Infosys Technologies, India's second largest IT firm, will now assess the performance of its employees "periodically" instead of evaluating them once or twice in a year. The new evaluation process will lead to a change in "nature of goals" set for its employees.
The move is aimed at getting feedback from the employees on a continuous basis, which will assist the company to plan their career development, said Pravin Rao, chief operating officer, Infosys.
"Earlier, we had a standard set of goals, irrespective of the nature of projects. Now, we are going for a lot more flexibility within project teams, to customise and tailor the goals' relevance," Business Standard quoted Rao as saying.
"Also, earlier, the goal setting used to happen once in every quarter or every six months or sometimes once a year, depending on the employee. Now, we have said if the kind of work the employee is doing changes after two months, you can evaluate against the old goal and the context and then set new goals for the new work he/she is doing. So, goal setting evaluation becomes a very continuous cycle, so that there is continuous feedback," said Rao.
The latest human resource initiative comes after the Bengaluru-based IT firm said that it would abandon using the Bell Curve model for evaluating its employees.
Under the Bell Curve system, the managers were compelled to separate the employees into three categories and "rank the performance of 70% as average, 20% as high and 10%, low".
"It (removal of the Bell Curve model) gives a lot more flexibility in the system and reduces the angst during performance evaluation. In the long run, it will make people much more comfortable and would reinforce the belief that it is a fair organisation, there's a lot of opportunities on career development and so on," added Rao.
In August, Infosys said that it had developed a new internal application to enable its employees to apply for various projects that match their skill set, a model similar to that of a mobile app used by Uber cab drivers to pick up passengers.
The new programme named 'Zero Bench' was aimed at better utilisation of resources, as it tries to keep its structure "leaner and more disciplined".
