Recruiting, helping employees and separation can be completely different. I hope that you’ll enjoy this short fictional story on a better HR practice. Actually, not even Human Resources, more about humans at work.
John was one of the best candidates that we recruited. He passed all the technical and competencies assessment successfully, scoring nearly 100%. There was a lot of excitement around him since he was the first candidate that we recruit with no human interaction. John has a perfect fit for marketing and shows a high degree of fit to the competencies needed to operate in a Non-hierarchical environment.
To be honest enough, John even surprised us more during the three months of his onboarding period. He finished all of his tasks to the satisfaction of all of his customers, flourished in self-management and even filled function not just in the kids’ shoe entity. John was the first new agent that during his onboarding took responsibilities that we didn’t plan for his onboarding. He also filled a function in the man shoe group.
For the first six months, John was a superstar, but that didn’t last for long. After nine months the platform alerts all the members of the man’s shoe marketing entity that the number of new collaborations with third parties reached a negative linear trend for the first time. That was one of the metrics measuring John performance. This negative metric’s trend concerned all agents in the entity. In a tactical meeting, they encouraged John to use mentoring services provided by the company as a way to get a better understanding of what he needs to do to improve the metrics.
John followed the advice and approached the mentoring entity. The results didn’t take time to materialize, and after a while, the metrics changed from negative linear to a flat and then back to a positive linear trend. That improvement on John side didn’t last too long as two months after the metrics issue was fixed, he got negative feedback from one of the agents filling one of the sales functions in the kid’s shoe entity. The feedback indicates that an extreme and ambitious strategy with partners on the kid’s shoe side ignored suggestions and feedback John got from other agents and yield (as projected) a negative impact on sales. Negative feedback is bad as negative metrics, so the kid’s shoe entity suggested John consider his strategy and take any actions needed to prevent any other negative feedback in the future.
John tried to prevent the next feedback, but any attempt to change his strategy impact negatively his metrics. He ignored all the suggestions to work with other agents on a strategy that will increase his metrics without impacting others. It feels that John was proud enough to collaborate with others and he was sure that he could resolve this issue by himself.
Regretfully things didn’t go the way that John wanted, and after three months he got another negative feedback. This time from the galaxy entity, but for the same reason as the first negative feedback. The second negative feedback indicates that the impact, this time, was on all Sales functions across all the shoe entities. Because of his aggressive marketing approach and the two negative feedbacks the platform automatically released John from his service (function) in the Kids shoe entity. The action done by the platform forced the kid’s shoe entity to take action. They decided to look for another agent to feel the open function. Their decision increased the pressure on John, as it immediately impacted his total compensation.
Several people contact the “Agent Advisory” function, which is part of the galaxy entity, to try to get help for John. But John didn’t find any way how to replace his aggressive marketing strategy (that improved his metrics) with a different approach that won’t impact other functions. John understood that he needs to drop his aggressive approach, but he couldn’t find any other method that drives the right trend for his metrics. Although several functions within the organization put a lot of effort to try to help John, he failed to find a way to work with other functions and entities. Eventually less than twelve months after he got his first notice on negative metrics, John got another negative metrics notice. Because of his second negative metrics notice, the platform automatically released him from his last function.
Having no function to perform the galaxy steering entity (which has representatives from different expertise from the Galaxy) decided to separate John from the galaxy. That was an unexpected and sad end for a promising start.
This story told us that it doesn’t matter how promising a candidate is, as an organization we need to stick to our onboarding process and not to load too much on a new agent. People need a lot of time to adjust to a non-hierarchical system regardless of their technical abilities, especially when they are new to any non-deterministic management systems. This adjustment takes time, and as an organization, we should provide this time for new people joining us.
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