Now the sour notes. Actually, let me focus on one recent change just announced internally by HR. This has to do with how the annual incentive plan (MPIP) is awarded. In the past your bonus was awarded as such: 80% based on company goals being met. 20% discretionary based on your manager. That meant that on a good year you'd be guaranteed at least 80% of your bonus regardless of what your manager thought of you. Starting next year 100% will be discretionary based on your manager.
HR hasn't really communicated well what is driving the change (other than "because we want managers to have more control"... dah). I heard rumors this was driven by the desire of being more "like Amazon and Microsoft".
Well, guess what? Premera is NOT Amazon or Microsoft. If you read through Glassdoors reviews the one theme that comes up over and over again is Premera's problem with weak/incompetent middle management. And now you're empowering these folks to have full control over your technical staff.
Let me break this out: Amazon and Microsoft might be giving more power to management, however they have talented, solid people in those roles. And they have well established practices to measure performance, idetify weak links, and replace weak performers. They also have very well established interviewing processes (ever heard about Amazon's "bar raiser"?) that constantly push the company to hire better and better people, especially in key management roles. Premera has nothing like that in place.
Let's look at this from a risk-benefit perspective. You might end up with managers with more power, but if they cannot use it well, it's going to backfire big times. In a company already at odds with hiring talent, you'll also start loosing people whose performance is not evaluated fairly by managers. I'm not implying anyone is in bad faith. But when you're a manager of a technical team with no technical background, performances can be difficult to evaluate fairly.
This is far too complex of an approach to management for a company with weak middle management. Hopefully time will prove me wrong but for now I'm holding my breath.
