Back when I was in public accounting, the term employee empowerment was a big buzzword. Like the mindless sheeple we supervising staffers were, we got sucked into one of the most colossal failures of human resources buffoonery ever. One year, the managing partners decided they’d implement reverse evaluations as part of the yearly employee evaluation process. The way these reverse evaluations would work was that we staffers would get an opportunity to evaluate our managers and partners using the same forms they used to evaluate us. We’d rate them on a one to five scale on various attributes like productivity and punctuality; and offer comments to aid them in their work.

To borrow a cliché, most public accounting managers and partners were what we called seagulls. They’d come in, make a lot of noise, shit all over everything, and leave the place in a worse mess than it was before they arrived. In public accounting, being a good accountant doesn’t determine your success. What determines your success is your ability to sell. Hence, there were many seagulls who lacked certain ability.

Needless to say, these reverse evaluations provided valuable insight into what the seagulls did. Apparently, this valuable insight was absolutely not wanted. After the evaluations were done, we never heard a peep about them again until many months later. We got some memo stating that the policy of reverse evaluations didn’t provide valuable information and would be discontinued. I’m guessing the seagulls weren’t real happy hearing about how they were doing.

I later heard from a manager who was leaving the firm that seagulls were not at all happy about how staffers viewed them. Instead of addressing the issues, they decided they just never wanted to hear about the issues again.

Posted in uncategorized on March 25th, 2004 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |