of working toward skills development — and perhaps other sorts of learning not covered in this research — they are driving down performance in the name of performance.
And the least generous assumption — perhaps a bit paranoid — is that some organizations may be imposing a cultural taint of fear into the mix. They might be hoping that increased surveillance and performance theater would make people work harder and longer. If so, it doesn’t seem to be working, but that doesn’t mean that mindset isn’t behind some of this.
The deeper truth is that taking a broader view of human development — working with people on their career plans, both near- and long-term — and looping that into everyday work and through periodic shared assessments of progress is the best way to foster a climate of human-centered performance improvement. Attempting shortcuts only worsens things.
Factoids
Climate on Business
The direct health costs alone of climate change already far exceed $800 billion per year in the U.S. The threat will also impact corporate finances, from higher healthcare-coverage costs borne by employers, including from asthma, mental health, and chronic conditions; performance and engagement costs given climate-driven health declines, lower employee engagement, and reduced productivity; injury and disability costs; and reduced labor availability. Climate events such as extreme heat already cost an estimated 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. and 490 billion hours globally on an annual basis.
The business community is not taking a broad perspective of climate change: if they were they would be pressing for a full-on effort to counter climate devastation.
Only localized issues, like direct financial costs, like insurance, seem to grab business leaders’ attention, and only when they are directly impacted.
…
Term Limits
The United States remains the only major constitutional democracy without either term limits or a mandatory retirement age for judges on the highest court. Almost every American state, in fact, has some kind of term limit for high-court justices. Only Rhode Island has neither a term limit nor an age restriction.
…
Agriculture and Food
More than half of America’s land is used for agricultural production. More than one-third of the planet’s land is used to produce food, and 70 percent of all fresh water is used to irrigate farmland. [..] Globally, the equivalent of South America is now used to grow crops, and the equivalent of Africa is used to graze animals.
Worldwide, wholesale food prices, adjusted for inflation, have grown about 50 percent since 1999, and those prices have also grown considerably more volatile, making not just markets but the whole agricultural Rube Goldberg network less reliable. Overall, American grocery prices have grown by almost 21 percent since President Biden took office, a phenomenon central to the widespread perception that the cost of living has exploded on his watch. Between 2020 and 2023, the wholesale price of olive oil tripled; the price of cocoa delivered to American ports jumped by even more in less than two years. The economist Isabella Weber has proposed maintaining the food equivalent of a strategic petroleum reserve, to buffer against shortages and ease inevitable bursts of market chaos.
China has started to build such a strategic food reserve.
…
Rent
Nearly half of renters nationwide in 2022 spent more than a third of their income on rent.
| Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies
It’s not sustainable.
Elsewhere
From @CWAUnion:
In “House of Splendid Isolation” (1994), [Edna O’Brien] wrote: “I think of the rows, rows over money, my husband putting on his cap to go out and escape from me, a black greasy cap that his ire had sweated into, bacon and cabbage, the dogs yelping for the leavings, downpours and in spite of it all there used to be inside me this river, an expectation for something marvelous. When did I lose it? When did it go? I want before I die to be myself again.”
Nate Silver writes about the Indigo Blob, and offers a series of hypotheses about how it all works:
In American media and political discourse, there has been a fundamental asymmetry during the Trump Era. Left-progressives, liberals, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives all share a common argumentative space. I call this space the Indigo Blob, because it’s somewhere between left-wing (blue) and centrist (purple). The space largely excludes MAGA/right-wing conservatives — around 30 percent of the country.
In one of the hypotheses, he argues that the denizens of the Blob employ logical tricks, such as ‘motte-and-bailey games’, to reject valid criticisms:
The Indigo Blob is not an undifferentiated mass. If you look closely, it contains multitudes. However, it’s to some people’s advantage to maintain the Blob’s ambiguity. Trying to disambiguate the Blob will often make you the subject of intense criticism on Twitter, and Twitter’s architecture has tended to make such dissent painful.
The basic critique here is that some people within the Indigo Blob have laundered the trust placed within their institutions as sources of expertise to advance a political agenda or for other self-serving purposes. For instance, by publishing misinformation that downplayed the possibility of a COVID lab leak in Nature Medicine to avoid causing trouble with China, giving credence to Trump, or drawing criticism of virological research. Or on a more routine level, by playing motte-and-bailey games between science and advocacy.