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‐Fair Assessment Is the Basis of Fair Working Conditions‐
At Bayer, a personnel system is based on “More Professional & More Performance Oriented.” This is a performance-based personnel system with management by objectives. In other words, the system provides fair working conditions in accordance with the results that have been achieved.
In order for this system to function effectively, measuring correctly the extent of each employee’s achievement, in other words, each employee’s performance and results, is very important. It is generally said that “people cannot evaluate people” and “whatever happens, the supervisor gives a subjective assessment.”
The basics of the Bayer personnel system were established about 20 years ago in 1990. At almost all companies including big corporations at that time, seniority systems held sway under ability-based grade system. Under such an environment, Bayer advocated the basic philosophy and reconstructed its personnel system. Management, employees and the labour union worked together on this new challenge. There were not many companies like Bayer and Bayer was advanced in this field of personnel system innovation.
No matter how the personnel system was reformed, it was not necessarily that the system was operated effectively in a short term.
Employees made a great many complaints since introduction of the system which was supposed to adopt “performance orientation”; “ it is essential to assess the results of all employees fairly”, “the assessment criteria might be different among divisions and branch offices”, and “we did not receive feedback from our supervisors.” In particular, the company decided to asses sales staff (MRs) from the 2 perspectives of the degree of achievement of sales plans and an assessment of daily MR activities conducted in order to achieve those plans, and demands for improvement focused on how to conduct a quality-type assessment of work activity.
Consequently, about 15 years ago, Bayer first of all launched branch office assessment committees that were made up of branch and sales office managers at each branch of what is now the General Medicine Division. A supervisor from the Personnel Division has also participated in every meeting, each sales office manager has brought the results of assessments conducted on the employees working under them, and the committees have worked to investigate matters such as the assessment criteria for each junior employee work grade, assessment viewpoints, and the degree of difficulty of targets one by one. Initially, there were some cases where the levels of expectation held towards junior employees differed greatly among office managers and there were also other cases where it was difficult to find common ground. Occasionally, there were even scenes of arguments between office managers making different assertions, but by repeating these committee meetings every year, it has been possible to unify assessment standards and the number of complaints made by employees about personnel assessments has become very small in recent years.
Following the merger of Bayer and Nihon Schering in 2007, the company has also held the same sort of assessment committees in all divisions other than General Medicine Division too and the fairness of assessments has been significantly improved.
In some divisions, the company holds meetings of the assessment committees not only at the end of the fiscal year, but also when conducting interim reviews, and tries to pursue discussions at the same time in regard to promotions and human resource development planning based on fair assessments.
Furthermore, by providing junior employees with feedback on these assessment results and advice aimed at the next term through their supervisors, the company has created the foundations for junior employees to be able to think properly about what they should do in order to improve their results and advance their careers.
However precise a personnel system we construct, we believe that it is daily efforts that inspire and utilize the system. We are convinced that a workplace where employees can work safely and undistractedly by assessing fairly the results of individual employees and by reflecting those assessments fairly in working conditions. We would like to continue using these assessment committees and develop them further in the future.
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