Quantifiability is a nasty thing that’s recently (in the last 10 years) started creeping into the UK. Some things in life were never intended to be measured in an exact manner, but computerisation of everything that can be computerised has meant that such unclassifiable things are no longer welcomed in modern society and need to be revised. The result is a society where every aspect must be scored from 0-10.
A classic example, (which led me to writing this) is the diabolical annual appraisal that I’m now subjected to by my employer. In days gone by, an appraisal was something I looked forward to. It was described as my opportunity to express my thoughts on how my career was progressing. In reality it was a bit of a griping session for both me and the appraiser to openly discuss my work. It was usually open and frank with the appraiser being somebody I had worked closely with over the course of the year. Sadly this system has fallen foul of the need to score people.
My current appraisal involves a session with my newly appointed line manager. This poor sod has been given a management title simply in order to put him in the firing line for producing appraisals as the real managers understand the full horror of the task and want to delegate it. During the course of the appraisal I sit quietly whilst a number of multiple choice boxes are ticked, sometimes getting the opportunity to make a comment which can be recorded for posterity, (providing there is a suitable box on the form to write it in). After about an hour of painful ticking and muttering, we reach the final box on the form where my appraiser grants me an overall score of 1-5, with 1 making me a God and 5 making me a brainless gimp. With that task complete, my line manager and appraiser can retire to the relative calm of his day job in another country for another year.
My appraisal complete, it gets submitted to a group that were formally known as Personnel. This title didn’t work as it led employees to mistakenly believe that these people were there to help them. It was subsequently renamed Human Resources which resolved this problem as nobody knew what it meant. I believe they have yet another title now, so perhaps Human Resources was politically incorrect if a dog wanted to apply for a job. I digress. The group formally known as Personnel are then faced with the task of Normalization. To those reading who thought this was something done to music in order to get the volume level the same across all tracks, it’s the same concept. In this context, Normalization means changing the 1-5 appraisal scores for hundreds of employees in order to make them fit in a nice distribution that matches the money available for pay reviews. Unlike my line manager whom I meet once a year, I have never met any of these people so God only knows how they do it.
Finally after being assessed, graded and normalized, my completed appraisal finds its way to the desk of my big manager for him to write a stock sentence in keeping with my score of 1-5. I have met this guy, but never spoken to him on a one to one basis. When all is done, the completed form comes back to me (electronically) so I can add any last words I may have before appending my signature. Job done for another year.
This process takes around 3 months to complete. For the mathematically challenged, that’s a quarter of the actual appraisal period. I’m left wondering how on earth the genius who came up with this system can possibly believe it is better than the old days when I came away from an appraisal with a feeling of having been listened to, and a concept of whether I was doing a good job or not.
I hope the day never comes when artists are told they must paint on A4 paper using colours that are numbered 1-256. When this happens, life will comprise 16 shades, all grey. Nature doesn’t fit into a computer. Nor does human nature or an individuals personality. Changing something simply in order to classify and quantify it is to destroy that something. Werner Heisenberg only applied his principle at the quantum level, but it seems to me it’s not that different in the real world. Life cannot be measured in Centimetres or Kilograms.