When it comes to stress and burn out, the famous KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are certainly a must. Not that monitoring and evaluation are bad in themselves, but rather that the multiplication of indicators and imperatives on which work is evaluated means in subliminal language that employees are not trusted. The tragedy of workplace ill-being feeds daily on such evaluations through which the future takes precedence over the past and present and devalues them at the same time.

Saturation point

With these increasingly sophisticated and sometimes absurd systems, the ideal of reason has reached its saturation point. The economy is globalised, organisations are increasingly matrix-based and advocate remote management. As for employees, they are still evaluated on individual objectives without always mastering the cards to achieve them. Under these conditions, how can we distinguish between individual performance and economic non-performance? This question is all the more crucial since this tyranny of evaluation is based on their supposed objectivity.

"Even though these evaluations tend to be exerted on the totality of individual and social life, they pass themselves off as anything other than power: mere information or even a discourse of truth. And with the progress of new information and communication technologies, the value judgement present in any evaluation tends to fade away behind the automatic imposition of a self-referential measure.... As proof, if a blog or website generates a lot of "I like" mentions, it is because it is good and deserves to be visited", writes the philosopher Angélique Del Rey in "La Tyrannie de l'évaluation" (La Tyrannie de l'évaluation) (Ed. de la Découverte).

"A decrease in social life"

According to her, there is no doubt that the evaluation at all levels has gradually produced "a decrease in social life". "While the new forms of evaluation tend to optimise human capital and action, they obviously lead to the opposite result". A very normative power system in which everyone is led to identify with their evaluations and which suffers from an excess of reason and rationalism. But not only that.

As HR Valley points out, "in France, evaluation retains a strong academic and discriminatory connotation. It is easy to look "at what is wrong". Managers and employees are tempted to reproduce this pattern, which is often disappointing, even anxiety-provoking, since it gives more value to what is missing than to what is. This has the unfortunate consequence of infantilizing and freezing the dialogue.

The famous SMART fades away

The survey carried out by this firm among the HR departments provides an overview of practices in this area, leading to the conclusion that the famous SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, achievable, limited in time) advocated in management training is losing ground to objectives that are most often quantitative, reduced to an expectation of progress on a quantified indicator, such as turnover, number of clients, number of cases handled.

As for the measurement of managerial skills, a real malaise linked to their discretionary and subjective nature is revealed through a curious mix between skills that relate to the values of the company (solidarity, entrepreneurial spirit, trust, etc.) and those linked to strategic needs (results orientation, cross-functionality, etc.), a mix that is nevertheless denounced today by jurisprudence.

"In response to the anxiety generated by this change in case law, there is a strong resurgence of interest in our consulting professions in the search for the skills reference systems that are desired as exhaustive and detailed on several levels of progress, the quest for the perfect tool that would make it possible to objectify everything," notes HR Valley.

As a result, companies today no longer know what to look at, nor what exact place to give to evaluation. "What strikes us is the multitude of questions that companies are asking themselves about indicators and measurement elements and the fact that the evaluation tool as such is not questioned. But the tool can only be at the service of a thought and not the other way round", the consultancy firm continues.

The quality of the dialogue is essential

The omnipresence of the financial and mathematical viewpoint has indeed engendered the fantasy of the existence of the perfect tool and has at the same time made us lose sight of a common sense reality: it is because there is a subjective part that the assessment interview has its raison d'être. The quality of the dialogue therefore becomes essential. It is the quality of the dialogue that allows the construction of gaps in perception and gives meaning to the objectives sought. Because if everything were measurable, it would be useless to talk to each other. This is why the will to put everything in boxes is tantamount to invalidating what the other person says, to not trusting him or her.

"The equivalence of beings and things, a process involved in the modern value of objectivity, is today at the heart of this evaluation which objectifies subjects and uproots them from themselves, emptying them of their interiority. The belief in the freedom to work is at issue behind this caricature of meritocracy which makes the employee believe that he deserves to be fired because his skill assessment is unsatisfactory. The idea that being efficient means achieving rationally targeted objectives is the explicit basis of this ideology, which prevents people from working (well) in the name of increased efficiency", says Angélique Del Rey.

A psychosocial risk factor?

Hence the annoying question: should assessment be considered a psychosocial risk factor? Or is it possible that it could be a decisive means for quality of working life policy? It is no longer possible for companies to give up responding to these questions in the light of the CSR and sustainable development policies that they must now pursue.

At the risk, if not of continuing to exclude more and more surely the "unclassifiable", or even the "unsuitable", who we know by simple common sense are often the providers of unsuspected and incalculable wealth within a work collective. At the risk, finally, of denying the essential human need to have one's contribution to "the beautiful work" recognised.