Which Should Employers Evaluate More: Process or Results?

It appears that effort does not mean much in most workplaces today. If an employee failed to make a sale even though they spend hours every day calling clients, it is difficult for them to believe they will get a positive feedback because in the end, results matter. However, top psychologists say that this system of evaluating performance is very flawed.

Evaluate employees' process, not results

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. Daniel Kahneman thinks that organisations should evaluate employees’ process instead of their outcome.

“The quality of people’s decisions doesn’t determine the outcome. You can make a very good decision and get a bad outcome because of bad luck. You can make a bad decision and get a good outcome because of good luck.”

So when employers reward their employees based on results and not effort, Kahneman said, “very often you are going to penalize bad luck and reward good luck.”

Dan Ariely believes that employers should focus on employees' input.

Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University said that the best way to motivate kids to achieve success is to praise their effort instead of the outcome. This same logic applies to motivating adults too.

Ariely said, “Often what we do is we reward or punish the outcome. And we do it in the business world as well: We give people bonuses if what they did was successful, regardless of whether the process was good or bad.”

Ariely suggested that employers should focus on their employees’ “input.” Otherwise, managers risk reinforcing a terrible process that just so happened to lead to a positive result.

Prioritising results affect employee's work quality

Evaluating employees based on their results does make sense because the workplace isn’t a school. Employees are there to benefit the company. But, Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, says that this system may have its consequences.

Schwartz uses the American education system as an illustration of how evaluating results weakens the teachers’ ability to do their best work.

He argues that talented teachers are handed detailed lesson plans to follow every day, which leaves no room for creativity and autonomy. Teachers are trained to prepare for the the standardized examinations. Their performance is measured mostly based on their students’ scores on those tests.

Schwartz says “The most tragic consequence of this de-skilling is that it will either drive the energy, engagement, and enthusiasm out of good teachers, or it will drive these good teachers out of education.”

Why people prefer results

Perhaps the most believable reason why employers are obsessed over results is that it’s just easier. This is the unfortunate reality. One does not have to spend time translating or quantifying a single number such as sales revenue like one would have to do with qualities such as “persistence” or “initiative”

 Daniel Kahneman thinks that organisations should evaluate employees’ process instead of their outcome.

As Kahneman said it, “it’s much harder to evaluate the process than to evaluate the outcome. And it’s much more intuitively attractive and compelling to evaluate outcomes than to evaluate the process. So that’s what people do.”

Is your company hiring? Get a headstart on filling all your vacancies at AJobThing.com where 4 million job seekers are waiting for you!

This article is based on Judging employees on results could reward luck over skill, argue top psychologists, and there’s a better way to do it by Shana Lebowitz