KRAs: Key Result Areas (Or keep repeating activities)

When it comes to jargon, the IT industry, technologists seem to have far outdone their counterparts from other fields. But there were good old days when their brethren from marketing and HR used to rule the roost. The major difference is of course the pace with which the technologists obsolete their jargon vis-à-vis our other friends who show greater sustaining tendencies.

So a MBD (Management by Objectives) may not be such hot stuff today, but KRAs (key result areas) have definitely been around for quite some time. Almost to the point of getting a little boring! The 'problem' is (god help me if the HR guys hear this) that KRAs have become the root component of appraisal systems. Today, appraisals without KRAs are unthinkable (except in a few 'progressive' organizations!).

Before you get any wrong ideas about my leanings against KRAs, let me clarify things. I really have nothing against this poor old thing. In fact, like many other good things with good intentions, KRAs too came with all good intentions. But as they say, even good things can be mishandled. So a tool is only as good as the guys using it.

What do you find in a typical KRA? Well, for one, it is likely to be one page long. There are likely to be at least five to eight areas of focus-sometimes even more. In the earlier days organizations, generally carried out an annual appraisal cycle. Many organizations today have switched to a half yearly or a quarterly appraised cycle. But the one page KRA format has probably not changed.

How easy or difficult is it for an individual to do justice to so many KRAs? Well, it would of course depend well within the control of the individual, or do the KRAs call for a lot of development activity of an uncertain nature. (Then again, how much of the routine stuff should be part of the KRAs.) There is a need to distinguish between the two types of activities and accordingly decide on the number of key result areas that an employee should be asked to focus upon.

In case the appraisal cycle has been reduced to a quarterly period, the need to reduce the number of KRAs is even more. An employee may just not be able to focus on, and do justice to five or six different objectives in that short period. And for all the talk about KRAs being SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, and all that…), how many organizations actually get down to developing measurement metrics. 

Add to that the fact that a manager may have several people reporting to him or her. In the absence of easily administerable metrics, there is a lot of scope for debate on performance and results. And as result, of relationships between boss and subordinate getting sour.

To my mind, it makes eminent sense to choose just one project in a quarter (provided of course that the project can be completed in that time frame) and do a good job of it. Where several people are engaged in similar job functions, instead of giving everyone five KRAs to work on, it may make more sense to ask five different people to work on five different projects.

Each is able to concentrate on one specific assignment and is able to do a good job of it. Rather than getting five mediocre results on the same things from five people, you might end up with one brilliant piece of work from each individual. And then replicate the same across the organization.

Short-term (like quarterly) appraisal cycles were meant to eliminate the element of the 'last month' syndrome of annual appraisals. In an annual appraisal cycle the danger of the last months performance coloring the entire years performance is immense. People stand to gain or lose heavily because of this shadow effect. To that extent, the short-term appraisal cycle makes a lot of sense.

However, organizations need to put this in perspective and balance out the long term and short term objectives. One of the pitfalls of the short cycle KRA is that people get bogged down at the transaction level because that is what seems to matter in the short term. There is also a danger of people circumventing the system or taking actions that prop up short-term results but have a disastrous effect on the organization in the longer term.

In the present day scenario where few people seem to be aiming for long term careers in an organizations, the long-term view may have taken a back seat. Add to it the fact that the rapid pace of change has also reduced the tenure of long-term plans. The result is that you only have short-term plans, which are broken into even shorter-term plans.

However, everything has a gestation period. A baby will not be born in less than nine months no matter what you do. And if it is it will be weak (or worse, still born). 

In our exuberance to compress time cycles we may end up in similar situations. The enormity of what needs to be done many times overwhelms us and makes us set unrealistic deadlines for ourselves and for those who work for us.

The result is full page KRAs with a whole lot of things to be completed in a short cycle time frame. No wonder we may end up not achieving our objectives in the true spirit. And setting the same KRAs for our team and ourselves over and over again.

(Do we hear people complaining that their work is dull and repetitive?)

Going back to school, remember who needed to repeat a class? Those who failed. It's not a good feeling. And those who failed did not suddenly become brilliant students, the next year. KRAs definitely need better treatment ad understanding.

Any body got the time?