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CEO Scorecard: Matching goal by goal Cos Are Sharing Their Leadership Targets For Transparency & Emp
COMPANY boards are passe. The CEOs’ obligations now encompass a presence in the employee court too. In order to enhance the management’s credibility and infuse transparency, scores of companies are sharing goals, targets and key results areas (KRAs) of their CEOs and function heads with employees through the intranet or face to face. So, if an employee can a c c e s s Mindtree C E O ’s goals on the company int r a n e t , Google reports its C E O ’s quarterly KRAs there. Pfizer and auto major Mahindra & Mahindra and Perot Systems, to name a few, are the others that have adopted such a practice to bring in a culture of transparency and build goal alignment throughout the organisation. Take the case of Pfizer’s Indian arm. Pfizer India’s CEO and all functional heads present their draft objectives for the following year, to employees down the line. HR department facilitates the process to evaluate interdependency of departmental goals and align them across the company, says Pfizer India executive director-HR Yugesh Goutam. “Once it is done, we put a scorecard on the intranet in a quantifiable format that everyone can access.” Interestingly, India is the only subsidiary that has conceived and implemented such a practice and insiders say this has interested the pharma major, globally. The pay-off has been encouraging, adds Goutam. “While it has brought openness in employees’ aspirations about moving forward and how to deliver, it has also allowed us to do course correction and gather feedback through a healthy criticism of the top management.” And bare their performance. While many companies do use balance scorecards, which are cascading in nature, today companies are increasingly getting proactive at communicating on their leadership’s targets to bring in that feeling of belongingness amongst its people. “It is an exercise to build a feeling of inclusion amongst employees,” says Mindtree Consulting vice-president & head-people function Puneet Jetli. The company adopted the practice much before the firm was listed. At Mindtree, it begins with chairman Ashok Soota spelling out his own objectives/goals, how to measure his success and his personal learning objectives on the firms intranet. “He then posts his report card or how did he do, at the end of every quarter apart from what went well and what could have been better,” says Jetli. While the practice brings a huge amount of transparency across the organisation building credibility, from the company’s viewpoint it is a great way to bring about goal alignment, says Great Place to Work Institute India (GPTWI) CEO Prasenjit Bhattacharya. “Here the process of alignment of goals is spontaneous, which means people would willingly put in their effort to make a maximum impact.” All this has a wider implications for the organisational work culture. Perot Systems India president-application & business process solution group Anurag Jain believes that days of bureaucratic management are gone, where employees were not at the level of the management.