Hire the Guilty

One of the most difficult things to measure is employee performance. Most organizations focus on the easily quantifiable aspects of performance, like attendance and technical training attendance, yet there are so many fuzzier parts of performance that are just as important to the success of an organization. Take for example, commitment. Employee commitment is important because it influences turnover and team performance, but how do you measure an employee’s commitment to a company? Is a supervisor’s assessment really an accurate gauge of an employee’s commitment to an organization or is it more likely to be an assessment of how successful that employee is in sucking-up?

An article in a recent Harvard Business Review by Francis J. Flynn seems to indicate that guilt may be a good proxy for employee commitment. 

Flynn gathered her research on guilt from a standard psychological test, not unlike the personality tests many organizations already use. Other possible indicators of commitment might be how quickly and reliably an employee responds to emails or how often they volunteer for mundane tasks. Most organizations are collecting lots of data on their employees that they could be using to get outside the traditional HR box when evaluating employee performance. With the right business intelligence tools and some creative thinking, they can begin to measure and reward those aspects of employee performance, like commitment, that aren’t easily quantified yet highly valued. We’ll have much more to come on using “data exhaust” to examine employee performance.