(originally published December 8th, 2005)

When I was a director in a hospital, upper management came up with something that they presented to all the employees. The idea was to go to raises based on merit; in essence, the amount of the raise you got was determined by the kind of job review you got.

Most of the employees thought this was a great idea, and some of my employees came to me and asked me what I thought about it. I said that I thought it was a bad idea as an employee because you never know what the criteria might end up being, and that I would never vote for anything like it. However, when the hospital put it up for a vote, it came back overwhelmingly in favor, over 93%.

A few months later, the rules came down to us directors on just how we had to do the employee evaluations. What they had done was come up with an overall amount for raises they would support for the organization. Then they looked at how many employees we had in each department, and came up with a specific number of who could rate the highest, who rated average, and who rated the lowest; only three categories. And those who rated in the lowest categories would not only not get raises, but they had to be put on notice that they needed to improve their job performance.

Imagine how tough it’s got to be for a manager who had almost no deficient people in the department because of all the training I’d given, having to select based on this criteria, knowing I was going to have a good number of employees who didn’t deserve the lowest ratings, yet I still had to give it to them; ugh. Imagine being the employee I was talking to, giving them what amounted to a bad evaluation, where what I had written really wasn’t bad enough for them to receive such a bad rating. In essence, I was put into the corner of having to compare employees and determine who was better or worse than someone else, often with no criteria other than raw data that might have been similar. Just like being on the low scoring team on The Apprentice when you’ve just lost your task by 2 or 3 dollars.

The employees were up in arms, as you can imagine, and my employees were no different. In this regard I told them they had gotten what they had asked for, without thinking everything through, and that I had warned them. In the working world, almost everyone believes they’re a superior worker, whether someone has told them or not.

Sometimes, people react to something they hear without really knowing what’s behind it. There are scams and deceptions that can come from all directions, and unless you know the person or the process well enough to really agree with something or state something, you don’t want to fall into that sort of trap if you can help it. Sometimes, the consequences can be tough to overcome.